Design thinking

Last updated Oct 19, 2022

• Productivity

A thinking process to help with generating and executing an solution for problems. Often utilises human-centred design to come up with humane and usable solutions. Requires creators to consider people’s experiences to focus on their human needs. Has five distinct steps to the process:

1. Empathise
   • Aims to understand the experiences, actions, and feelings experienced by people (e.g., the target audience)
   • Conducting interviews to get a sense of what people (e.g., the target audience) care about
   • Understand current problems derived from experiences shared during the interviews
   • In the design thinking context, explained as “a deep understanding of the problems and realities of the people you are designing for”
2. Define
3. Ideate
4. Prototype
5. Test

At this stage, asking questions and interviewing the right audinece is crucial to understanding the issues a group of people face. Through interviews and asking good questions, we can think of pain points or smile points that a person is experiencing; we can then use these points to identify opportunities that we can add on.

Identifying opportunities is important, as it provides a basis that we can use to think of opportunity statements (i.e., sentences that prompt for idea generation using the structure “how might we…?”).

• Opportunity statements tend to have the structure of “how might we so as to ?”
  • Must the target audience clearly in the definition

It is important to define target audiences when coming up with ideas using design thinking as it helps us built a solution around the audience rather than building the audience around the solution. It is important to identify the relevant stakeholders or audience for a problem you are empathising for.

In many cases, these audiences may differ in terms of:

• having different roles (e.g., customers, staff, managers);
• age ranges with different needs (e.g., youth, adults, elderly);
• interests; and
• experience.

When you have the opportunity to interact with the target audience, it’s best that you make the most out of it. Interacting involves getting to know the pain points that the target audience faces, and understanding their experience. You aren’t there to judge how they are, but rather to understand why they do what they do. Some tips to interact with your target audience:

• define your audience;
• spend quality time observing the audience in context;
• ask good questions (e.g., open-ended questions, the ‘what-how-why’ approach); and
• observe with a beginner’s mindset.