What is Design Thinking
Whether you are a designer, entrepreneur, or simply someone who wants to create innovative solutions to everyday problems, design thinking is a tool that can help you tap into your creativity, and unlock your true potential. Design Thinking is becoming an extremely popular thought process and mindset that helps solve problems of all sizes in creative, and often groundbreaking ways.
Design Thinking is a process one goes through to seek solutions that are not immediately clear, through an iterative process that typically includes the following five stages.
Empathize – The first step is to empathize with your audience that will use your product. This involves research and insight into your users’ needs, wants, and pain points.
Define – Once designers have a deep understanding of users needs, they must define and articulate the problem they are solving, accounting for all of the audiences needs, wants, and pain points.
Ideate – The problems identified in the define stage are analyzed and expanded upon with a wide variety of creative solutions.
Prototype – After generating enough potential solutions, designers may start to prototype some of the ideations made in the previous stage. This allows designers to quickly test and refine their ideas.
Test – This is the final stage, where designers test their prototypes with real users and gather feedback to refine their ideas even further. This stage may cycle around several times to continue refining until their product is perfect.
This 5 stage design process has been developed and refined through decades of work from a variety of academics, designers, and thinkers, however, there is no one definitive version of a design thinking process. Instead, it more important that the designer involve a user-centric, iterative approach to problem-solving, as that is the root of why design thinking is so successful.
Design thinking works
An example of great design thinking can be found at Apple. Every corner of their user experience has been carefully contrived to suit their goals. Apple products have their own operating systems, so someone that is use to their apple branded interface will feel very comfortable working with other products in the apple ecosystem. Their products are constantly upgrading with new iterations and new custom parts that consistently out-perform other brands; To accomplish these extreme tasks, apple goes through an immense amount of design thinking, every step of the way. Before they develop a new product line, they understand what their users want, and generate unique ideas to out-perform their competitors.
One of my favorite examples of Apple’s obsession with design thinking is how well they tied AirPods into their ecosystem. AirPods are one of apples most successful products, they are so successful that just the revenue they have made off of AirPods is larger than almost every other business in the world. If you have a pair yourself, you know they are highly optimized only for people with iPhones. Just think how much design thinking was involved in the creation of this product. Everything has been clearly thought out leaving no stone unturned, and it shows.
Conclusion
Design thinking expert, Tim Brown states in his TEDx, that he believes in design thinking and states that it is not great because it is for everyone, rather, it is so great because it is about everyone. Tim Brown is essentially stating that all of us are smarter than any of us, and if we take our inspiration from everyone, we will unlock the perfect user experience.
This is something I think Apple has achieved, and why it is the largest company in the world. They have cracked the code of design thinking and iterative design. Just look at their history of technology, and each product being their next expression of what humanity needs to continue forward. Time and time again they have given the world something it did not know it needed. First it was the laptop computer, next was the iPod, then finally their current defining product the iPhone. No one was asking for these products, but Apple knew they are what everyone wanted. They use design thinking processes to find new innovative ideas; and continue to use even more design thinking when researching & developing these products.
Design thinking is the symbiosis of science and art, through finding creative solutions for complex problems requires both schools of thought.
Sources
https://headphonesaddict.com/airpods-facts-revenue/
www.ted.com/talks/tim_brown_designers_think_big
hbr.org/2018/09/why-design-thinking-works
www.interaction-design.org/literature/topics/design-thinking