How to create better user-centered solutions with Design Thinking

in 5 steps

Have you ever heard of Design Thinking?

This combination of two words was unknown to me a few months ago but I understood its power after meeting Michael Lewrick, author and bestseller of the Design Thinking Playbook, among others.

So what is Design Thinking?

Well, I would answer that it is first and foremost a Mindset, a method that allows us to structure our thoughts, our ideas and to assess the real needs of the users fo a service or a product, or the real needs of the members of a team when faced with a problem, before starting to work on the solutions.

It's a powerful and impactful toolkit that really allows us to focus on the needs of users to create new market opportunities.

It's a whole new mindset for creating innovation.

It is a very flexible process with no specific recipe.

Every company or designers using Design Thinking does it differently! BUT there is 5 main steps to go through which are always the same:

1 Empathize

It's about gathering information with interviews, the creation of persona to figure who is the person you are doing the product for.

2 Define

Based on the information, define the Needs of your user Needs.

3 Ideate

Coming up with ideas, potential matches of products or solutions which respond to the Insights you got in Step 1 and 2.

4 Prototype

You 're turning all your ideas in simple, testable prototypes

5 Test

In this step, you're testing your prototypes with real people and get feedback from them

The exact exercises into each steps are not defined.

Design Thinking is more a Broadmap of what you 're going to be doing over the next weeks, months or years, but there is no rule set that says you have to do this exercise first and then the other one.

No there is no specific recipe.

Tomorrow I will publish a new podcast episode “There is a Workshop for That"!” with my guest Michael Lewrick.

We have a talk about Design Thinking but also the future of building powerful Business Ecosystem to grow and empower each other and create sustainable environment.