Let’s Talk About Design Thinking
Design thinking is a terminology that often heard in the field of User Experience design. It is often referred as “outside the box” thinking because people who involves themselves in design thinking always try to develop new ways of thinking that goes out of the boundary of common problem-solving methods
What exactly is Design Thinking?
Theoretically, design thinking is an iterative process that we undergo to understand the user, challenge assumptions, and redefine the problems in order to search for alternative solutions that might not be instantly apparent with our initial level of understanding. Design thinking provides solution-based approach when solving problems.
Because design thinking involves in understanding the user needs, the innovation process that uses design thinking approach can be referred as Human Centered Design.
There are five known phases in design thinking method, it should be noted that these five phases are not always implemented linearly:
- Emphathize:Design thinking is a user-centered approach that values the user. Emphathize means that we try to explore the feeling of the user and tries to create product that the user needs and also can solve their problem. Emphathy is a very important concept in design thinking method to understand the user better, we can implement this step by doing user research through interview, survey, or observation.
- Define: We need to define what the user really needs according to the fact that we collect from user research. Prioritize on the problem that needs to be solved in order to satisfy the user.
- Ideate: Ideate is a step where we try to generate as much ideas as possible to solve the problem that we gathered from previous step. Ideate needs to be done through team discussion to explore many ideas and point of view.
- Prototype: After the idea are done, we already have the vision of the solution that we want to offer to the user. This solution is then made into a prototype which is some kind demo for the solution in the form of a minimum viable product that is ready to be tested but did not need to be complete. Prototype can be categorized into low-fidelity and high fidelity.
- Test: In this step we validate the solution that we created, is it able to solve the problem faced by the user? is there something that we can improve? Testing step is important because it can give us insight regarding the result of our project.
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