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Design Thinking

Overview

Want to solve problems in a way that puts people first? Design thinking is your friendly guide to creative problem-solving! It's more than just a method - it's a mindset that helps you understand what people really need and create solutions they'll love. By focusing on empathy, brainstorming ideas, testing prototypes, and learning from feedback, you can develop solutions that work in the real world.

Design Thinking is a design and management framework that develops solutions to problems by involving the human perspective in all steps of the problem-solving process. It encompasses processes such as context analysis, problem finding and framing, ideation and solution generating, creative thinking, sketching and drawing, modelling and prototyping, testing and evaluating.

While the specific phases may vary between implementations of Design Thinking, a common framework includes:

  1. Disocver: Understand the needs, behaviors, and motivations of the users.
  2. Define: Clearly articulate the problem based on user insights.
  3. Ideate: Generate a wide range of potential solutions to the defined problem.
  4. Prototype: Create tangible or virtual representations of potential solutions for testing.
  5. Test: Gather feedback from users on the prototypes and refine the solutions accordingly.

The process may be thought of as a system of overlapping spaces rather than a sequence of orderly steps: inspiration, ideation, and implementation. The steps aren't linear - they can occur simultaneously and repeat. Projects may loop back through inspiration, ideation, and implementation more than once as the team refines its ideas and explores new directions. Within these steps, problems can be framed, the right questions can be asked, more ideas can be created, and the best answers can be chosen.

Benefits

  • Human-centred: Design thinking focuses on understanding the needs, behaviors, and motivations of the target users.
  • Iterative: The process is not linear; teams may revisit and refine previous steps as they gain new insights.
  • Creative problem-solving: It encourages a mindset of exploration and experimentation, moving beyond traditional, logical approaches.
  • Collaborative: Design thinking often involves diverse teams and stakeholders to bring a wider range of perspectives to the problem.
  • Action-oriented: It emphasises getting hands-on with prototypes and testing solutions in real-world settings.
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Playlist Stages

1

Discover

Research Plan

Every challenge is different, so take some time to develop and execute a research plan that's custom made to deeply understand your challenge.

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Roadmap

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Problem Interview

A structured customer discovery technique to validate problem hypotheses, understand existing solutions, and identify early adopters before committing to building a specific solution.

Customer Journey Map

A visual storytelling technique that maps out each step of a customer's experience with your product or service, capturing both actions and emotions along the way.

User Personas

A method for creating realistic representations of your key user types that capture their goals, behaviors, and pain points to guide product decisions.

2

Define

Problem Statement Reframing

Properly framing the innovation challenge is critical to your success.

How Might We...?

A powerful question-framing technique that transforms research insights into opportunity spaces, setting the stage for innovative solution brainstorming.

3

Ideate

Brainstorming

A creative group ideation technique designed to generate a large quantity of diverse solutions to well-defined challenges.

4

Prototype

Prototyping

A hands-on technique for rapidly bringing ideas to life in a tangible form that can be tested with real users to validate assumptions before significant investment.

Storyboarding

A visual storytelling technique that uses a sequence of images to illustrate how a user would interact with your solution in a specific scenario.

5

Test

Prototype Test Plan

Test each of the individual key assumptions and the envisaged value propositions.

Solution Interview

A solution interview is a form of a customer interview to test if you are on the right path.