5 phases of design thinking
Have you ever used any product that has failed? Or a tool that you bought, tested in your daily life, and you fell in love with this because it was a great product?
Understanding human needs is an approach to dig deeper into their problems to solve them. Marketing industries and sales have started a design methodology that provides solution-based in human-centric ways, creating tons of ideas in brainstorming sessions and adopting an approach in prototyping and testing.
Let's take a look at the 5 different stages of design thinking.
5. Empathize
The first stage of Design Thinking is to understand the process through the application of empathy. Therefore you will truly understand the problem you're trying to solve. This process consists of immersing yourself in a physical environment to understand the user's issue in a personal way. This is a human-centered design process.
4. Define
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It grabs and puts all the information gathered in the first stage.
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The second step is to define the problem statement.
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The resulting problem statement should be captured in human-centered terms instead of focused on a business goal.
3. Ideate
In the third stage of the Design Thinking process, designers are ready to propose some ideas. At this point of the process, you understood every desire, key detail of the user needs, which was presented during the empathize stage.
You already:
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Analyzed.
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Synthetized.
Your ideas in the define stage and ended with a human-centered problem statement. The next thing is to start thinking out of the box with your team and identify new solutions to the statement that you've found. There are hundreds of ideation techniques in the design thinking process, such as brainstorming, brainwriting, the worst possible idea, and scamper. After this, you should pick one idea to help you solve this problem and test it.
2. Prototype
At this stage, your team will produce several scaled-down versions of the product. Prototypes should be shared and tested with your team, other departments, and a small group of people outside the design team, named stakeholders. This prototype is an experimental phase, and the aim is to identify possible solutions.
1. Test
This test is the final stage of the 5 stage-model. The results generated during the testing are mostly used to redefine the issues found in the first stage of the process. Understand the users, the condition of use, how people think, behave, and feel, and empathize with it.
Testing is essential because there are people who will use your products. Sometimes designers could create a "smart" proposal, but they don't think about the functionality and users' use.
Make sure to test and empathize; design thinking is not a linear process; for instance, the observations of users in tests may reveal crucial insights that could change the way you frame the problem statement.
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