Design Thinking in 3 easy steps

Importance of design thinking

The goal of any design is to understand your users needs and to develop products and experiences that satisfy those needs. Design is therefore a process of problem solving, just defining and meeting your users needs is not enough you have to find innovative ways of solving their problems aswell.

So what is design thinking?

Design thinking is a problem solving approach that involves understanding a group of people and developing a solution that is tailored to meet their specific needs.

This involves developing a deep understanding of peoples goals and creating experiences that match those goals and experiences.

Design Thinking steps

The 3 easy steps of design thinking are an iterative process that helps demystify the process of developing goals and experiences for your clients/users.

1. Understand

During the understand phase you as a Design thinker will seek to understand your prospective user’s problem, what they are trying to solve and the goal they intend to achieve.

The expected result of this stage is to develop a Persona of your users, to make this effective ensure to capture the following;

• what did they want to accomplish or How did they want to feel?
• What were their challenges, frustrations, pain points and complaints?
• what did you learned that was unexpected or eye opening?

Perform this step as a story inorder to identify patterns around common behaviours, goals and concerns. These patterns will help you identify opportunity areas and envision an ideal experience.

2. Envision

During this phase the you as a design thinker need to envision a solution that will help your client/user meet their goals.

Since you have created the personas in the previous stage use this persona to envision the solutions. Ignore all your biases, assumptions, constraints and requirements and instead use the personas to envision the solution.

The expected result of this stage is to develop, evaluate and choose an Idea, here are a few tips to help you along;

• Generate as many ideas as possible with disregard for quality.
• Ignore your constraints (Think anything is possible).
• Accept the ideas and refine them.
• Evaluate Ideas based on how well they satisfy the persona’s goals

3. Prototype

During this phase you create a prototype, test it with your users and prepare it for your next iteration of the 3 easy steps of Design thinking.

A prototype is an iterative process whose goal is to develop an early model of you solution that you will try out with real people, Here are some tips to help you along;

• Make it fast and cheap (a pen and a paper are the best prototyping tools)
• Use a scenario, a narrative story that helps you experiment with an ideal experience from your users perspective.
• Use a story board showing the Situation, Action and Outcome.
• Get user feedback and observe carefully the users experience.

Prototyping will help you understand what does and what doesn’t work, helping you learn more about the problem you are trying to solve hence improve the solution.

Conclusion

Design Thinking sometimes sounds ambiguous, and a mention of it leaves one wondering where to start from. I hope the 3 easy steps of Design thinking demystifies this concept and sets you on the right path in developing great experiences and products for your customers.