By Sewvandi Wickramasinghe
What is Design Thinking?
Design Thinking is a continuous process in which we try to understand the user, keep an open mind, and reframe issues in order to come up with new methods and answers that may not be obvious at first.
Design thinking is human-centered, which means it considers how people interact with a product or service rather than how someone else or an organization believes they will interact with it. It is a problem-solving method centered on solutions. It is both a style of thinking and functioning as well as a set of practical techniques.
Why Design Thinking?
Its goal is to meet a certain human requirement.
- Once those pain areas are discovered, design thinking may lead to solutions.
Deals with vague or difficult-to-define situations.
- Consumers frequently don’t understand or can’t articulate the problem they’re trying to solve. Consumers frequently have no idea what problem they are trying to solve or are unable to articulate it. However, with careful observation, one may discover problems based on what they see in real customer behavior rather than working off of their own assumptions about the consumer.
This leads to more creative solutions.
- Design thinking can help bring to light some of these previously unseen pain areas that would otherwise go unnoticed. Taking a step-by-step approach to solving those difficulties frequently results in non-obvious, creative solutions.
Organizations function more quickly and efficiently as a result of this.
- Design thinking advocates building prototypes and then testing them to determine how successful they are, rather than studying an issue for a long period without coming up with a solution.
5 stages of the design-thinking process
A five-stage framework guides design thinking.
1) Empathize
2) Define
3) Ideate
4) Prototype
5) Test
It’s worth noting that the five phases, stages, or modes aren’t usually in order. They don’t have to happen in any particular order, and they can frequently happen in parallel and recur repeatedly.
1) Empathize
The designer watches customers in this initial step to acquire a better knowledge of how they interact with or are influenced by a product or issue. The assumptions must be made with empathy, which includes refraining from passing judgement and without imposing previous assumptions about the requirements of the customer.
Observing with compassion is effective because it can reveal difficulties that the customer was unaware of or couldn’t express themselves. It’s now much easier to comprehend the human needs for which you’re designing and developing.
2) Define
You use your observations from the first stage to identify the problem you’re seeking to address in this second step. Consider the challenges your customers face, what they consistently battle with, and what you’ve learned from how they’re impacted by the problem. You’ll be able to identify the problem they’re dealing with once you’ve integrated your results.
3) Ideate
The next stage is to come up with solutions to the problem you’ve identified. These brainstorming sessions can be done in a group, in a corporate environment that fosters creativity and cooperation, in an innovation program, or they can be done alone.
The essential thing is to come up with a variety of diverse concepts. You’ll come up with a couple ideas to move on with at the end of this procedure.
4) Prototype
This is the stage where concepts are transformed into practical solutions. Prototypes aren’t supposed to be flawless. The purpose of a prototype is to quickly create a tangible form of a concept in order to test how well it is received by customers.
5) Test
This is the stage of testing where you get feedback on your work. You’ll probably have to return to one or more of the previous stages after the fifth step is completed.
Maybe the testing revealed that you need to create a new prototype, in which case you’d go back to the fourth stage. Or it might be that you’ve misunderstood the customer’s requirements. If that’s the case, you’ll have to restart the procedure from the beginning.
Design Thinking ‘Outside the Box’
Design Thinking is frequently referred to as “thinking beyond the box.”
One aspect of outside-the-box thinking involves falsifying previous assumptions in order to establish whether or not they are correct. The solution-generation method will assist us in producing ideas that represent the actual limits and aspects of an issue once we have questioned and explored its conditions.
Design Thinking assists us in doing appropriate research, prototyping, and testing our goods and services in order to discover new methods to improve the product, service, and design.
Design Thinking is Accessible to All
Design thinking isn’t only for designers, it’s also for creative employees, freelancers, and executives who want to incorporate design thinking into every level of an organization, product, or service to create new business and societal options.
You can visit www.axonect.com to know more about its Axonect Product Suite respectively.
