Design Thinking Process

Tell Story (Seventh step in the Design Thinking process)

As designers, we oftentimes must justify our design solutions to colleagues, managers, and stakeholders. This step is all about explaining and defending design decisions via effective storytelling while still being open to critique and feedback.

Understand (First Step in the Design Thinking Process)

In order to solve a problem, you need to understand a problem. This first stage in the Design Thinking Process is all about taking the initial steps towards understanding the problem at hand. You'll create problem statements and perform competitor analyses to ensure you understand not only what you'll create but the landscape you'll be creating it in, as well.

Observe (Second Step in the Design Thinking Process)

In this second stage of the Design Thinking Process, you'll be performing user research in order to observe your potential users and determine their needs and goals. User interviews and surveys fall under this stage.

Test (Sixth step in the Design Thinking Process)

In this stage, you'll be testing your prototypes with real users, collecting feedback, then improving and iterating on your designs again and again. Validating your designs in the early stages is a great way to solve problems before they reach a product development team. Use observations and feedback from people to create new hypotheses before starting the process over.

POV (Third Step in the Design Thinking Process)

In this stage, your goal is to step into the shoes of your users and "see" your product from their point of view. This is the reason why we create design personas! The closer we can get to our users, the greater our chance of fulfilling their needs efficiently.

Ideate (Fourth Step in the Design Thinking Process)

Now that you've collected all these observations, it's time to make ideas out of them. This is the part of the creative process that allows you to explore a wide variety and large quantity of diverse possible solutions. The purpose of ideation is to move beyond the obvious in order to explore a full range of ideas. User flows/journeys and card sorts fall under this category.

Present (Eighth step in the design thinking process)

This comes after you've prepared all of your research, design solutions, and prototypes and are confident that your design is ready to be handed off to developers. Your goal at this point is to communicate what developers should code based on your blueprints.

Prototype (Fifth Step in the Design Thinking Process)

This is the experimental stage of the process. Transform your ideas into a physical format so that they can be experienced and interacted with by others. Build wireframe after wireframe, then turn them into interactive prototypes (after receiving feedback, of course). Throughout this process, additional insights and empathy-building will occur.