Design Thinking process
By: Marta Law
Tags: Designer, Design Thinking, Design Process, Design

Introduction

Proces Overview

It’s important to have an overview of the entire process and identify what is the purpose of each step. We need to understand what kind of service or product we’re dealing with. The main reason for this step is to build a relevant and comprehensive view of the design challenge. I like to start with the end result and then work my way back to what and why needs to happen to get there.

01. Business Hypothesis 02. Hypothesis Validation 03. Design Challenge 04. Ideation Phase 05. Prototyping Phase 06. Testing Phase 07. Impact Delivery

Understanding

01. Business Hypothesis

The first step is to define a very clear hypothesis that considers a number of questions. This allows us to have a very good view of what the business team cares about, what they want to achieve and how.

Goal: To create a tangible picture of what the business challenge is.

QUESTIONS

What are the activities or processes we’d like to assess to find out where the current problems occur? Who is relevant to these activities being problematic? Why are these activities there? What kind of business goals are we achieving? Why do we need to achieve these business goals? What is the underlying long-term business motivation?

02. Hypothesis Validation

The next element is the customer perspective. Once the hypothesis is well defined we can start validating it. During the process we confirm some of the hypotheses, we bring new insights, and find new elements that we missed in the first stage of the design process. While building the design challenge we need to look at both sides of the coin, the business as well as the customer. For this step, we need to authenticate the hypothesis answering some questions that will help to fully address the main goal of this stage, the validation of the hypothesis. Allowing us to create a view of what is happening and to get a comprehensive outlook on who our customers are.

Goal: Validate the hypothesis so any future design work is based on facts.

QUESTIONS

What are the key problems and needs of our end-customer? Which of the hypothetical activities and problems were correctly or incorrectly assessed? How do we quantify the insights we gathered? What questions do we need to ask to get the right insights? Who do we need to talk to? What method should we use to other research data?

03. Design Challenge

Now that we know what is actually happening we need to synthesize the information and prioritize it. Its time to conclusively put it together to define the design challenge. To do so we ask ourselves some questions that will allow us to get to the bottom of the issues that need to be resolved, not only to improve the customers' experience but to the bottom line as well.

Goal: To create a concrete definition of the problems so that we know what needs to be resolved.

QUESTIONS

What is the key problem that needs to be addressed? How do we prioritize the problems? Which of the problems are key to the business goals fulfillment? Which of the problems are key to the customer experience? How do we define the problems? What is the root cause of product occurrence?

Design

04. Ideation Phase

Its time to put our creative minds to work and to come up with multiple ways of solving the design challenge. There are many techniques to generate ideas. The previous steps allowed us to find a meaningful problem. In order to answer the design challenge we need to confront some questions that will lead to the path of great discovery, combined with a practical and pragmatic approach to deliver, its a combination of creativity flying high and appropriate use of constructive criticism.

Goal: Generate as many ideas as possible to then prioritize them with the biggest potential in mind.

QUESTIONS

Which of the multiple solutions is best and why? ​How do we prioritize the solutions? Which of the solutions have the biggest potential of addressing the design challenge? ​Which of the solutions is the simplest to implement? What is the level of detail needed for each solution in order to assess its complexity? How do we generate multiple appealing solutions?

05. Prototyping Phase

Time to bring the best solutions to life. It is not about creating the target product or service, but to convey the target experience. Deliver what we can with minimal investment in time and resources to create a tangible product of the solution. The main goal is to craft something that we can test with customers. Asking some questions will help us to create prototypes that will deliver the meaningful insights we’re looking for. After all, we want to reevaluate and redefine how the target product should look and feel like.

Goal: To bring ideas to life so we can refine them and work on them in detail.

QUESTIONS

How are we going to create the target experience? What tools and materials do we need? How will the prototype interact with the customers? Where will the prototype be used?

06. Testing Phase

Its time to put the prototypes to work and find out how they are being used. We want to gather as much insight into what needs to be improved and what will not work. We need to let go of ideas that will not work. To make this efficient we need to ask ourselves some questions that will allow us to create a final list of validated solutions that should make their way to the forthcoming view of the service or product. Goal: Plays a key role in the investigation of what works and what doesn’t.

Goal: To filter the best solutions out of the ordinary ones and improve them.

QUESTIONS

What should be improved for the solution to deliver the value? Which of the solutions won’t work? How do we gather insights from the experiments? What elements of the solutions are we trying to validate?

Impact

07. Impact Delivery

This is the last stage where everything we’ve worked on so far needs to be put all together. We revisit the entire list of subsequent events that led us here, each one adding more value to the process. The main goal of this step is to visualize what the future of the customer experience looks like. We need to integrate what we’ve learned in the current business ecosystem and make sure that this new additional value doesn’t damage what is already working. Answering some questions at this final stage will allow us to conclude the design thinking process.

Goal: To prepare the business for the new changes that are about to come and look at them from many different perspectives.

QUESTIONS