Written by: Betssy Brijit Thomson
The design thinking process
To build a problem statement, pay attention to your audience, relate to them, and examine the problem. Then iterate and design ideas before evaluating and testing them.
Generating a problem statement
A problem statement is a single sentence that includes the following questions:
What is your design?
Who will use or experience your design?
Where will your design be used?
What is your design’s outcome (benefit)?
Tip: Be aware of and certain of your objective and intended outcome. A design's actions are its goal, and its advantages are its outcomes.
Making observations
Field work involves observing customers in their environment, recording observations using notes, pictures, audio recordings, or videos for product or service improvement.
Tip: As you come up with ideas, remember to review your notes.
When conducting interviews, be prepared, request that the talk be recorded, avoid asking yes-or-no questions because you will learn less, ask follow-up questions, and be calm yet focused.
Empathizing
Personas are detailed representations of potential customers with common traits, based on interview notes. Creating a scenario based on these personas and insights helps create a brief story, allowing for a better understanding of user behavior and desired outcomes.
Iterating and prototyping
During the observation, empathizing, and testing stages, the design can be modified and redesigned based on new data, which is known as iterating. Empathizing phases in brainstorming help generate new design ideas by incorporating observation. Turn off your inner critic while brainstorming, build on other people's ideas, stay on topic, be visual, and aim for quantity. Prototyping is creating an early sample of a product or service, testing the process, and presenting it to potential customers, allowing for feedback and improvement.
Tip: In design thinking, there are no absolute solutions.
Evaluating ideas
Observation, caution, questioning, and recording are all part of the evaluation process. Use observational feedback while iterating and revising your prototype. Finally, express empathy by creating a new scenario based on the insights gained from your observations.