The 5 Stages of the Design Thinking Process

Technology and business are always evolving, and keeping up with the latest trends will help you achieve success in your career field.

If you want to get ahead in your industry, you need to understand the best practices. The Design Thinking Process is crucial for solving all kinds of problems that many businesses face. It can help encourage innovation and ingenuity, especially when the problems a company is dealing with aren’t well-defined or understood.

Various design thinking exercises can help you get a better grasp of this process and its importance. Ultimately, this will make you an invaluable asset as you’ll be able to help any business you work with achieve its goals.

In this guide, we’ll go over the Design Thinking Process so you can see what each step involves.

What Is the Design Thinking Process?

The Design Thinking Process is a five-step approach that involves taking a point of view and developing an idea or outcome from it. It’s important to note that this isn’t always a linear process, and can vary depending on the circumstances of the situation you’re looking at.

While there are five distinct stages to it, the idea or outcome you’re looking for could be found at any stage. In many cases, this leads to the repetition of a previous stage, hence making it non-linear.

The Origin of the Design Thinking Process

The term “Design Thinking Process” was coined in the 1990s, but this innovation methodology has been in practice since the mid-1900s. It stemmed from studies that were based on the development and methods of creativity.

In the 1970s, the term “wicked problem” emerged. It regarded problems that were difficult to define and unsolvable using standard methods. Such problems require alternative solutions like design thinking.

In the last couple of decades, design thinking has become very prominent. Universities offer courses covering it, and it’s now a popular methodology that a lot of huge companies like Samsung and Nike make use of.

The Five Stages of Design Thinking

Design thinking is all about creative problem-solving. While the process isn’t set in stone, there are five standard design process steps that are used to solve complex problems. Let’s take a closer look at each step.

Stage 1: Empathize

The whole process of design thinking starts with empathy. At this point, the design team needs to ignore any biases or differences and work together.

This helps them understand the users they’re targeting along with their needs. They can often do this through observation and engagement.

It’s easy to underestimate the importance of this step as it doesn’t actually involve solving a problem. In reality, however, it’s one of the most important stages. This is because it’s almost impossible to solve a problem users have without understanding what they want.

Empathy helps create a connection between designers and users. There are several research strategies that help identify and define problems.

Interviews are a useful approach, as designers can ask users questions directly. This helps them understand users’ challenges and points of view.

Questionnaires and surveys are also useful here. You can better determine what people think of your current solutions as well as their own needs.

Observation allows you to see how users interact with the current product and their environment. This will let you get a view of their thoughts and feelings in action.

An empathy map is a visual tool that design teams often use. It creates a summary of users’ thoughts, feelings, and actions.

Color psychology is another visual tool that involves using different color patterns to invoke certain psychological effects. This can impact the branding colors that you implement.

Stage 2: Define

After the empathy stage, you should have a good understanding of users’ wants and needs. From here, you can define the problem.

Analyze the data collected in the first stage to determine the issue. It’s important to specify a clear and concise product statement. This will dictate the rest of the process.

Data analytics is often one of the most complicated parts of design thinking. You can train through Coding Temple and learn how to effectively analyze all kinds of data.

Problem statements are crucial as they give a clear outline of the audience’s challenges. With this, it becomes much easier to resolve the problem.

It also helps ensure the user’s perspective remains the central focus of the approach. Without this, it can be easy to look at things more from the company’s perspective, and this can lead to worse results. User-centered design is a key element of the design thinking process, so this viewpoint should remain throughout.

During this phase, there are a few methods that are commonplace.

Data analysis is crucial. By understanding the data in the empathy stage, it becomes much easier to define the problem.

The “5 Why’s” method is an iterative, interrogative technique. It helps find the root cause of a certain problem.

Building user personas is also vital here. It helps build an archetype based on users’ needs.

Stage 3: Ideate

The ideation stage is all about exploring potential solutions. The ideas that are found here will serve as the foundation for prototypes that will be tested later on.

One of the most crucial things that will help this stage run smoothly is that judgments should be left behind. Design teams shouldn’t consider potential barriers like feasibility or budgetary constraints.

It’s all about being creative and thinking outside the box to come up with as many innovative solutions as possible. Not all solutions will be suitable, but there are no wrong answers here. Design teams use several common techniques to generate ideas.

Brainwriting involves writing ideas down on a sheet of paper and passing it along throughout a design team. Each person will add to the ideas on the paper until a certain time limit is reached. The team will then gather the ideas and review them.

Sketching is used to visualize ideas. It’s a great way to communicate ideas clearly and it’s time-efficient.

Round-robin brainstorming is a classic approach that starts with the “How Might We” prompt. Designers can put forward their ideas, and the team can then work together to further develop them.

Mind maps and flow charts work well as visual approaches. Not only do they involve building ideas, but showing how they connect with one another. From this, a team can often classify ideas and identify any patterns that occur.

SWOT analysis takes a look at ideas and helps a team determine how good they are. It observes the strengths, weaknesses, external opportunities, and threats that may be present.

Stage 4: Prototype

Now that a team has some ideas generated, they can start testing them out. The ideas don’t need to be finalized at this point; they’re simply presenting possible solutions. These prototypes are typically scaled-down versions of some of the products found in the ideation stage.

Through software engineering, for example, you can develop platforms that allow you to test features and functions so you can see how it performs. This isn’t just in terms of it solving a problem, but also in making sure it’s feasible and determining if there are any challenges in the way. There are a few prototyping techniques that businesses commonly use.

Wireframes are low-fidelity prototypes that give the basic layout of an interface or product. They’re clear and easy to understand.

Low-fidelity prototypes are cost- and time-efficient solutions. You can use them to express broad concepts and ideas. It’s possible to produce them with little design work, so you can test them quickly.

High-fidelity prototypes are more involved. They’re realistic and are close to what the final product will be. This takes more time and money but gives a more accurate representation of the final product.

Stage 5: Test

This is the final stage and involves real users. Prototypes are given to participants, who can then give feedback on their experience. Gathering this feedback and analyzing it allows a team to determine how suitable a solution is.

They can observe what works well and what doesn’t, allowing them to make further refinements. As this is a part of the whole non-linear process, it often results in a team going back to a previous step. After testing, it may become clear that a product needs certain changes to make it more suitable.

Quality assurance is key here as it allows a team to ensure a product is as good as it can be. The Coding Temple can help train you to become a QA professional.

Usability testing is a common tool used here. It determines how usable a product is after allowing a group of target users to test it.

Beta launching is another technique that involves releasing a prototype to a certain group for them to try. They can see how usable it is, identify bugs, and determine how well it meets their needs.

The Importance of Design Thinking Exercises

When users are facing problems, developing solutions isn’t always easy. Design thinking exercises can help a team come up with ideas and test them to make sure they’ll provide good results.

Coding Temple can help you develop the skills needed to effectively implement the Design Thinking process. You can get certified through our coding bootcamp and become an expert in data analytics. If you’re ready to get started, apply today!