Design thinking is an iterative and non-linear process which contains five phases:
Design thinking is a process for creative problem solving.
Design thinking has a human-centered core. It encourages organizations to focus on the people they're creating for, which leads to better products, services, and internal processes.
Design thinking is an iterative process in which you seek to understand your users, challenge assumptions, redefine problems and create innovative solutions which you can prototype and test.
Design thinking can help your team or organization:
- Better understand the unmet needs of the people you’re creating for (customers, clients, students, users, etc...).
- Reduce the risk associated with launching new ideas, products, and services.
- Generate solutions that are revolutionary, not just incremental.
- Learn and iterate faster.
In essence, design thinking:
- Revolves around a deep interest to understand the people for whom we design products and services.
- Helps us observe and develop empathy with the target users.
- Enhances our ability to question: in design thinking you question the problem, the assumptions and the implications.
- Proves extremely useful when you tackle problems that are ill-defined or unknown.
- Involves ongoing experimentation through sketches, prototypes, testing and trials of new concepts and ideas.