Of course, don’t let the term Design Thinking (DT) fool you — it isn’t some specialist skill, saved for designers and creative types alone. Instead, design thinking exercises can be used by any business facing creative challenges and/or seeking to understand, and satisfy, their customers on a deeper level. However, this term can still be understandingly confusing for beginners.
This is especially true if you’re learning about design thinking for the first time. So, we’ll try to demystify the “design” part of design thinking. Falling under the umbrella of user-centered design, design thinking as a process has its roots in the industrial and product design scene of 1960s America. It’s just a way for anyone to see, approach, and tackle a problem in a new and innovative way.
As we’ll see in a moment, design thinking can be broken down into five key stages — from first empathizing with the user and their needs, all the way to testing concepts and ideas in the real world. This means that any idea that makes it through the entire design thinking journey — reaching a market launch — has been explored, improved, and stress-tested in a hands-on and user-centric way.
In short, design thinking is one of the best ways to guarantee that your concept meets user needs. The Design Thinking (DT) Process aims to satisfy three criteria: desirability (what do people desire?), feasibility (is it technically possible to build the solution?), and viability (can the company profit from the solution?). Teams begin with desirability and then bring in the other two lenses.
Why Design Thinking (DT) Is A Crucial Process For Creatives
Technically, the Design Thinking process and other related exercises challenge creative and innovative teams, or individuals, to view a problem through a user’s eyes. What’s more, design thinking is an iterative process — meaning it smoothly progresses in various essential stages. Eventually, it helps sprout many opportunities to pivot, adapt, and evolve based on what we learned so far.
Thus, by definition, Design Thinking (DT) is a nonlinear, iterative process that creative teams use to understand users, challenge assumptions, redefine problems, and create innovative solutions to prototype and test. The process is most useful and helpful when tackling ill-defined or unknown problems and involves five phases: Empathy, Definition, Ideation, Prototyping, and Testing.
No one knows exactly where design thinking came from, although the very origins of the movement can be traced back to Buckminster Fuller’s 1950s Design Science approach at MIT, and industrial design of a similar era. Today, though, design thinking is used in companies from many sectors all over the world — including at tech giant IBM, the Web Tech Experts, and more.
According to IDEO, their approach combines inspiration from designer and scholar Richard Buchanan and his “wicked problems.” Whereby, complex challenges are made far more achievable by collaborating with key stakeholders, working in continuous feedback loops, carrying out multiple iterations, and visualizing the output every step of the way. Below are some of its driving forces.
1. Innovation
Design thinking fosters innovation. Companies must innovate to survive and remain competitive in a rapidly changing environment. In design thinking, cross-functional teams work together to understand user needs and create solutions that address those needs. Moreover, the design thinking process helps unearth creative solutions. Most designers use design thinking to tackle ill-defined/unknown problems (aka wicked problems). Wicked problems demand teams to think outside the box, take action immediately, and constantly iterate — all hallmarks of design thinking.
2. Simplicity
Design thinking offers simplicity in terms of practical methods and tools that major companies like Google, Apple, and Airbnb use to drive innovation. From architecture and engineering to technology and services, companies across industries have embraced the methodology to drive innovation and address complex problems. For instance, our global design agency is often associated with creating a modern take on design thinking using simplified methods — one that teams beyond product design and engineering could use, too.
3. Desirability
The design thinking process starts by looking at the needs, dreams, and behaviors of people—the end users. The team listens with empathy to understand what people want, not what the organization thinks they want or need. The team then thinks about solutions to satisfy these needs from the end user’s point of view. Usually, at the beginning of the design thinking process, teams should not get too caught up in the technical implementation. If teams begin with technical constraints, they might restrict innovation.
4. Feasibility
Once the team identifies one or more solutions, they determine whether the organization can implement them. In theory, any solution is feasible if the organization has infinite resources and time to develop the solution. However, given the team’s current (or future resources), the team evaluates if the solution is worth pursuing. The team may iterate on the solution to make it more feasible or plan to increase its resources (say, hire more people or acquire specialized machinery).
5. Viability
A desirable and technically feasible product isn’t enough. The organization must be able to generate revenues and profits from the solution. The viability lens is essential not only for commercial organizations but also for non-profits. Traditionally, companies begin with feasibility or viability and then try to find a problem to fit the solution and push it to the market. Design thinking reverses this process and advocates that teams begin with desirability and bring in the other two lenses later.
Understanding The Topmost Essential Stages In The DT Process
One thing is sure: Design Thinking is not an exclusive property of designers—all great innovators in literature, art, music, science, engineering, and business have practiced it. Designers can help us systematically extract, teach, learn, and apply these human-centered techniques to solve problems creatively and innovatively—in designs, businesses, our countries, and our daily lives.
Stanford University’s Hasso Plattner Institute of Design, commonly known as the d.school, is renowned for its pioneering approach to design thinking. Their design process (Empathize, Define, Ideate, Prototype, and Test) is like a tower guiding sailors across the sea. These stages are not always sequential. Most teams often run them in parallel, out of order, and repeat them as needed.
Realistically, Design Thinking takes the position of an iterative development process in which you seek to understand your users, challenge assumptions, redefine problems, and create innovative solutions that you can prototype and test. The overall goal is to identify the best alternative methods and strategic solutions that are not instantly apparent with your initial level of understanding.
In other words, design thinking is more than just a process; it opens up an entirely new way to think, and it offers a collection of hands-on methods to help you apply this new mindset.
Design Thinking:
- Revolves around a deep interest to understand the people for whom we design products and services.
- Helps us observe and develop empathy with the target users.
- Enhances our ability to question: in design thinking you question the problem, the assumptions, and the implications.
- Proves extremely useful when you tackle problems that are ill-defined or unknown.
- Involves ongoing experimentation through sketches, prototypes, testing, and trials of new concepts and ideas.
Some of the world’s leading brands, such as Apple, Google, and Samsung, rapidly adopted the design thinking approach, and leading universities around the world teach the related methodology—including Stanford, Harvard, Imperial College London, and the Srishti Institute. So, before incorporating DT into your workflows, you need to know why it’s so essential and understand all stages.
“No one cares how much you know until they know how much you care“– Theodore Roosevelt.
As a rule of thumb, throughout the process, the aim is for the teams to understand the problem, typically through user research. For instance, empathy is crucial to design thinking because it allows designers to set aside their assumptions about the world and gain insight into users and their needs. Remember, DT helps foster tried-and-tested methods for putting your customers first.
Stage #1: Empathize
By exercising empathy, we understand others’ needs from our own. This requires an open mind, a willingness to think differently, and a lot of research into what consumers need help solving. Maintaining this empathy throughout the entire process is the essence of what design thinking encompasses. Tools like empathy maps can help teams to explore a user’s wants and needs — seeing the world, and the problem in question, from the customer’s viewpoint. Simply put: the more you empathize, the better you understand your user. And the better you understand your user, the easier is it to define and solve their problem(s).
Stage #2: Define
In the ‘define’ stage, it’s time to put your user insights to work. You should apply what you’ve learned about the customer, to create a clearly-worded (yet inspiring) problem statement. This mission or manifesto should be user-centered, of course. So rather than focusing on the impact on the business (increasing sign-ups, boosting revenue, etc), you should focus on the end user and what they stand to gain. This could be anything from learning healthy recipes to feed the family, to having a secure place to save their favorite digital photos.
Stage #3: Ideate
So you’ve defined the problem and have an in-depth understanding of what the users need help with. Now you need some answers. No more speculation — it’s time to come up with something tangible! The ideation stage marks the transition from identifying problems to exploring solutions. Don’t restrict yourself to a single idea, either. With a selection of concepts, you’ve got more opportunities to test, a greater chance of finding a solution that checks all the boxes, and a deeper insight into what works and what doesn’t.
Stage #4: Prototype
Here’s where the ideas take physical form, and where your design thinking starts to take shape. A prototype is a rough simulation or sample version of your idea — maybe it’s a wireframe of a website or a paper prototype of an app. Either way, it’s low-cost and quick to pull together (and you’ll see why that’s important soon). It’s in this stage that you’ll first share your ideas with real end users. You can also test your prototype with other stakeholders if you wish.
Stage #5: Test
Even when your concept is met with widespread praise at the prototype stage, there’s one more hurdle to overcome: testing. Here, you’ll have developed your successful prototype into a finished article. And it’s time to make sure it’s market-ready — but your ‘design’ thinking isn’t over yet. Even in final test sessions, you can be learning from the data you collect; improving, tweaking, and repositioning the solution, making it the best it can be.
How To Develop An Empathic Design Thinking Approach
Empathy is especially important in the first stage of any Design Thinking process (the “empathize” stage). In the Empathise stage, it’s your goal as a designer to gain an empathic understanding of the people you’re designing for and the problem you are trying to solve. This involves empathizing with, engaging, and observing the people — your target audience — you intend to help.
Empathy is an innate quality in all people. Still, sometimes, being an empathic listener in a Design Thinking project is not as simple as it seems, because we are trained — whether consciously in our schools or workplaces or subconsciously from our prior experiences — to form judgments and opinions about others rather than absorbing and understanding the raw data.
By all means, empathy requires us to put aside our learning, culture, knowledge, opinions, and worldview purposefully to understand other peoples’ experiences of things deeply and meaningfully. In addition, it also requires a strong sense of imagination for us to be able to see through another person’s eyes. It requires humility so we can seek to abandon our preconceived ideas and biases.
Equally important, empathy requires that we have a heightened awareness of other peoples’ needs, wants, motivations, and goals. Be that as it may, there are a few traits an empathic observer should possess — some interrelated qualities and characteristics combine to develop a more empathic approach to engaging with others. there are also some methods you can use to advantage.
1. Abandon Ego
Most of us tend to assert ourselves, which results in an imposition upon others, as well as having more concern about our situation rather than the needs and concerns of others. Often in our education or workplace, we are taught to adopt an egocentric view of things and be firm in our opinions and thoughts. However, to empathize deeply, we need to tame and put aside our egos. We need to become aware of the primary goal of empathy in Design Thinking, which is to understand and experience the feelings of others.
2. Adopt Humility
When we adopt humility, we naturally improve our ability to empathize, because through humility we elevate the value of others above ourselves. This is underscored in Rise of the DEO, a book by Maria Giudice, innovator and VP of Experience Design at Autodesk, and Christopher Ireland, ethnographer and CEO of design research firm Cheskin. In Rise of the DEO, Giudice, and Ireland discuss the emerging role of design leadership and point out that humility is a characteristic of design-focused leaders who are willing to admit their shortcomings as well as abandon preconceived ideas for the good of the overall vision and goals.
3. Listen Attentively
To empathize, we need to listen and listen attentively. We need to choose actively to block out our inner conflicting voices and allow the other’s voice to resonate. We need to train ourselves to control our natural tendency to formulate our own opinions and voice them before the other person has finished talking. Doing so would enable us to have a deeper kind of listening, which uncovers deeper meaning and experience.
4. Be Observative
To develop empathy towards our users, we need to do more than listen. We need to observe others and have a close reading of their behaviors, subtle indications, non-verbal expressions, body language, and environments. Only once we can experience the full range of sensations of others within context can we have a deeper and more meaningful empathic experience. Many times, what our users articulate is only a fraction of the full story. By honing our observation skills, we can fill many of the gaps, leading to a deeper understanding of someone else’s experience.
5. Provide Support
A genuine concern about the state of others, leading to the desire to act and assist, is required. This is one of the important drivers that allow us to overcome our own needs and wants and seek to understand others. We must build a sense of care, a deep concern, and a desire to want to help, nurture, and provide assistance. This requires a level of emotional insight. To connect with, engage, and support our users on a deeper level, we need to study them. Consider body signals, facial expressions, voice intonations, and the positive and negative signs that come from the study.
6. Foster Curiosity
Being genuinely curious makes engaging in empathy research not only easier but also extremely rewarding as we learn to understand what motivates people. By being curious, we are naturally inclined to dig into unexpected areas, uncover new insights, and explore all aspects of people’s lives. At a glance, these details might seem unimportant, but they will expose the most important information we need for problem-solving.
7. Showcase Sincerity
Nothing kills empathy more than a lack of sincerity. When we approach people with a superficial agenda, superiority complex, or any mindset that may undermine our sincere intention to understand their experience deeply, we are placing a barrier between us and those we seek to understand. Rather than approaching people with the mindset that they require our help, we should realize that we stand to benefit more out of deeply understanding them. After all, the solution exists to serve their needs, and your work will not be complete unless you properly understand their needs.
8. Body Language
We should have a keen awareness of how our body language sets the scene for trust and engagement between ourselves and the people we are observing or interviewing. On top of that, we need to read and interpret the signals that our users give off via their body language. This skill comes with practice, and thus practice we must. At times, body language might be so subtle that the messages made by our very forms (eyebrows, shoulders, hands, and virtually any other part) and how we sound and behave are visible only to practiced readers of body language.
9. Immerse Yourself
Next, the most effective way you can gain empathy is through immersion: direct experience of the lives, contexts, environments, and activities of the people you would like to understand better. On top of immersing yourself in the environment to experience first-hand what it feels like to be your user, there are also a couple of methods you can engage in to gain a deeper understanding of people’s needs and emotions. Here, we will highlight three methods, and provide a template for each that you can download and use. Remember: the key to developing empathy is to go out there and practice with real people.
10. A Knowledge Base
Last but not least, in an era where technology is rapidly reshaping the way we interact with the world, having or fostering a resource-centered Knowledge Base on a business website is no longer a by the way, but a fundamental toolkit. It’s an essential and helpful center where the target audience and potential customers get information they might have missed elsewhere (Explore Our Knowledge Base). This is a resource center (can come from anywhere) fostering a self-serve online library of information about various partner projects, courses, departments, or topics.
Summary Thoughts:
Consider this: You work for an organization that sells treadle pumps (used for farmland irrigation) to local farmers. After years of operation, you notice that in some regions, the treadle pumps sell extremely well, while in other regions, they don’t sell at all. You’ve been tasked with generating sales of the pumps in those weak-performing regions. What is your strategic approach for this?
Maybe they just aren’t aware of the product. You might try to increase your marketing efforts in those regions, hire new sales reps, or offer a discount. But you would potentially be risking time, money, and energy on a tactic that doesn’t have a clear reason behind it. Instead, you’ll use design thinking as a different way of approaching problems, determining challenges, and fixing them.
With a physical manifestation of your design thinking process concept in hand (literally!), your customers will be able to interact with your idea, test its usefulness, and give you invaluable feedback for improvements. Sometimes, you may need to go back to the drawing board (or restart from step 1 in the design thinking process) — that’s okay if you are planning for optimization.
Notwithstanding, it’s better to know now if you’ve misunderstood users’ needs than once you’ve invested more time and money in taking a concept to launch. Aim at gaining a deep understanding of the people for whom you are designing. Keep the key empathetic qualities and traits (as discussed above) in mind, and learn to develop them to form a deep and genuine user understanding.
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