Design thinking – a practical guide

Are you looking to improve your in-house product design process or learn more about design thinking? Are you looking for tips on how to implement design thinking in your organisation or perhaps you’ve heard the phrase and want to know what it’s all about? In this white paper we explain the various stages of design thinking and take a closer look at the key benefits. We have provided lots of practical tips, links and free resources throughout to help you and you can save this white paper as a PDF to read later using the button at the top of the page.

Design thinking is broken down into 5 stages which we will cover in this white paper.

• Empathise
• Define
• Ideate
• Prototype
• Test

The design thinking process

As you follow the design thinking process, the learning gained from one stage can often require you to go back and revisit a previous stage to make improvements based on new knowledge. This means the seemingly linear process frequently breaks out into smaller, iterative cycles within the larger design thinking process. For example you might come up with an idea, but whilst testing your prototype discover that the problem isn’t quite how you understood it, requiring you to loop back one or two stages to redefine the problem, come up with new concepts or rethink the idea entirely.

Design processes can exist in many different forms, they can vary from one organisation or institution to another and across industries. Some organisations have longer and more in-depth processes and some will be tailored to their exact requirements. This process is the design thinking methodology and it is a user centric approach, boiled down to its fundamental components to make it universal and applicable to many situations.

In this white paper we assume you already have a design brief and are looking to learn about how to apply the design thinking methodology. If you need help writing an effective design brief read our guide here, how to write an effective product design brief.

The 5 stages of design thinking

1. Empathise

The first thing you need to do is work out who your user is and learn everything there is to know about them. Build a deep knowledge of them. Get into their shoes, create a persona alongside a list of everything you know about them. Not just the basics like their age, gender and where they live, really dig down into their behaviours, their habits, their frustrations, their aspirations, their motivations. What are their problems and how do they currently solve them? How effective are their current solutions?

One thing design educators and textbooks often forget to mention is that your user isn’t always the customer. In the case of our meeting room booking device example there was a user and a customer who were different parties and each had their own requirements to factor in. Consider all of your stakeholders and their individual motivations. This can be difficult and requires you to talk to them which is especially tricky if they’re not interested in talking to you (or letting you observe them!).

2. Define

By now you should know what problems you are solving and for who. You now need to define who your users are and the problems they face and use that information to formulate a Problem Statement. Pull all of your observations together, what are the difficulties and frustrations? Construct a point of view based on the user needs you have identified. Focus the problem or problems which you will set about solving. It can be as simple as “we want to solve problem (x) for group of people (y)”. Don’t stipulate features, technology or commercial requirements just yet. A good problem statement should serve as goals to keep you on track based on what you have learned about your users.

If you need some help with your problem statement, download our free problem statement template.

3. Ideate

Now that you have defined who your users are, what their needs and challenges are and how they currently go about solving them, the next stage in the design thinking process is to start coming up with ideas. Concept generation, also known as idea generation or simply ideation is the next stage, it’s time to start work on some solutions!

If you need some inspiration on how to come up with lots of ideas take a look at our 5 ideation techniques post.

Come up with as many ideas as possible which fit the brief. This part works best as a team exercise in short, sharp bursts and the key is not to be too precious or spend too long getting stuck into the feasibility of one idea. Human nature is to get stuck into the details, but resist. All you need is a pen, some paper and a pack of Post-it notes. Have an idea, scribble it down with a few notes, stick it on the wall and move on. Once you have a good collection of ideas you can move to the process of whittling them down and building on them.

Using the brief and problem statement as a guide, narrow your ideas down to a few promising ones. A good way to do this is to number your ideas and write the number on each one. Then, on a separate sheet of paper draw a grid with the number of each idea along the top row and each of the needs or problems you identified in the left-hand column. Next, pick a datum, this can be how the user currently solves this problem, for example if you were looking for better ways for people to transport their shopping, this might be a plastic bag.

As a group discuss each idea and, in each cell, write a score which corresponds to that idea and problem area. Give the idea a score of +1 if it solves the problem better than the datum, -1 if it doesn’t or 0 if it neither solves it better or worse.

Totalling up the scores at the bottom of the table should give you a good indication of which ideas have the most merit against the requirements of the brief and problem statement. Pick the top two or three to take forward.

Download our concept evaluation matrix template to help you evaluate your ideas and select your best concepts.

It is also important to get involvement and feedback from users, customers and any other stakeholders there may be at this point. It is still easy to change ideas, move things around and re-think them. If you’ve made a fundamental miscalculation of the users’ requirements it’s better to catch it here, plus you will probably find that when presented with some ideas on paper, your users will have all sorts of ideas and insights to share with you.

4. Prototype

The next stage in the design thinking process involves taking your ideas forward, applying some thought and turning them into something tangible that can be evaluated. Prototypes speed up the innovation process because they enable you to quickly understand the strengths and weaknesses of a design concept. Having something which can be touched, felt and actually used for the purpose it was designed for will yield more learning than any other stage. Prototyping is useful for validating technical design but design thinking isn’t concerned with that, much more important is that prototyping provides you with user feedback. Prototyping gives you a tool to present to your users and say here, try this out, what do you think?

It is important to remember that of all of the design thinking stages, this one is the most likely to be iterative. It will deliver a lot of learning as it goes hand in hand with the following prototype testing stage. Prototypes don’t have to be polished and perfect, in fact early prototypes are likely to be basic forms which convey a sense of ergonomics and scale. As the iterations progress between prototyping and testing, more fidelity and clarity will emerge, features such as buttons are added and external components are introduced. Adjustments become smaller and finer until a well resolved prototype is accepted by your user group.

Find out more about prototyping and its role in user centred design in our article How prototyping and user-centred design leads to better products.

5. Test

Going hand in hand with the previous prototype development stage and often iterating between the two stages, the prototype testing stage is very important. Up until this point everything has been theoretical, untested and unproven.

The first type of testing will be user testing, the most important of all of the design thinking stages. From here you will want to answer questions like, does this do the job better than what you currently use? Is it easier or quicker? Do you know how to use it? A skilled designer will be able to hand a prototype to the user and infer answers to these questions simply through observation. This can be difficult to master at first, but having a pen and paper to hand and writing down everything you see or filming the testing sessions is a good way to start.

The second type of testing is the technical testing where you will evaluate fit and function, mechanical robustness and assembly process, but we aren’t covering that in this white paper.

Prototypes may be accepted, improved, redesigned or rejected based on your user feedback and you will need to iterate accordingly. Once your design has been fully tested and users have given positive feedback on the prototypes, then that is where design thinking ends and hands over to the design implementation, in this context that is the design for manufacture. If you would like to know more about the design for manufacture stage you can read more in our articles below.

• How to select a manufacturer for your product
• How to reduce your manufacturing costs

Those are the fundamental stages of design thinking, we hope you have enjoyed reading and found it useful.