Everyone knows that when we encounter problems, we find a way to solve them, right? But, in the business world or any related field, just coming up with something ordinary may not answer the need that much. In today’s article, we would like to share with you the design thinking process and why it is so prevalent.

What is Design Thinking

Design Thinking is a design process that provides a creative solution by understanding users’ problems. Users’ needs are an essential part of this process because it has to find and solve complex problems for responding to human needs and getting their feedback. To hit the nail on the head, you should ask questions about users such as their problems and current solutions. 

The reason why design thinking is widespread

The Design Thinking system encourages people to think outside the box to find how to solve problems that most people may overlook and judge they cannot do due to having the best thing yet. In a sense, this process is suitable for everybody in an organization. Each department often finds different problems and people may have a vague solution to the problem without discovering the cause. The Design Thinking Process can allow you to consider more detailed and careful problems. Plus, people will understand and solve the problem on the spot. Therefore, this is another skill that everyone needs to have with them. 

Most common principles of design thinking

• Helping one another: Since the goal of design thinking mainly focuses on varied opinions and ideas, it motivates every person in the organization to collaborate together as a teamwork or different multidisciplinary fields.
• Caring and understanding user’s needs: One of the most significant essences of design thinking is to seek solutions that meet the needs and feedback of humans. The thing is that you need to be thoroughly aware of what users have encountered by putting yourself in their shoes. Indeed, empathy and compromise are necessary because these can help you build trust and credibility among your users.
• Structuring ideas and concepts: Design thinking is a framework that emphasizes solutions which require you to provide a wide variety of ideas and concepts as much as you want. Don’t forget to assure that participants are equally involved in making decisions and exchanging their way of thinking. Whether those ideas will achieve or not is not the main issue, but the key is tremendous ideas that come up.
• Testing and repeating: Having ideas or concepts is not enough, but you have to make them become prototypes by experimenting with the user’s response. Moreover, after testing, you should repeat it again since you may find faults or nuisances early on before they’re actually implemented. This can help you solve problems in time.
• Making a real-world action: Due to the focus on action rather than discussion, assuming what users want is not the right way of design thinking, but you should go and see them in person. Plus, your ideas will become more valid and practical. When you don’t put it into practice, you won’t be able to know if your ideas will work out or be effective as you plan. 

The 5 keys of the design thinking process

It isn’t necessary to follow these steps sequentially, you can go back and forth or even repeat the same steps as you wish.

1. Empathize: During empathize time, you’ll be engaging with your target customers or clients. This step lets you see who your end-user is and think ahead about what problems they’ll find. You could do this step by conducting some surveys or interviews.
2. Define: Now, you already know your target customers from the empathize part. This step is to thoroughly define problem statements, so it would guide your way through the entire process of work. The best problem statement is to let it be broad and allow creativity, but specific enough to help you solve the problems.
3. Ideate: When you have clear problem statements, now it’s time for you to think about solutions freely. This step allows you to focus on quantity rather than quality, so just think about the solutions from every angle possible. 
4. Prototype: If you’re finally got some ideas that actually can be used, now it’s time to do some prototypes. Remember that, the prototypes are something that you have to test on a real person, so it would be better if you think about customers first.  
5. Test: If the prototype is ready, let’s test it. You can run a test on your target users and ask for their feedback in order to improve your real product in the future.   

Now you know about the design thinking process which can be adapted in many fields of your work. If you’re struggling with your business, you can take your time and follow these processes to help you come up with something better!
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