Design thinking
Design thinking step by step:
- Empathize: this stage involves gathering insights about users and trying to understand their objectives, wishes and needs.
- Define: the phase is all about identifying the challenge. What difficulties do users face? What is the biggest user problem? What users actually need?
- Ideate: this step, as you may have already guessed, is dedicated to thinking about the way you can solve the problems you have identified, with the help of your product. The product team, designers and software engineers, brainstorm and generate multiple ideas.
- Prototype: the fourth stage brings you to turning your ideas into reality. By creating prototypes, you test your ideas fitness.
- Test: you present the prototype to customers and find out if it solves their problem and provides users with what they need. Note that this is not the end of the journey and you cannot put a full stop here: you will get feedback from users, adjust the product functionality and test it again. This is a continuous process similar to the build-measure-learn approach in the lean startup methodology.