Design Thinking Process and the 5 Stages

Design Thinking Process and the 5 Stages

We are continually looking for advanced technologies to solve issues when working on projects. As the product quality is mainly dependent on the approach we use, design thinking is worth paying attention to its growing popularity.

Design thinking is a technique meeting the modern innovative economy requirements to the fullest extent. It is a methodology focused on providing a solution-based approach to overcome undefined or unanticipated problems.  The design thinking process is an iterative approach to solve the issues and identify new opportunities. It helps align business needs with people’s needs. While the product designers majorly use it, this approach to innovation follows processes such as understanding human needs, analyzing problems and brainstorming ideas.

It forms an integral part of the web design and development process. It is best to hire Web Development Company and experienced designers to explore this methodology and ensure that this approach aligns with your customer’s interests.

Definition: Design Thinking

It is a product creation technique that focuses on end-user interests when using a complete range of creative and analytical skills to solve problems. It applies methods to match a potential customer’s needs and figure out how to develop the technologically feasible product to satisfy their business demands. Design Thinking creates a viable strategy that can convert into customer value and market opportunity.

Why Is Design Thinking Process Necessary?

Design thinking helps inspire innovative strategies that lead designers to create user-friendly products and help solve a particular problem.

Teamwork: Design thinking focuses on gathering data collectively and bringing new ideas together for an innovative product. With this concept, it increases the level of collaboration among team members.

Future Planning: With rapidly evolving technology, design thinking allows the leaders to visualize the company future and build a roadmap to define its direction.

Connection with Customers: The primary focus is to solve customer’s problems and develop solutions based on feedback and iterations.

Timely Product Launch: The consideration of customer feedback during the development phase helps launch the service or product faster. It reduces last-minute errors and surprises.

Sales: Visual representation of solutions helps expedite the sales process as customers can understand how the product/ service works.

5 Stages in the Design Thinking Process

Design thinking is a popular methodology about analyzing, imagining, and providing a solution to the problems. Understanding the five different stages helps empower users to apply Design Thinking methods to solve complex problems—the stages of design range from the ideation stage to prototyping and testing.

Empathise

It is the first phase of design thinking methodology, where designers engage with real people, absorb their points of view, and introspect to understand their needs, requirements, and objectives. It does not have space for assumptions but requires real insights about the users and helps build a psychological and emotional level.

While designing a product/ service, empathy builds a crucial bridge between the target audience and the product, project, or the service getting developed. The essence of this stage is to understand the problem correctly. Empathy is a crucial stage in the design thinking journey and helps uncover the end-users’ experiences.

Define

This stage of the process involves designers defining the problem they need to solve with their design. At this stage, developers process all the data received and set meaningful objectives based on it. After empathizing stage, the designer integrates their researched understanding into the human-centric issue and outlines the problem statement.

In this stage, designers analyze their observations from the empathy stage and work on incorporating that information. The end of this phase helps build a clear problem statement in a user-centric approach. Instead of focusing on what the company needs, the design thinking process’s definition stage helps state what the user needs.

Ideate

It is time to work on potential solutions after the problems are defined. At this stage, the designers set out to ideate around creative solutions for solving the defined problem. The ideation stage is the phase revolving around creativity and ideation.

More ideas put together creates more opportunity to test if they solve the user’s problem. Designers hold ideation sessions, explore new ideas, and brainstorm during this stage. The end of this phase helps come up with healthy ideas to embark upon further.

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Prototype

This phase is where we select the best ideas and transform them into prototypes. Prototypes can be models, sketches, or digital renders of an idea. This phase usually involves the creation of small, inexpensive mini versions of the product. The prototype stage aims to understand all the roadblocks around, making the product come to life. It uncovers additional user experience ideas or problems and set up designers with a clearer view of user expectations.

Test

At this stage, we receive feedback about the prototypes and check if the users receive the expected experience. In design thinking, multiple designers roll out several prototypes to test different change factors within their idea. However, the last stage of design thinking is not necessarily the final thing designers will do. Testing is an iterative process. Designers go through a series of edits, changes and refinements during the testing stage.

Summary

Viewing other people’s perspectives, being aware of their requirements, and understanding their challenges are the main design thinking technique principles. Design Thinking emphasizes collaboration between designers and users, offering flexibility and solutions based on how the users think, react, and behave.

At Jva Tec, we grasp your design challenges and ideate a personalized experience to solve complex business problems and provide mobile app development consultation. If you look forward to exploring design thinking, get in touch with our team of experts.