Design Thinking

What is design thinking?

Design Thinking is a method designers use in ideation and development, that also has applications elsewhere. The method describes a human-centered, iterative design process consisting of 5 steps—Empathize, Define, Ideate, Prototype and Test. Design thinking is useful in tackling problems that are ill-defined or unknown.

We use design thinking at Mad to only solve unknown business problems or unknown future innovative product. Mad applied only 2 phases of the design thinking process: Empathy and Define.

When to use design thinking?

When a client has a core idea of what they want to do as product or solutions but they don’t know yet who are their target, what are the behavior of their targets, what are the journey that they going through, what paint points they have? Do they need that core ideas of solution or not?

Design thinking is not always the first step. This is because in many cases, the client may already have all of this defined and therefore does not need help to find out these pain points. A good way to identify on which stage each company is at is to see what they currently offer and do a preliminary assessment if they have any focal pain points that could be solved by design thinking.

What are the processes?

Empathy:

• Define what you want to learn and what you want to know and set up an Interview brief with questions and set up an outcome.

• Go out into the streets and meet with people with the same profile of persons that might fit in the business/product solutions. Start doing the interview and listen to them (see how to run interview in the design toolkit)

• Gather all the information from the interviews and build an Affinity Map

• Build a Existing Customer's Journey

• Build a persona for the project or product

Define:

• Categories the affinity mapping

• Choose focus point on the affinity mapping

• Turn affinity mapping focus point into Problems statements

• Turn that problems statement into Design Sprint focus point

Why use design thinking?

Design thinking is a fool proof way to make sure the product will live up to the expectations of the users. With design thinking you won't be making something by blindly assuming that those are the features users want, instead you build those features directly from their feedback.

Learn, Build, Succeed.