What is design thinking?
Design thinking is a creative process for building new products, services, and experiences. The two key components of design thinking are people and creative problem solving. Design thinkers use free-flowing idea generation and user insights to resolve an organization’s product, service, or business challenges with solutions that are innovative, meaningful, and aligned with their business goals.
For example, when you apply design thinking to your product development cycle, the first step is to gain a clear understanding of what your customers really need. Once you know what your real users want or need, you’ll use creative problem solving and brainstorming to generate a variety of possible solutions. Next, you’ll choose one of these solutions and move it to the prototyping and development phase.
Adopting a design thinking approach like the one above will result in better products and a more positive user experience.
What steps are included in a design thinking approach?
According to the Hasso Plattner Institute of Design (also known as the d.school), the design thinking process is an iterative methodology with six defined phases: understand, observe, define the point of view, ideate, prototype, and test. Here’s how we use this approach at Blink:
Understand the user — We employ user research, observation, and analysis to empathize with real-world users and understand their behaviors, motivations, and unmet needs. This is collected through techniques such as stakeholder interviews and ethnographic research.
Define, ideate, and prototype the solution — Our design team conducts brainstorming sessions and uses the insights gathered from our research and observation to define the problem and potential solutions. We select one or more solutions from the brainstorm phase that will best meet the users’ needs and begin to create prototypes.
Test the solution with the user — Next, we share the prototype with the people we’re designing it for to collect user feedback. We always learn a great deal from this type of research and we use the feedback to refine the next iteration of the product.
How can Blink help?
As a strategy, research, and design firm, we’ll guide your team through a design thinking workshop and collaborate to resolve your product, service, or business challenges. We’ll help your organization implement design thinking tools to ensure you understand your users and the creative solutions and products that they will use, love, and remember.