Design Thinking Process
Five
stage design thinking process, as adopted by the Stanford d.school.
1.
Empathize: Learn about and from your audience about their real concerns.
2.
Define: Sharpen your focus on the most important problems to be solved.
3.
Ideate: Generate a high volume of ideas around your problem.
4.
Prototype: Convert your ideas into quick and dirty mock-ups.
5.
Test: Subject your prototypes to real-world validation.
Empathize and define:
·
The
cornerstone of design thinking is empathy. Empathy does not
come effortlessly, especially in a context where a problem needs to be solved
fast and the access to customers is limited. However, empathy can be
engineered, and there are specific toolsets and skill sets available to stimulate
an empathetic mindset.
Ideate
- In
ideation, quantity is favored over quality of ideas, we converge and diverge iteratively
with the generated ideas.
- Quantity
over quality might be the most counter-intuitive principle in ideation, and yet
scores of managers want that one breakthrough idea that can revolutionize
everything.
- The
emphasis in the phase is to be systematic and adopt a set of time-honed methods
of generating ideas without bringing one’s biases into play.
- The
ideas are only as good and useful as the ingenuity of the insights and the
sharpness with which the problem is defined.
Prototype and test:
Once there are enough candidate ideas, pick
the most promising ones and to scale some of those. Prototyping and testing
happen iteratively and often even simultaneously, to build to learn and
validate, the two stages are clubbed into one.
Scale:
All
meaningful ideas must scale to the real-world context. Even if a prototype
works and the customers love it, only through scale an idea’s impact is
realized.
