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The Design Thinking can help enterprises to solve problems and find new solutions. It is a strategy development that brings innovation and success, it can applies to products, procedures, process and customer experience creating value and a new vision for the organization.
WHAT IS DESIGN THINKING?
Design Thinking[1] is an iterative process, a human-centered approach to innovation, it helps to redefine problems and to identify alternative strategies and solutions. It is a way of thinking and working and many big companies have introduced this technique to increase their productivity and to transform the development of products, services, processes, organizations and the whole work environment.
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There are five-stage Design Thinking model proposed by the Hasso-Plattner Institute of Design at Stanford (d.school), the leading university of teaching Design Thinking. The 5 steps are not always sequential but they work all together as an overview of the modes or phases that contribute to an innovation project:
- Empathise – research your users’ needs
- Define – state your users’ needs, problems and insights
- Ideate – challenge assumptions and create ideas for innovative solutions
- Prototype – start creating solutions
- Test – try out solutions
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Empathise is connected with empathy in order to research your users’ needs. The first stage of the Design Thinking process is to gain an empathic understanding of the problem you are trying to solve, this involves consulting experts to find out more about the area of concern through observing, engaging and empathizing with people to understand their experiences and motivations, as well as immersing yourself in the physical environment so you can gain a deeper personal understanding of the issues involved.
Define is the second stage to help you putting together the information gathered during the empathise stage. Here it is important to observe, analyse and synthesise the information in order to define the core problems of the organization, also to estabilish functions, features and other elements to help the team to solve problems.
Ideate focuses on generating ideas and think outside the box to identify new solutions to the problem statement you’ve created, and you can start to look for alternative ways of viewing the problem. There are many Ideation Techniques that can stimulate free thinking and expand the problem space.
Prototype is an experimental phase that aims to identify possible solutions for each problem. The solutions are implemented within the prototypes, and, one by one, they are investigated, improved and re-examined, or rejected on the basis of the users’ experiences. By the end of this stage, the design team will have a better idea of the constraints inherent to the product and the problems that are present, and have a clearer view of how real users would behave, think, and feel when interacting with the product.
Test is the final stage that helps to implement and make changes, to redefine one or more problems and inform the understanding of the users, the conditions of use, how people think, behave, and feel, and to empathise. Even during this phase, alterations and refinements are made in order to rule out problem solutions and derive as deep an understanding of the product and its users as possible.
The Design Thinking process is not only oriented to problem-focused or solution-focused but it involves both analysis and imagination, so it is linked to create a bright future, to bring innovation and also it can improve the quality of life for people and the enterprises.
[1] https://www.creativityatwork.com/design-thinking-strategy-for-innovation/