the Conscious Design™ Blog

The official definition of design thinking explains it as a non-linear, iterative process that teams use to understand users, challenge assumptions, redefine problems and create innovative solutions to prototype and test. That is a mouthful and was most likely created by someone who is experienced in its practice but not as polished when it comes to communicating ideas. Before we can dive into how Design Thinking can be integrated into your marketing strategy, we need to gain a deep understanding of what it is. The definition above uses several terms that we are familiar with, so gaining a basic understanding of this concept will not be difficult. In more simple terms, design thinking is a way for a team, who is creating a product, to look at the entire picture of a project before moving forward. It allows them to understand who they are creating this product for and identify what issues they may need to overcome along the way. It is also a way to propose solutions that are developed enough to be tested but not so far along that they cannot make changes. Why Is Design Thinking Important? Design Thinking has been leveraged by the world’s most innovative brands such as Google, Apple, and Airbnb. It is a critical practice because it provides teams such as developers with a process that allows them to create solutions that will best serve the end-user. Design Thinking is a process that has guided designers for years to be able to create better products. Ian Peterman, CEO Tweet It also allows them to think outside the box and produce solutions that have never been tried before but have a high chance of succeeding because of the research they have conducted. The process that is Design Thinking can be broken down into five key phases: Empathize, Define, Ideate, Prototype, and Test. STAGE 1: Empathize Empathy is defined as the ability to understand and share the feelings of another. For example, if your best friend loses their job, you are able to understand the pain they are going through even if you have never been laid off yourself. That is practicing empathy. In terms of Design Thinking, this is the stage where you commit to gaining a deep understanding of the problem you are trying to solve. This can be done by conducting user research. Remember, the product you end up creating must solve a significant issue and be relatively easy to use. Your research should focus on understanding what pain points the user is experiencing and what they would like your solution to include. This is key because it allows you to set aside your assumptions and understand what the real issues are. For example, let’s say you are redesigning a website for a global brand. You may assume that the reason visitor activity is low is that the user is not interested in the products they are viewing. However, once you actually interview the user, you learn that they find the website to be difficult to navigate. You may also learn additional facts such as the pages are slow to load or that they contain multiple dead links that don’t lead anywhere. Now you understand what needs to be fixed in order to develop a successful new website. STAGE 2: Define Once you have gathered your information from stage one, you must review it and define the core problems that need to be solved. This is where you layout your problem statements, which define the issue at hand and detail the gap between where you are now and where you need to get to. Going back to the example we listed above, one of your core problems is that users are currently being sent to a website that is difficult to navigate and produces a poor, frustrating user experience. In some cases, it is helpful to develop personas to remember who you are solving these core problems for. Personas are semi-fictional profiles of the types of people who will be using your finished product. As you develop your product, you will want to refer back to these personas when making decisions. For example, if your persona describes someone who is in a rush, you may decide to make key pieces of information easy to find at the top of the page, instead of placing them into a slider below the scroll. STAGE 3: Ideate This is the stage where you begin to develop your ideas on how to solve your core problems. This is where you can review the information you have gathered, look at the entire picture, and propose ideas that may be considered “outside the box”. In other terms, this is where you can propose innovative and alternative ideas that will not only solve your problem but provide a long-term solution that will leave the end-user impressed and satisfied. This is the stage where the world’s most innovative brands begin to develop products that set them apart from the competition. When presented with a core problem, there is usually an easy way to fix it. For example, if people find your website confusing, you can remove pages and words so there is less content for them to go through. While this may solve part of the problem in the short term, the end-user is still going to be dissatisfied with your site because now it doesn’t include what they are looking for. As a developer working their way through this process, it’s your job to find a way to redesign your website so it is easier to use, contains the same amount of key information, and provides a positive experience that encourages the user not to navigate over to the competitors’ website. STAGE 4: Prototype This is the stage where you begin to experiment with different ways to solve your core problems using the innovative ideas you produced in phase three. This allows you to get creative and implement alternative solutions with minimal risk. If an idea fails in