Call it what you will: a methodology, ideology, flow, mindset, or procedure; design thinking is a recognised process and a popular current buzzword in business organisation, product design and development, system structuring, marketing, strategising, and more.
However and wherever it manifests—and it has a wide range of application areas—it has a defining feature in common with user research: it puts the people who use the product (or are part of the system under examination) at the centre of the studies, creating solutions that benefit and delight them. Just like UX design and research, it’s people- or user-centric, but in addition to creating useful products that are easy to use, its other crucial goal is to drive innovation.
The Basics of Design Thinking
While exploring the design thinking process, you’ll regularly hear words like creative, innovative, inspiring, and impactful thrown into the mix—and rightly so.
Design thinking means delivering a product, service, or system that’s a step ahead of what everyone else is doing. It’s why users won’t just stick with you but migrate to you—it strives to provide a novel and necessary update to what’s currently on offer that people can’t resist.
The other great thing about the design thinking process is that it uses workflows that map out procedural stages. This allows anyone to use the system to devise new and novel approaches that deliver usable, viable, creative, and original solutions.
What is Design Thinking?
Design thinking is a problem-solving process.
Despite being labelled a problem-solving process, design thinking is predominantly solution-focused.
For example, let’s imagine that the problem is that your users don’t like your product or service interface. Design thinking doesn’t focus on fixing what’s wrong but exploring what kind of interface they can give users that will surprise and delight them. Another example could be if productivity is down. It doesn’t necessarily focus on how to get the numbers back on track but on how to drive employee engagement and passion that will organically deliver superior results.
What’s the Difference Between Design Thinking and User-Centered Design?
Both methodologies have a great deal in common. They prioritize users in their exploration and focus on empathy, problem-solving, iteration, and collaboration—it’s easy to think both are the same practice, yet with different labels.
The key difference is subtle and related to their focus.
- User-centred design focuses on user needs and feedback, which helps deliver strong products to a specific population or user group.
- In contrast, the design thinking process is driven to identify and solve complex problems and create innovative solutions with a focus on ‘desirability, feasibility, and viability‘, which can be applied to a wide range of products, systems, and strategies.
The more you explore the design thinking process, the more you’ll hear those words crop up.
Desirability concerns understanding the user and giving them something new and exciting.
Feasibility considers if such creative and groundbreaking ideas can manifest into practical and technically possible solutions.
Viability adds the business goals to the equation and considers how to make those exciting new steps, not just possible solutions but profitable ones.
The Link Between Design Thinking and UX
When it comes to understanding users and exploring their ideas, no one is better placed to do so than UX researchers. User research should be at the heart of the design process—however it’s carried out—to provide the deep understanding required for problem-solving and delivering innovative ideas and creative solutions based on real user feedback.
You only have to read the words empathy, exploration, and iteration to know UX research is ideally equipped to carry out the surveys, studies, and monitoring that uncover problems, the usability testing and prototyping to test solutions, and as an iterative process, to modify and fine-tune possible solutions.
Five Stages of the Design Thinking Process
There isn’t a sole strategy for design thinking or a set number of stages. Depending on which of the many variations of system, strategy, or flow you choose to use, it could have three, four, five, or more stages. All or any of these can (and will likely) be worked as repeating loops, jumping backwards and forwards between them based on whatever your project needs.
Today, we’ll use a simple five-stage process to give you an idea of how the design thinking process can flow.
1. Empathise
Understanding your users’ needs is at the centre of UX research. Only user research can help you understand your target users, showing exactly what, how, and why they think and feel as they do. A typical UX practice at this stage is developing and building user personas. It’s a great way to gain insight during the empathize phase and to put yourself in your user’s shoes.
Design thinking requires a deep understanding of how system or product users interact to deliver an enhanced user experience. Only by understanding more about them through this user-centric approach can we deliver the innovative ideas design thinking is renowned for.
2. Define
Using real users’ information we’ve uncovered during the previous stage, the next step in design thinking ideology directs us to build a problem statement, for which we’ll create solutions.
Heading into the design thinking process, you’ll probably have predetermined ideas about your most complex problems. However, with information gathered from real users being generative, it’d be surprising if you didn’t uncover a range of additional issues within the problem space.
The define phase creates a single or set of specific goals your teams must focus on. UX design is an iterative process, so you’ll almost always encounter unexpected issues. However, referring to your original problem statement will maintain progress toward the defined goals and any extra bumps along the way.
3. Ideate
This, our third stage, is part of the design process, where the team generates as many ideas and alternatives as possible that will eventually define the innovative solutions that create great user experiences.
The ideation phase is one of the key practices of design thinking ideology. It allows brainstorming of the problem space, providing innovative ideas that challenge assumptions of typical thinking and standard solutions.
There are plenty of ideation techniques that extend beyond brainstorming, such as mind mapping, provocation, body storming, and more. Exploring multiple angles of unusual exploration can generate the most creative problem-solving ideas.
These are the creative ideas and potential solutions that will drive future trends and practices, becoming the exciting and exceptional design solutions the system is designed to produce. Design thinking requires us to adhere to its rules of feasibility, desirability, and viability. For the business or organisation, it ensures lasting, practical, and profitable problem-solving, especially for the most complex problems.
4. Prototype
Prototyping sounds far more hi-tech and glamorous than it often is. Yes, UX designers and researchers have tools that create prototypes for every level, but during the early stages, when we might like to explore as many ideas as possible through scaled-down versions, those prototypes can be as simple as card sorting with paper models, simple sketches, or interactive wireframes.
Prototyping is about testing early and often; it’s an iterative process. As your exploration progresses through user and product studies, user experience maps, and more, any additional user feedback gathered through continual problem-solving ensures your prototypes combat all the ideas the previous stages uncover.
5. Test
At this final stage, with something close to a complete product, we consider final rounds of usability testing as an opportunity to check we’re aligned with our key principles from the define phase, delivering the proposed solution we initially set out to.
The process doesn’t necessarily stop once you have a final design. As we said earlier, despite design thinking looking like a linear process, as with any UX design, it’s an iterative practice, creating prototypes for continual testing. When you take your product or project live, the live testing begins. There’s also much to be said and learned from sharing your practices and results for the benefit of any peers considering a similar operation.
Challenges and Considerations of Design Thinking
Advantages of design thinking
- It encourages creative problem-solving from a wider pool of members in your organisation.
- It promotes novel, out-of-the-box thinking.
- Its user-centric approach prioritises what users want and need.
- Its iterative nature generates discovery and allows problem-solving on the fly.
- It can facilitate learning between teams.
Disadvantages of design thinking
- As with any iterative, non-linear process, it can be confusing to those used to working within more defined constraints. It can also become demanding of valuable resources such as time, money, teams, and tech.
- Such an open process of learning and iteration can cause projects to deviate or drift from the original problem statement.
- Calculating the ROI of design thinking and considering its value can be off-putting to stakeholders and organisation leaders.
Summary
Design thinking in UX is about using human-centred design to create innovative solutions from creative ideas. Uncovering those ideas means understanding actual users’ wants and needs through rounds of user research and problem-solving. This delivers a new and possibly groundbreaking product or system they weren’t expecting and something they won’t want to work without.
UX designers are used to developing creative solutions through a design-thinking mindset. However, the beauty of design thinking frameworks is that they’re accessible to everyone. With a simple four- or five-step framework, it’s not just experienced design teams that can solve complex problems and deliver a competitive advantage; organisation heads, managers, or team leaders can all utilise a design thinking framework to gain a deeper understanding of their users, staff, operations, and products.
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