I used to believe design thinking was something only for designers to do, obviously because of the word ‘design’. But it turns out design thinking is not just for visual designers, interface designers and every other type of designer you can think of, design thinking is for everybody.
To better understand my point, you have to know what exactly is deisgn thinking?
Design thinking is a human-centered approach to innovation that draws from the designer’s toolkit to integrate the needs of people, the possibilities of technology, and the requirements for business success.
-Tim Brown, Executive Chair of IDEO
From this definition it is clear that any organization that is user-centered needs design thinking; once the purpose of an organization, business or company is to meet the needs of it’s customers, design thinking should be utilized.
Design thinking is important because it is a strategy used to solve real-time problems in a way that is human-centered, and in solving these problems the needs of the users are met. For example a business owner notices that the number of her customers have reduced in the past months, she will work with her team to find out why this happened and make use of design tools to solve this problem. She is making use of design thinking to solve a problem in her business and she is solving this problem with the users in mind.
There are 5 stages to carrying out design thinking;
1. Empathy
Understand what the problem is, understand your users. This is where important questions are asked, the business looks inward and do some ‘soul searching’ . The business also focuses on the users and potential users, and get information through surveys and interviews.
2. Define
In this stage, every information gotten from the Empathy stage is analyzed and used to define the core problem, it is in this stage that a problem statement is made.
3. Ideate
when the core problem is defined, the ideate phase is where solutions are created through brainstorming, sketching, basically making use of creative tools to come up with as many solutions as possible.
4. Prototype
Here low-fidelity prototypes are made and then tested in the final stage based on user experience. The prototypes are inexpensive, very small effort is put into creating them because they will go through rigorous testing and some of the prototypes will be dropped.
5. Test
This is where the prototypes are tested to discover the best possible solution or product. In this stage prototypes are tested several times, improved and retested till a product that meets the needs of the users is made.
The whole point or essence of design thinking is to solve problems in human-centered ways; this is the WHY of design thinking and it is for everybody.
