A Simple Guide to Design Thinking

Introduction

Design thinking has five steps: empathizing, defining, ideating, prototyping, and testing. Empathizing is about deeply understanding the user and their problems, and then defining their challenges more concretely. Idea-ting is geared at coming up with multiple solutions that might work for the problem.

Story

Generally, design thinking is a design methodology used to solve human-related problems. Contrary to what you might think, it is not about making a brand or a product look trendy in the eyes of the audience. Instead, it is a systematic approach to problem-solving that allows marketers to come up with new and exciting ideas that speak to customers. Design thinking goes beyond the traditional business models and focuses on customer empathy and real-world experiments.

Design thinking empowers marketers to generate quality marketing strategies that will be successful by getting the right content in front of the right sets of eyes. So, whether you are marketing a local business or specific services, it is important to explore and create ideas that better cater to the consumers’ requirements and desires.

Conclusion

Like any other methodology, design thinking needs to follow certain stages or phases that will contribute to the innovative project created by the designers. However, those phases shouldn’t be perceived as a step-by-step process because often they can occur in parallel or require to be repeated. 

Let’s take a closer look at the five stages designers should follow: 

  1. Empathize with customers in different situations
  2. Approach a problem-solving mindset by defining the core problems
  3. Ideate by generating better solutions to the existing problems
  4. Imagine ideal user experiences from the customers’ perspective and create prototypes of the product
  5. Test the complete product to rule out any possible problem