Design thinking is beautifully nonlinear

From Ideation to Creation.

  • Gain an empathetic understanding of the problem you’re trying to solve. Empathy is crucial to design thinking because it allows you to set aside your own assumptions about the world and gain real insight into users and their needs.

  • Analyze your observations and synthesize them to define the core problems. These definitions are called problem statements. You can create personas to help keep your efforts human-centered before proceeding to ideation

  • “Think outside the box”, look for alternative ways to view the problem and identify innovative solutions to the problem statement you’ve created. Brainstorming is particularly useful here.

  • The aim is to identify the best possible solution for each problem found. Your team should produce some inexpensive, scaled-down versions of the product to investigate the ideas you’ve generated and experiment further.

  • Although this is the final phase, design thinking is iterative. So, you can return to previous stages to make further iterations, alterations and refinements: To find or rule out alternative solutions.