design thinking methodology

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Ideas Made to Matter

Design thinking, explained

Rebecca Linke

Sep 14, 2017

What is design thinking?

Design thinking is an innovative problem-solving process rooted in a set of skills.The approach has been around for decades, but it only started gaining traction outside of the design community after the 2008 Harvard Business Review article [subscription required] titled “Design Thinking” by Tim Brown, CEO and president of design company IDEO.

Since then, the design thinking process has been applied to developing new products and services, and to a whole range of problems, from creating a business model for selling solar panels in Africa to the operation of Airbnb .

At a high level, the steps involved in the design thinking process are simple: first, fully understand the problem; second, explore a wide range of possible solutions; third, iterate extensively through prototyping and testing; and finally, implement through the customary deployment mechanisms. 

The skills associated with these steps help people apply creativity to effectively solve real-world problems better than they otherwise would. They can be readily learned, but take effort. For instance, when trying to understand a problem, setting aside your own preconceptions is vital, but it’s hard.

Creative brainstorming is necessary for developing possible solutions, but many people don’t do it particularly well. And throughout the process it is critical to engage in modeling, analysis, prototyping, and testing, and to really learn from these many iterations.

Once you master the skills central to the design thinking approach, they can be applied to solve problems in daily life and any industry.

Here’s what you need to know to get started.

Understand the problem 

The first step in design thinking is to understand the problem you are trying to solve before searching for solutions. Sometimes, the problem you need to address is not the one you originally set out to tackle.

“Most people don’t make much of an effort to explore the problem space before exploring the solution space,” said MIT Sloan professor Steve Eppinger. The mistake they make is to try and empathize, connecting the stated problem only to their own experiences. This falsely leads to the belief that you completely understand the situation. But the actual problem is always broader, more nuanced, or different than people originally assume.

Take the example of a meal delivery service in Holstebro, Denmark. When a team first began looking at the problem of poor nutrition and malnourishment among the elderly in the city, many of whom received meals from the service, it thought that simply updating the menu options would be a sufficient solution. But after closer observation, the team realized the scope of the problem was much larger , and that they would need to redesign the entire experience, not only for those receiving the meals, but for those preparing the meals as well. While the company changed almost everything about itself, including rebranding as The Good Kitchen, the most important change the company made when rethinking its business model was shifting how employees viewed themselves and their work. That, in turn, helped them create better meals (which were also drastically changed), yielding happier, better nourished customers.

Involve users

Imagine you are designing a new walker for rehabilitation patients and the elderly, but you have never used one. Could you fully understand what customers need? Certainly not, if you haven’t extensively observed and spoken with real customers. There is a reason that design thinking is often referred to as human-centered design.

“You have to immerse yourself in the problem,” Eppinger said.

How do you start to understand how to build a better walker? When a team from MIT’s Integrated Design and Management program together with the design firm Altitude took on that task, they met with walker users to interview them, observe them, and understand their experiences.  

“We center the design process on human beings by understanding their needs at the beginning, and then include them throughout the development and testing process,” Eppinger said.

Central to the design thinking process is prototyping and testing (more on that later) which allows designers to try, to fail, and to learn what works. Testing also involves customers, and that continued involvement provides essential user feedback on potential designs and use cases. If the MIT-Altitude team studying walkers had ended user involvement after its initial interviews, it would likely have ended up with a walker that didn’t work very well for customers. 

It is also important to interview and understand other stakeholders, like people selling the product, or those who are supporting the users throughout the product life cycle.

The second phase of design thinking is developing solutions to the problem (which you now fully understand). This begins with what most people know as brainstorming.

Hold nothing back during brainstorming sessions — except criticism. Infeasible ideas can generate useful solutions, but you’d never get there if you shoot down every impractical idea from the start.

“One of the key principles of brainstorming is to suspend judgment,” Eppinger said. “When we're exploring the solution space, we first broaden the search and generate lots of possibilities, including the wild and crazy ideas. Of course, the only way we're going to build on the wild and crazy ideas is if we consider them in the first place.”

That doesn’t mean you never judge the ideas, Eppinger said. That part comes later, in downselection. “But if we want 100 ideas to choose from, we can’t be very critical.”

In the case of The Good Kitchen, the kitchen employees were given new uniforms. Why? Uniforms don’t directly affect the competence of the cooks or the taste of the food.

But during interviews conducted with kitchen employees, designers realized that morale was low, in part because employees were bored preparing the same dishes over and over again, in part because they felt that others had a poor perception of them. The new, chef-style uniforms gave the cooks a greater sense of pride. It was only part of the solution, but if the idea had been rejected outright, or perhaps not even suggested, the company would have missed an important aspect of the solution.

Prototype and test. Repeat.

You’ve defined the problem. You’ve spoken to customers. You’ve brainstormed, come up with all sorts of ideas, and worked with your team to boil those ideas down to the ones you think may actually solve the problem you’ve defined.

“We don’t develop a good solution just by thinking about a list of ideas, bullet points and rough sketches,” Eppinger said. “We explore potential solutions through modeling and prototyping. We design, we build, we test, and repeat — this design iteration process is absolutely critical to effective design thinking.”

Repeating this loop of prototyping, testing, and gathering user feedback is crucial for making sure the design is right — that is, it works for customers, you can build it, and you can support it.

“After several iterations, we might get something that works, we validate it with real customers, and we often find that what we thought was a great solution is actually only just OK. But then we can make it a lot better through even just a few more iterations,” Eppinger said.

Implementation

The goal of all the steps that come before this is to have the best possible solution before you move into implementing the design. Your team will spend most of its time, its money, and its energy on this stage.

“Implementation involves detailed design, training, tooling, and ramping up. It is a huge amount of effort, so get it right before you expend that effort,” said Eppinger.

Design thinking isn’t just for “things.” If you are only applying the approach to physical products, you aren’t getting the most out of it. Design thinking can be applied to any problem that needs a creative solution. When Eppinger ran into a primary school educator who told him design thinking was big in his school, Eppinger thought he meant that they were teaching students the tenets of design thinking.

“It turns out they meant they were using design thinking in running their operations and improving the school programs. It’s being applied everywhere these days,” Eppinger said.

In another example from the education field, Peruvian entrepreneur Carlos Rodriguez-Pastor hired design consulting firm IDEO to redesign every aspect of the learning experience in a network of schools in Peru. The ultimate goal? To elevate Peru’s middle class.

As you’d expect, many large corporations have also adopted design thinking. IBM has adopted it at a company-wide level, training many of its nearly 400,000 employees in design thinking principles .

What can design thinking do for your business?

The impact of all the buzz around design thinking today is that people are realizing that “anybody who has a challenge that needs creative problem solving could benefit from this approach,” Eppinger said. That means that managers can use it, not only to design a new product or service, “but anytime they’ve got a challenge, a problem to solve.”

Applying design thinking techniques to business problems can help executives across industries rethink their product offerings, grow their markets, offer greater value to customers, or innovate and stay relevant. “I don’t know industries that can’t use design thinking,” said Eppinger.

Ready to go deeper?

Read “ The Designful Company ” by Marty Neumeier, a book that focuses on how businesses can benefit from design thinking, and “ Product Design and Development ,” co-authored by Eppinger, to better understand the detailed methods.

Register for an MIT Sloan Executive Education course:

Systematic Innovation of Products, Processes, and Services , a five-day course taught by Eppinger and other MIT professors.

• Leadership by Design: Innovation Process and Culture , a two-day course taught by MIT Integrated Design and Management director Matthew Kressy.
• Managing Complex Technical Projects , a two-day course taught by Eppinger.
• Apply for M astering Design Thinking , a 3-month online certificate course taught by Eppinger and MIT Sloan senior lecturers Renée Richardson Gosline and David Robertson.

Steve Eppinger is a professor of management science and innovation at MIT Sloan. He holds the General Motors Leaders for Global Operations Chair and has a PhD from MIT in engineering. He is the faculty co-director of MIT's System Design and Management program and Integrated Design and Management program, both master’s degrees joint between the MIT Sloan and Engineering schools. His research focuses on product development and technical project management, and has been applied to improving complex engineering processes in many industries.

Read next: 10 agile ideas worth sharing

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What is design thinking?

Design and conquer: in years past, the word “design” might have conjured images of expensive handbags or glossy coffee table books. Now, your mind might go straight to business. Design and design thinking are buzzing in the business community more than ever. Until now, design has focused largely on how something looks; these days, it’s a dynamic idea used to describe how organizations can adjust their problem-solving approaches to respond to rapidly changing environments—and create maximum impact and shareholder value. Design is a journey and a destination. Design thinking is a core way of starting the journey and arriving at the right destination at the right time.

Simply put, “design thinking is a methodology that we use to solve complex problems , and it’s a way of using systemic reasoning and intuition to explore ideal future states,” says McKinsey partner Jennifer Kilian. Design thinking, she continues, is “the single biggest competitive advantage that you can have, if your customers are loyal to you—because if you solve for their needs first, you’ll always win.”

Get to know and directly engage with senior McKinsey experts on design thinking

Tjark Freundt is a senior partner in McKinsey’s Hamburg office, Tomas Nauclér is a senior partner in the Stockholm office, Daniel Swan is a senior partner in the Stamford office, Warren Teichner is a senior partner in the New York office, Bill Wiseman is a senior partner in the Seattle office, and Kai Vollhardt is a senior partner in the Munich office.

And good design is good business. Kilian’s claim is backed up with data: McKinsey Design’s 2018 Business value of design report  found that the best design performers increase their revenues  and investor returns at nearly twice the rate of their industry competitors. What’s more, over a ten-year period, design-led companies outperformed  the S&P 500 by 219 percent.

As you may have guessed by now, design thinking goes way beyond just the way something looks. And incorporating design thinking into your business is more than just creating a design studio and hiring designers. Design thinking means fundamentally changing how you develop your products, services, and, indeed, your organization itself.

Read on for a deep dive into the theory and practice of design thinking.

Learn more about McKinsey’s Design Practice , and check out McKinsey’s latest Business value of design report here .

How do companies build a design-driven company culture?

There’s more to succeeding in business than developing a great product or service that generates a financial return. Empathy and purpose are core business needs. Design thinking means putting customers, employees, and the planet at the center of problem solving.

McKinsey’s Design Practice has learned that design-led organizations start with design-driven cultures. Here are four steps  to building success through the power of design:

Understand your audience. Design-driven companies go beyond asking what customers and employees want, to truly understanding why they want it. Frequently, design-driven companies will turn to cultural anthropologists and ethnographers to drill down into how their customers use and experience products, including what motivates them and what turns them away.

Makeup retailer Sephora provides an example. When marketing leaders actually watched  shoppers using the Sephora website, they realized customers would frequently go to YouTube to watch videos of people using products before making a purchase. Using this information, the cosmetics retailer developed its own line of demonstration videos, keeping shoppers on the site and therefore more likely to make a purchase.

• Bring design to the executive table. This leader can be a chief design officer, a chief digital officer, or a chief marketing officer. Overall, this executive should be the best advocate for the company’s customers and employees, bringing the point of view of the people, the planet, and the company’s purpose into strategic business decisions. The design lead should also build bridges between multiple functions and stakeholders, bringing various groups into the design iteration process.
• Design in real time. To understand how and why people—both customers and employees—use processes, products, or services, organizations should develop a three-pronged design-thinking model that combines design, business strategy, and technology. This approach allows business leaders to spot trends, cocreate using feedback and data, prototype, validate, and build governance models for ongoing investment.

Act quickly. Good design depends on agility. That means getting a product to users quickly, then iterating based on customer feedback. In a design-driven culture, companies aren’t afraid to release products that aren’t quite perfect. Designers know there is no end to the design process. The power of design, instead, lies in the ability to adopt and adapt as needs change. When designers are embedded within teams, they are uniquely positioned to gather and digest feedback, which can lead to unexpected revelations. Ultimately, this approach creates more impactful and profitable results than following a prescribed path.

Consider Instagram. Having launched an initial product in 2010, Instagram’s founders paid attention to what the most popular features were: image sharing, commenting, and liking. They relaunched with a stripped-down version a few months later, resulting in 100,000 downloads in less than a week and over two million users in under two months —all without any strategic promotion.

Learn more about McKinsey’s Design Practice .

What’s the relationship between user-centered design and design thinking?

Both processes are design led. And they both emphasize listening to and deeply understanding users and continually gathering and implementing feedback to develop, refine, and improve a service.

Where they are different is scale. User-centered design focuses on improving a specific product or service . Design thinking takes a broader view  as a way to creatively address complex problems—whether for a start-up, a large organization, or society as a whole.

User-centered design is great for developing a fantastic product or service. In the past, a company could coast on a superior process or product for years before competitors caught up. But now, as digitization drives more frequent and faster disruptions, users demand a dynamic mix of product and service. Emphasis has shifted firmly away  from features and functions toward purpose, lifestyle, and simplicity of use.

Looking for direct answers to other complex questions?

McKinsey analysis has found that some industries—such as telecommunications, automotive, and consumer product companies— have already made strides toward combining product and service into a unified customer experience . Read on for concrete examples of how companies have applied design thinking to offer innovative—and lucrative—customer experiences.

Learn more about our Operations Practice .

What is the design-thinking process?

McKinsey analysis has shown that the design-thinking approach creates more value  than conventional approaches. The right design at the right price point spurs sustainability and resilience in a demonstrable way—a key driver of growth.

According to McKinsey’s Design  Practice, there are two key steps to the design-thinking process:

• Developing an understanding of behavior and needs that goes beyond what people are doing right now to what they will need in the future and how to deliver that. The best way to develop this understanding is to spend time with people.
• “Concepting,” iterating, and testing . First start with pen and paper, sketching out concepts. Then quickly put these into rough prototypes—with an emphasis on quickly. Get feedback, refine, and test again. As American chemist Linus Pauling said : “The way to get good ideas is to get lots of ideas and throw the bad ones away.”

What is D4VG versus DTV?

For more than a decade, manufacturers have used a design-to-value (DTV) model  to design and release products that have the features needed to be competitive at a low cost. During this time, DTV efforts were groundbreaking because they were based on data rather than experience. They also reached across functions, in contrast to the typical value-engineering approach.

The principles of DTV have evolved into design for value and growth (D4VG), a new way of creating products that provide exceptional customer experiences while driving both value and growth. Done right, D4VG efforts generate products with the features, form, and functionality that turn users into loyal fans .

D4VG products can cost more to build, but they can ultimately raise margins by delivering on a clear understanding of a product’s core brand attributes, insights into people’s motivations, and design thinking.

Learn more about our Consumer Packaged Goods Practice .

What is design for sustainability?

As consumers, companies, and regulators shift toward increased sustainability, design processes are coming under even more scrutiny. The challenge is that carbon-efficient production processes tend to be more complex and can require more carbon-intensive materials. The good news is that an increased focus on design for sustainability (DFS), especially at the research and development stage , can help mitigate some of these inefficiencies and ultimately create even more sustainable products.

For example, the transition from internal-combustion engines to electric-propulsion vehicles  has highlighted emissions-intensive automobile production processes. One study found that around 20 percent of the carbon generated by a diesel vehicle comes from its production . If the vehicle ran on only renewable energy, production emissions would account for 85 percent of the total. With more sustainable design, electric-vehicle (EV) manufacturers stand to reduce the lifetime emissions of their products significantly.

To achieve design for sustainability at scale, companies can address three interrelated elements at the R&D stage:

• rethinking the way their products use resources, adapting them to changing regulations, adopting principles of circularity, and making use of customer insights
• understanding and tracking emissions and cost impact of design decisions in support of sustainability goals
• fostering the right mindsets and capabilities to integrate sustainability into every product and design decision

What is ‘skinny design’?

Skinny design is a less theoretical aspect of design thinking. It’s a method whereby consumer goods companies reassess the overall box size of products by reducing the total cubic volume of the package. According to McKinsey analysis , this can improve overall business performance in the following ways:

• Top-line growth of 4 to 5 percent through improvements in shelf and warehouse holding power. The ability to fit more stock into warehouses ultimately translates to growth.
• Bottom-line growth of more than 10 percent . Packing more product into containers and trucks creates the largest savings. Other cost reductions can come from designing packaging to minimize the labor required and facilitate automation.
• Sustainability improvements associated with reductions in carbon emissions through less diesel fuel burned per unit. Material choices can also confer improvements to the overall footprint.

Read more about skinny design and how it can help maximize the volume of consumer products that make it onto shelves.

Learn more about McKinsey’s Operations Practice .

How can a company become a top design performer?

The average person’s standard for design is higher than ever. Good design is no longer just a nice-to-have for a company. Customers now have extremely high expectations for design, whether it’s customer service, instant access to information, or clever products that are also aesthetically relevant in the current culture.

McKinsey tracked the design practices of 300 publicly listed companies  over a five-year period in multiple countries. Advanced regression analysis of more than two million pieces of financial data and more than 100,000 design actions revealed 12 actions most correlated to improved financial performance. These were then clustered into the following four themes:

• Analytical leadership . For the best financial performers, design is a top management issue , and design performance is assessed with the same rigor these companies use to approach revenue and cost. The companies with the top financial returns have combined design and business leadership through bold, design-centric visions. These include a commitment to maintain a baseline level of customer understanding among all executives. The CEO of one of the world’s largest banks, for example, spends one day a month with the bank’s clients and encourages all members of the company’s C-suite to do the same.
• Cross-functional talent . Top-performing companies make user-centric design everyone’s responsibility, not a siloed function. Companies whose designers are embedded within cross-functional teams have better overall business performance . Further, the alignment of design metrics with functional business metrics (such as financial performance, user adoption rates, and satisfaction results) is also correlated to better business performance.
• Design with people, not for people . Design flourishes best, according to our research, in environments that encourage learning, testing, and iterating with users . These practices increase the odds of creating breakthrough products and services, while at the same time reducing the risk of costly missteps.
• User experience (UX) . Top-quartile companies embrace the full user experience  by taking a broad-based view of where design can make a difference. Design approaches like mapping customer journeys can lead to more inclusive and sustainable solutions.

What are some real-world examples of how design thinking can improve efficiency and user experience?

Understanding the theory of design thinking is one thing. Seeing it work in practice is something else. Here are some examples of how elegant design created value for customers, a company, and shareholders:

• Stockholm’s international airport, Arlanda, used design thinking to address its air-traffic-control problem. The goal was to create a system that would make air traffic safer and more effective. By understanding the tasks and challenges of the air-traffic controllers, then collaboratively working on prototypes and iterating based on feedback, a working group was able to design a new departure-sequencing tool  that helped air-traffic controllers do their jobs better. The new system greatly reduced the amount of time planes spent between leaving the terminal and being in the air, which in turn helped reduce fuel consumption.
• When Tesla creates its electric vehicles , the company closely considers not only aesthetics but also the overall driving experience .
• The consumer electronics industry has a long history of dramatic evolutions lead by design thinking. Since Apple debuted the iPhone in 2007, for example, each new generation has seen additional features, new customers, and lower costs—all driven by design-led value creation .

Learn more about our Consumer Packaged Goods  and Sustainability  Practices.

For a more in-depth exploration of these topics, see McKinsey’s Agile Organizations collection. Learn more about our Design Practice —and check out design-thinking-related job opportunities if you’re interested in working at McKinsey.

Articles referenced:

• “ Skinny design: Smaller is better ,” April 26, 2022, Dave Fedewa , Daniel Swan , Warren Teichner , and Bill Wiseman
• “ Product sustainability: Back to the drawing board ,” February 7, 2022, Stephan Fuchs, Stephan Mohr , Malin Orebäck, and Jan Rys
• “ Emerging from COVID-19: Australians embrace their values ,” May 11, 2020, Lloyd Colling, Rod Farmer , Jenny Child, Dan Feldman, and Jean-Baptiste Coumau
• “ The business value of design ,” McKinsey Quarterly , October 25, 2018, Benedict Sheppard , Hugo Sarrazin, Garen Kouyoumjian, and Fabricio Dore
• “ More than a feeling: Ten design practices to deliver business value ,” December 8, 2017, Benedict Sheppard , John Edson, and Garen Kouyoumjian
• “ Creating value through sustainable design ,” July 25, 2017, Sara Andersson, David Crafoord, and Tomas Nauclér
• “ The expanding role of design in creating an end-to-end customer experience ,” June 6, 2017, Raffaele Breschi, Tjark Freundt , Malin Orebäck, and Kai Vollhardt
• “ Design for value and growth in a new world ,” April 13, 2017, Ankur Agrawal , Mark Dziersk, Dave Subburaj, and Kieran West
• “ The power of design thinking ,” March 1, 2016, Jennifer Kilian , Hugo Sarrazin, and Barr Seitz
• “ Building a design-driven culture ,” September 1, 2015, Jennifer Kilian , Hugo Sarrazin, and Hyo Yeon

Want to know more about design thinking?

Related articles.

Skinny design: Smaller is better

The business value of design

More than a feeling: Ten design practices to deliver business value

Design Thinking 101

July 31, 2016 2016-07-31

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In This Article:

Definition of design thinking, why — the advantage, flexibility — adapt to fit your needs, scalability — think bigger, history of design thinking.

Design thinking is an ideology supported by an accompanying process . A complete definition requires an understanding of both.

Definition: The design thinking ideology asserts that a hands-on, user-centric approach to problem solving can lead to innovation, and innovation can lead to differentiation and a competitive advantage. This hands-on, user-centric approach is defined by the design thinking process and comprises 6 distinct phases, as defined and illustrated below.

The design-thinking framework follows an overall flow of 1) understand, 2) explore, and 3) materialize. Within these larger buckets fall the 6 phases: empathize, define, ideate, prototype, test, and implement.

Conduct research in order to develop knowledge about what your users do, say, think, and feel .

Imagine your goal is to improve an onboarding experience for new users. In this phase, you talk to a range of actual users.  Directly observe what they do, how they think, and what they want, asking yourself things like ‘what motivates or discourages users?’ or ‘where do they experience frustration?’ The goal is to gather enough observations that you can truly begin to empathize with your users and their perspectives.

Combine all your research and observe where your users’ problems exist. While pinpointing your users’ needs , begin to highlight opportunities for innovation.

Consider the onboarding example again. In the define phase, use the data gathered in the empathize phase to glean insights. Organize all your observations and draw parallels across your users’ current experiences. Is there a common pain point across many different users? Identify unmet user needs.

Brainstorm a range of crazy, creative ideas that address the unmet user needs identified in the define phase. Give yourself and your team total freedom; no idea is too farfetched and quantity supersedes quality.

At this phase, bring your team members together and sketch out many different ideas. Then, have them share ideas with one another, mixing and remixing, building on others' ideas.

Build real, tactile representations for a subset of your ideas. The goal of this phase is to understand what components of your ideas work, and which do not. In this phase you begin to weigh the impact vs. feasibility of your ideas through feedback on your prototypes.

Make your ideas tactile. If it is a new landing page, draw out a wireframe and get feedback internally.  Change it based on feedback, then prototype it again in quick and dirty code. Then, share it with another group of people.

Return to your users for feedback. Ask yourself ‘Does this solution meet users’ needs?’ and ‘Has it improved how they feel, think, or do their tasks?’

Put your prototype in front of real customers and verify that it achieves your goals. Has the users’ perspective during onboarding improved? Does the new landing page increase time or money spent on your site? As you are executing your vision, continue to test along the way.

Put the vision into effect. Ensure that your solution is materialized and touches the lives of your end users.

This is the most important part of design thinking, but it is the one most often forgotten. As Don Norman preaches, “we need more design doing.” Design thinking does not free you from the actual design doing. It’s not magic.

“There’s no such thing as a creative type. As if creativity is a verb, a very time-consuming verb. It’s about taking an idea in your head, and transforming that idea into something real. And that’s always going to be a long and difficult process. If you’re doing it right, it’s going to feel like work.”  - Milton Glaser

As impactful as design thinking can be for an organization, it only leads to true innovation if the vision is executed. The success of design thinking lies in its ability to transform an aspect of the end user’s life. This sixth step — implement — is crucial.

Why should we introduce a new way to think about product development? There are numerous reasons to engage in design thinking, enough to merit a standalone article, but in summary, design thinking achieves all these advantages at the same time.

Design thinking:

• Is a user-centered process that starts with user data, creates design artifacts that address real and not imaginary user needs, and then tests those artifacts with real users
• Leverages collective expertise and establishes a shared language, as well as buy-in amongst your team
• Encourages innovation by exploring multiple avenues for the same problem

Jakob Nielsen says “ a wonderful interface solving the wrong problem will fail ." Design thinking unfetters creative energies and focuses them on the right problem. 

The above process will feel abstruse at first. Don’t think of it as if it were a prescribed step-by-step recipe for success. Instead, use it as scaffolding to support you when and where you need it. Be a master chef, not a line cook: take the recipe as a framework, then tweak as needed.

Each phase is meant to be iterative and cyclical as opposed to a strictly linear process, as depicted below. It is common to return to the two understanding phases, empathize and define, after an initial prototype is built and tested. This is because it is not until wireframes are prototyped and your ideas come to life that you are able to get a true representation of your design. For the first time, you can accurately assess if your solution really works. At this point, looping back to your user research is immensely helpful. What else do you need to know about the user in order to make decisions or to prioritize development order? What new use cases have arisen from the prototype that you didn’t previously research?

You can also repeat phases. It’s often necessary to do an exercise within a phase multiple times in order to arrive at the outcome needed to move forward. For example, in the define phase, different team members will have different backgrounds and expertise, and thus different approaches to problem identification. It’s common to spend an extended amount of time in the define phase, aligning a team to the same focus. Repetition is necessary if there are obstacles in establishing buy-in. The outcome of each phase should be sound enough to serve as a guiding principle throughout the rest of the process and to ensure that you never stray too far from your focus.

The packaged and accessible nature of design thinking makes it scalable. Organizations previously unable to shift their way of thinking now have a guide that can be comprehended regardless of expertise, mitigating the range of design talent while increasing the probability of success. This doesn’t just apply to traditional “designery” topics such as product design, but to a variety of societal, environmental, and economical issues. Design thinking is simple enough to be practiced at a range of scopes; even tough, undefined problems that might otherwise be overwhelming. While it can be applied over time to improve small functions like search, it can also be applied to design disruptive and transformative solutions, such as restructuring the career ladder for teachers in order to retain more talent. 

It is a common misconception that design thinking is new. Design has been practiced for ages : monuments, bridges, automobiles, subway systems are all end-products of design processes. Throughout history, good designers have applied a human-centric creative process to build meaningful and effective solutions.

In the early 1900's husband and wife designers Charles and Ray Eames practiced “learning by doing,” exploring a range of needs and constraints before designing their Eames chairs, which continue to be in production even now, seventy years later. 1960's dressmaker Jean Muir was well known for her “common sense” approach to clothing design, placing as much emphasis on how her clothes felt to wear as they looked to others. These designers were innovators of their time. Their approaches can be viewed as early examples of design thinking — as they each developed a deep understanding of their users’ lives and unmet needs. Milton Glaser, the designer behind the famous I ♥ NY logo, describes this notion well: “We’re always looking, but we never really see…it’s the act of attention that allows you to really grasp something, to become fully conscious of it.”

Despite these (and other) early examples of human-centric products, design has historically been an afterthought in the business world, applied only to touch up a product’s aesthetics. This topical design application has resulted in corporations creating solutions which fail to meet their customers’ real needs. Consequently, some of these companies moved their designers from the end of the product-development process, where their contribution is limited, to the beginning. Their human-centric design approach proved to be a differentiator: those companies that used it have reaped the financial benefits of creating products shaped by human needs.

In order for this approach to be adopted across large organizations, it needed to be standardized. Cue design thinking, a formalized framework of applying the creative design process to traditional business problems.

The specific term "design thinking" was coined in the 1990's by David Kelley and Tim Brown of IDEO, with Roger Martin, and encapsulated methods and ideas that have been brewing for years into a single unified concept.

We live in an era of experiences , be they services or products, and we’ve come to have high expectations for these experiences. They are becoming more complex in nature as information and technology continues to evolve. With each evolution comes a new set of unmet needs. While design thinking is simply an approach to problem solving, it increases the probability of success and breakthrough innovation.

Learn more about design thinking in the full-day course Generating Big Ideas with Design Thinking .

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A complete guide to the design thinking process

Start collaborating with Mural today

Learn the five stages of the design thinking process, get practical tips to apply them, and get templates to seamlessly run design thinking exercises.

How many projects have you worked on that stalled because your team couldn’t align on the best path forward? How many more got shelved because they didn’t meet user needs or expectations? And how many got delayed in rounds and rounds of never-ending feedback? 

Thankfully, you don’t have to keep repeating those experiences month after month. The (not so) secret weapon: design thinking .

Design thinking gives teams a new way to approach their projects and overcome some of those well-known challenges. It can help teams understand their users' needs and challenges, then apply those learnings to solve problems in a creative, innovative way. Understanding design thinking can transform your team’s problem-solving approach — and how you work together.

What is design thinking?

Design thinking is an iterative process where teams seek to understand user needs, challenge assumptions, define complex problems to solve, and develop innovative solutions to prototype and test. The goal of design thinking is to come up with user-focused solutions tailored to the particular problem at hand.

While often used in product design, service design, and customer experience, you can use design thinking in virtually any situation, industry, or organization to create user-centric solutions to specific problems.

Design thinking process 101: Definitions and approaches

The design thinking process puts customers’ and users’ needs at the center and aims to solve challenges from their perspective.

Design thinking typically follows five distinct stages:

Empathize stage

The first stage of design thinking lays the foundation for the rest of the process because it focuses on the needs of the real people using your product. At this stage, you want to get familiar with the people experiencing the problems you’re trying to solve, understanding their point of view, and learning about their user experience. You want to understand their challenges and what they need from your product or company to address them.

The goal of this stage is for your team to develop a user-centered vision of the core problem you need to solve. The idea is to challenge any assumptions or biases teams have, instead using their customer perspective as a guiding source. This is important because it aligns the team on what needs to be considered during the rest of the design thinking process. 

To help you get a solid understanding of the problems you’re solving, you can ask a lot of questions to build empathy with your users. These will invite people to share their experiences and observations to help your team better understand the problem. Then, you can move on to some specific exercises for the empathy stage of the process.

As you build up your understanding of your users, it's helpful to visualize their experience. A common way to do this is to assemble a customer journey map . This helps identify areas of friction and understand customer preferences.

Learn more: 7 types of questions to build empathy for design thinking

Ideate stage

Your priority here is to think outside the box and source as many ideas as possible from all areas of the business. Bring in people from different departments so you benefit from a wider range of experiences and perspectives during ideation sessions. Don’t worry about coming up with concrete solutions or how to implement each one — you’ll build on that later. The goal is to explore new and creative ideas rather than come up with an actual plan.

Key steps in the ideation phase:

• Define your problem : Creating a problem statement ensures that your team can focus on solving the right problem and staying aligned with your end-user or customer’s problem
• Start ideating : Choose a brainstorming technique to help organize team participation that fits your goal (More on that in the next section.)
• Prioritize your ideas : Once you have several ideas, prioritize them based on how well they take into account the customer’s needs‍ ‍
• Choose the best solution : Choose the best ideas to move forward to either the define stage or the prototype stage

Learn more: The ideation stage of design thinking: What you need to know

Your priority here is to generate as many ideas as possible, without judging or evaluating them. This step encourages designers to think creatively and push the boundaries of what's possible. We’ve put together a list of different brainstorming techniques to help your teams come up with creative new ideas. 

Put it into practice: How to facilitate a brainstorming session

Prototyping stage

At this stage, your team’s goal is to remove uncertainty around your proposed solutions. This is where you start thinking about them in more detail, including how you’ll bring them to life. Your prototypes should help the team understand if the design or solution will work as it’s intended to. 

Here, the focus is on speed and efficiency — you don’t want to invest a ton of time or resources into these solutions yet because you’re not sure they’re the best ones for the problem you’re trying to solve. You just need a functional, interactive prototype that can prove your concept. These are learning opportunities to help you spot any issues or opportunities before you take it any further.

Learn more: A guide to prototyping: the 4th stage of design thinking

Testing stage

The testing stage is normally one of the last stages of the design thinking process. After you’ve developed a concept or prototype, you need to test it in the real-world to understand its viability and usability. It’s where your product, design, or development teams evaluate the creative solutions they’ve come up with, to see how real users interact with them. 

Testing your concepts and observing how people interact with them helps you understand whether or not the prototype solves real problems and meets their needs, before you invest in it fully.

However, design thinking is an iterative process: You may go through the ideation, prototyping, and testing phases multiple times to improve and refine your solutions as you learn more from your users.

Read the guide: Testing: A guide to the 5th stage of design thinking

The relationship between human-centered design and design thinking

These two terms are often used together, because they complement one another. However, they’re two different things, so understanding their differences is important. 

Simply put, design thinking is a working process, while human-centered design is a mindset or approach.

The first step in finding success with design thinking is to foster a culture of human-centered design within your team. This is because design thinking focuses so heavily on the users and customers — the people using your product or service.

To inspire your team, we’ve put together four human-centered design examples — and explain why they work so well.

Benefits of design thinking

For organizations who’ve never run a design thinking workshop before, it can feel like a big change in how you approach the design process. But it can offer many benefits for your business.

Foster a true design culture within your organization

Design thinking is an iterative process — it’s not something you do once and call it done. The more you do it, the more you’ll see a design-focused culture emerge within your organization, which is much more effective than going to one-off creative retreats or setting up expensive innovation centers that no one ever uses.

This mindset and cultural shift can help scale design thinking within the business. But it’s important to know how to avoid  some of the pitfalls companies can face when trying to create a design culture internally.

Learn more: How to use the LUMA System of Innovation for everyday design thinking

Encourage collaboration across departments

Design thinking isn’t just for the designers on the team. The earlier stages of the process — Empathize, Define, and Ideate — are perfect for bringing in people from across the business. In fact, bringing in varied viewpoints and perspectives can help you come up with more creative or effective solutions.

You can use the design thinking process to get more people involved, and help everyone contribute ideas.

Improve understanding of user needs

So many companies say they’re “customer focused,” but lack a clear understanding of what really matters most to their customers in the context of their product or service. Design thinking puts the user front and center, with the Empathize stage dedicated to understanding and discovering user needs.

Learn more: How to identify user needs and pain points

Skills and behaviors needed for successful design thinking

To get the most out of a design thinking exercise, you’ll need a collaborative and creative mindset within your team. The team needs to be willing to explore new ideas, and laser-focused on customer or user needs. 

Here are some specific skills to help your design thinking process run smoothly.

Divergent and convergent thinking

Divergence and convergence is a human-centered design approach to problem-solving. It switches between expansive and focused thinking, giving you a process that balances understanding people’s problems and developing solutions. 

It focuses on understanding a user's needs, behaviors, and motivations, to help you develop empathy for their problems. Then, it encourages experimentation and iteration to help you effectively design solutions to meet those needs.

Collaborative working

Design thinking isn’t a solo activity. You’ll bring in people from different teams or business areas. To get the most out of the process, everyone needs to collaborate and communicate effectively. Teams that are good at collaborating drive the best outcomes, while also making it an enjoyable experience working together.

There are several core collaboration skills your team needs to succeed:

• Open-mindedness
• Communication
• Adaptability
• Organization
• Time management

Learn more about why these skills are so important and how you can improve them individually or as a team: 7 collaboration skills your team needs to succeed

Participatory or collaborative design

For many design teams and creative folks, the idea of designing something with other people can be enough to make them shudder. “Design by committee” is their idea of a nightmare. But the design thinking process isn’t about “making the logo 10% bigger” or “using a different shade of blue.” It’s user- and solution-focused.

You’ll get the best outcomes if you bring insights, perspectives, and expertise from multiple stakeholders. That includes at the Prototype and Test stages, as everyone will have ideas to contribute to help you bring solutions to life.

Learn more: What is co-design? A primer on participatory design

Common challenges in design thinking

If your team hasn’t mastered or fully committed to each one of the design thinking steps, you may encounter problems that make it harder to reap the benefits of design thinking.

Here are 4 common challenges that teams face when implementing design thinking practices.

• A company culture that doesn't foster collaboration
• An inability to adjust to non-linear processes
• A lack of in-depth user research
• Getting too invested in a single idea

Learn how to address these in Mural's guide on design thinking challenges .

Design thinking tools and templates to help you get started

Using mural for design thinking.

There are lots of tools you can use to run design thinking workshops — including Mural. We help designers work as effectively as possible, so they can get to better solutions quicker. We’ve incorporated some design thinking shortcuts and “hidden” features into our application, making it perfect for in-person or remote (or even asynchronous) collaborative sessions. These include:

• Use the C-key shortcut to quickly connect ideas with arrows
• Seamlessly import existing information from spreadsheets
• Duplicate elements you already created for faster visualization
• Fit your canvas to your screen and zoom in
• Get even more options using the right-click menu

And to help you get started, we’ve hand-picked some Mural templates relevant to each stage of the design process below.

Templates for the Empathy stage

The empathy map template helps you visualize the thoughts, feelings, and actions of your customersto help you develop a better understanding of the their experiences. The map is divided into four quadrants, where you record the following:

• Thoughts: the customer’s internal dialogue and beliefs
• Feelings: the customer’s emotional responses
• Actions: the customer’s actions and behaviors
• Observations: what the customer is seeing and hearing.

Try Mural’s empathy map template

Templates for the Define stage

This exercise helps you understand a situation or problem by identifying what’s working, what’s not, and areas for improvement. You start by listing out the problem, then identifying the positive aspects (the rose), negatives (thorn), and possible solutions for improvement (the buds).

You can use this template to run the exercise individually or in groups. It gives you a way to gather new ideas and perspectives on the problem you’re solving in real-time.

Try Mural’s Rose, thorn, bud template

Templates for the Ideate stage

The round robin brainstorming exercise is a collaborative session where every person contributes multiple ideas. This is a great way to come up with lots of different ideas and solutions in the ideation stage of design thinking, where you’re focusing on quantity and creativity. 

Bringing in ideas from every team member encourages people to share their unique perspectives, and can also help you avoid groupthink. 

Try Mural’s Round robin template

Templates for the Prototype stage

This template helps you map out how an idea will work in practice, as a functional system. Schematic diagramming is very flexible, so it can be used in many types of projects to make sure your idea is  structurally sound. It can help you map out workflows and identify any decisions you need to make to bring your idea to life.

Try Mural’s Schematic diagramming template

Templates for the Test stage

In think aloud testing, users test out a product or prototype and talk through the relevant tasks as they complete them. You can use this template to record the feedback, insights, and experiences of your testers, and identify the success and failure points in your proposed solution.

Try Mural’s Think aloud testing template

Design thinking examples: What it looks like in practice

Design thinking is a very flexible approach that works for companies of any size, from large enterprises to small startups. 

Here are some examples of how companies use design thinking, for many types of creative projects.

IBM uses design thinking to design at scale

IBM was traditionally an engineering-led organization, but now it's shifting its focus onto design, working to spread a design culture throughout the business. One of the main ways of doing that is by launching IBM Design Camps.

These camps are comprehensive educational programs that help people understand the concept of design thinking and how it specifically works at IBM. 

Learn more about how IBM runs design thinking workshops with remote or distributed teams .

Somersault Innovation uses design thinking to transform its sales process

Somersault Innovation has used design thinking methods to help their sales team co-create solutions with their customers. It’s helped sellers become more customer-centric. 

Now, their sellers can create mutual success plans with their prospects, making it easier for them to find a path forward together.

Mural uses design thinking to drive growth

At Mural, our marketing team is constantly following new trends, evaluating metrics, and working to deliver the best experiences for our customers. Design thinking helps us adopt a customer-centric approach by ensuring that we're focused on the right problems. This helps us have the biggest impact on the company’s long-term growth while creating the most value for our users.

David J. Bland planned a book using the design thinking methodology

It’s not just visual creative projects that can benefit from the design thinking process. Founder, speaker, and author David J. Bland used the methodology to plan out his book and collaborate with other team members in the process. In addition to helping him refine and adjust the structure, Bland also used it to gather feedback from early readers and target audiences, which helped get the final product just right.

Support design thinking with tools that facilitate creative collaboration

While we’ve covered some of the skills and behaviors you need to successfully run design thinking exercises, having the right tools can help a lot, too. A collaborative platform helps teams communicate, share ideas, and turn those ideas into solutions together.

Mural helps teams visualize their ideas in a collaboration platform that unlocks teamwork . This helps everyone stay on the same page, while giving them the ability to add their own ideas freely and easily. Mural facilitates effective collaboration both in person and remotely, making it ideal for design thinking workshops for co-located and distributed teams. Plus, it has tons of ready-to-use templates (like the ones we listed above) to help you get started.

Ready to give it a try? Start your Free Forever account today, and run your next design thinking workshop in Mural.

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What is design thinking?

Some of the most innovative brands—including Airbnb, Uber Eats, and GE Healthcare—use design thinking to solve complex problems for their target audiences. This iterative, user-centric approach encourages creativity and diverse viewpoints to meet user needs with delightful new products and services.

Read on to learn more about:

• What design thinking is and how it supports good design
• 4 rules to help guide design thinkers
• 5 phases of design thinking and how Figma can help

The design thinking process uses ideation and problem-solving to generate innovative solutions that resonate with users. Modern companies use design thinking approaches to understand users better, so they can develop intuitive user experiences and improve product functionality.

Why is design thinking important?

Companies of all sizes rely on design thinking to:

• Increase customer satisfaction. User research is the foundation of the design thinking process. Reframing problems from the user point of view helps teams produce informed, human-centered designs.
• Boost innovation. Design thinking raises key questions to uncover users’ unmet needs. It challenges assumptions and tests ideas to deliver captivating, creative solutions.
• Improve collaboration. The design thinking process helps keep everyone aligned. Design teams, engineers, business strategists, and other key stakeholders can work better together within a structured framework.

The rise of design thinking

Some design historians claim the term design thinking dates from the 1930s —but this creative, problem-solving methodology only gained widespread traction about 15 years ago. That’s when Tim Brown, chair of design consultancy IDEO, wrote about design thinking for the Harvard Business Review . Brown's book Change by Design became a bestseller, igniting the human-centered design movement.

4 design thinking rules

Stanford University's Hasso Plattner Institute of Design (better known as the d.school ) established four design thinking principles to guide design thinkers exploring solutions. Here's a quick summary:

• The human rule. Design thinkers should always focus on end users, creating products that address their wants and needs.
• The ambiguity rule. Uncertainty goes hand in hand with out-of-the-box thinking. Accept ambiguity and boldly explore new ideas anyway.
• The re-design rule. Despite an ever-changing technology landscape, core human needs remain constant. This allows teams to learn from and apply past designs to their latest work.
• The tangibility rule. Use prototyping to help bring concepts to life. Prototypes help design thinkers communicate and test ideas in the real world.

5 phases of the design thinking process

Design thinking is a non-linear, iterative process that doesn’t always follow a step-by-step order. Teams can run phases in parallel, or repeat any of the following stages as needed:

Empathize with your users.

Conduct in-depth user research to understand your target audience’s thoughts, feelings, beliefs, and actions. FigJam’s research tools and templates will get you started.

Define your users’ problems.

Use insights pulled from user research to identify user needs and challenges. Then develop a clear problem statement .

Ideate potential solutions.

Brainstorm ways to tackle problems facing your users. Invite key stakeholders to explore innovative ideas.

Prototype and test concepts with users.

Get hands-on, and start building prototypes of your most promising concepts. User testing can provide valuable feedback to help you validate and refine your prototypes.

Implement your design.

Turn your most promising prototype into a real product. Track and analyze key performance indicators (KPIs) to guide future product development or improvements.

Pro tips for design thinkers

• Keep an open mind when brainstorming ideas. A judgment-free environment keeps the creative process constructive and dynamic.
• Test early and often with simple prototypes. Validate them with your users right from the start to streamline workflows and reduce product development risk.
• Put your users first throughout the design process to build useful, usable products and services.

Jumpstart design thinking with Figma

Kick off the design thinking process with user research, using FigJam’s research plan template to hammer out research goals. To draw insights from your research, try FigJam’s problem statement example .

Ready to get creative? Brainstorm possible solutions using FigJam’s online collaborative whiteboard .

Once you've identified a promising concept, prototyping in Figma helps you to:

• Bring your ideas to life and share them with stakeholders for input and approval.
• Create interactive, polished prototypes for user testing—no code required.
• Refine your designs and prototypes quickly and easily on a single platform.

To dig deeper into design thinking, check out the library of design thinking resources shared by the Figma community.

Ready to engage your users with design thinking?

Keep reading

What is UI design

What is UI design today, and what role does it play in the design thinking process?

What is visual hierarchy

If everything looks the same, then you see nothing. Visual hierarchy can change that.

Read on to find out what it takes to design engaging UI, and create a memorable UX.

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Inside Design

What is design thinking, and how do we apply it?

Emily stevens,   •   jan 30, 2020.

T he famous inventor, engineer, businessman, and holder of no fewer than 186 patents Charles Kettering once said, “If you have always done it that way, it is probably wrong.”

If you’re a designer, an entrepreneur, or any kind of employee, you are no stranger to the constant pressure to innovate. It’s the secret sauce, after all; the key to progress and success. Our capacity for innovation—the ability to conceive ideas which are at once actionable and effective—is what gives us the upper hand in competitive industries.

The Apples, Airbnbs, and Ubers of this world were all borne of innovation. Now, the challenge that all of these companies—and your company too, no doubt—face is to continue that innovation in order to maintain or further advance their position in their respective markets. Innovation can’t be a one-time affair; it needs to be part of the company’s DNA.

You also know that innovation doesn’t always come that easily.

That’s where design thinking comes in.

Design thinking has long been considered the holy grail of innovation—and the remedy to stagnation. It has been credited with remarkable feats, like transforming Airbnb from a failing startup to a billion-dollar business . It’s a concept that’s becoming increasingly hard to ignore, and yet, despite such high-profile success stories, it’s a concept that continues to be shrouded in mystery.

Enough of the vague definitions and abstract descriptions. In this post, we’ll show you exactly what design thinking is and what it looks like in action. Let’s get into:

What is design thinking?

• What are the key principles of design thinking?
• What is the design thinking methodology and how can I use it?
• How can I apply the design thinking framework?

Ready to leverage the power of design thinking? Let’s go.

Design thinking originally came about as a way of teaching engineers how to approach problems creatively, like designers do. One of the first people to write about design thinking was John E. Arnold, professor of mechanical engineering at Stanford University. In 1959, he wrote “ Creative Engineering ,” the text that established the four areas of design thinking. From there, design thinking began to evolve as a “way of thinking” in the fields of science and design engineering—as can be seen in Herbert A. Simon’s book “ The Sciences of the Artificial ” and in Robert McKim’s “ Experiences in Visual Thinking ”.

With the rise of human-centered design in the 80s and the formation of design consultancy IDEO in the 90s, design thinking became increasingly popular. By the start of the 21st century, design thinking was making its way into the world of business. In 2005, Stanford University’s d.school began teaching design thinking as an approach to technical and social innovation.

Indeed, many of the methods and techniques used in design thinking have been borrowed from the designer’s toolkit.

So what exactly is design thinking?

Design thinking is both an ideology and a process that seeks to solve complex problems in a user-centric way. It focuses on achieving practical results and solutions that are:

• Technically feasible : They can be developed into functional products or processes;
• Economically viable : The business can afford to implement them;
• Desirable for the user : They meet a real human need.

The ideology behind design thinking states that, in order to come up with innovative solutions, one must adopt a designer’s mindset and approach the problem from the user’s perspective. At the same time, design thinking is all about getting hands-on; the aim is to turn your ideas into tangible, testable products or processes as quickly as possible.

The design thinking process outlines a series of steps that bring this ideology to life—starting with building empathy for the user, right through to coming up with ideas and turning them into prototypes.

At this point, you’re probably thinking that this sounds suspiciously like UX. So what makes design thinking so special?

Design thinking helps us tackle “wicked” problems

The uniqueness of design thinking lies in the kinds of problems it addresses. When it comes to the problems to be solved with design thinking, we’re not just talking about ordinary, common problems that have tried-and-tested solutions. We’re talking about highly complex, “wicked” problems: the kind that refuse to be solved using standard methods and approaches.

Not only are these problems difficult to define, but any attempt to solve them is likely to give way to even more problems. Wicked problems are everywhere, ranging from global issues such as climate change and poverty, to challenges that affect almost all businesses such as change management, achieving sustainable growth, or maintaining your competitive edge.

Design thinking is an actionable approach which can be used to tackle the world’s wickedest of problems. It fosters user-centricity, creativity, innovation, and out-of-the-box thinking.

With that in mind, let’s explore the principles and pillars of design thinking in more detail.

What are the principles of design thinking?

There are certain principles that are pivotal to design thinking. These are reflected in the design thinking methodology, which we’ll explore in detail a little later on. We’ve outlined five of design thinking’s most important principles below.

1. User-centricity and empathy

Design thinking is all about finding solutions that respond to human needs and user feedback. People, not technology, are the drivers of innovation, so an essential part of the process involves stepping into the user’s shoes and building genuine empathy for your target audience.

2. Collaboration

The aim of design thinking is to pool a diverse variety of perspectives and ideas; this is what leads to innovation! Design thinking encourages collaboration between heterogeneous, multidisciplinary teams which may not typically work together.

3. Ideation

Design thinking is a solution-based framework, so the focus is on coming up with as many ideas and potential solutions as possible. Ideation is both a core design thinking principle and a step in the design thinking process. The ideation step is a designated judgment-free zone where participants are encouraged to focus on the quantity of ideas, rather than the quality.

4. Experimentation and iteration

It’s not just about coming up with ideas; it’s about turning them into prototypes, testing them, and making changes based on user feedback. Design thinking is an iterative approach, so be prepared to repeat certain steps in the process as you uncover flaws and shortcomings in the early versions of your proposed solution.

5. A bias towards action

Design thinking is an extremely hands-on approach to problem-solving favoring action over discussion. Instead of hypothesizing about what your users want, design thinking encourages you to get out there and engage with them face-to-face. Rather than talking about potential solutions, you’ll turn them into tangible prototypes and test them in real-world contexts.

The design thinking methodology in action

So far, we’ve covered quite a bit of theory. We know what design thinking is and the key principles that shape it. Now let’s consider what the design thinking methodology looks like in action, starting with the five key steps in the design thinking process .

The design thinking framework: five key steps

The design thinking framework can be divided into three distinct phases: immersion, ideation, and implementation. This framework can be further broken down into five actionable steps which make up the design thinking process:

Although these steps appear to be sequential, it’s important to point out that design thinking doesn’t follow a strictly linear process. At each stage in the process, you’re likely to make new discoveries that require you to go back and repeat a previous step.

Step 1. Empathize

• What? During the empathize phase, you’ll engage with and observe your target audience.
• Why? The aim of this step is to paint a clear picture of who your end users are, what challenges they face, and what needs and expectations must be met.
• How? In order to build user empathy, you’ll conduct surveys, interviews, and observation sessions.
• For example: You want to address the issue of employee retention, so you ask each employee to complete an anonymous survey. You then hold user interviews with as many employees as possible to find out how they feel about retention within the company.

Step 2. Define

• What? Based on what you’ve learned in the empathize phase, the next step is to define a clear problem statement.
• Why? Your problem statement sets out the specific challenge you will address. It will guide the entire design process from here on out, giving you a fixed goal to focus on and helping to keep the user in mind at all times.
• How? When framing your problem statement, you’ll focus on the user’s needs rather than those of the business. A good problem statement is human-centered, broad enough for creativity, yet specific enough to provide guidance and direction.
• For example: “My employees need to be able to maintain a healthy lifestyle while working in the office” is much more user-centric than “I need to keep my employees healthy and happy in order to boost retention.”

Step 3. Ideate

• What? With a clear problem statement in mind, you’ll now aim to come up with as many ideas and potential solutions as possible.
• Why? The ideation phase gets you thinking outside the box and exploring new angles. By focusing on quantity of ideas rather than quality, you’re more likely to free your mind and stumble upon innovation!
• How? During dedicated ideation sessions, you’ll use a range of different ideation techniques such as bodystorming, reverse thinking, and worst possible idea.
• For example: Based on what you’ve learned in the empathize phase, you hold several ideation sessions with a variety of different stakeholders. With your problem statement to hand, you come up with as many ideas as possible for how you might make your employees happier and thus more likely to stay with the company.

Step 4. Prototype

• What? Having narrowed your ideas down to a select few, you’ll now turn them into prototypes—or “scaled-down” versions of the product or concept you want to test.
• Why? The prototyping stagegives you something tangible that can be tested on real users. This is crucial in maintaining a user-centric approach.
• How? Depending on what you’re testing, prototypes can take various forms—from basic paper models to interactive, digital prototypes. When creating your prototypes, have a clear goal in mind; know exactly what you want your prototype to represent and therefore test.
• For example: During the ideation phase, one idea that came up was to offer free yoga classes. To prototype this idea, you set up a dedicated yoga room in the office, complete with mats, water bottles, and hand towels.

Step 5. Test

What? The fifth step in the design thinking process will see you testing your prototypes on real or representative users.

• Why? The testing phase enables you to see where your prototype works well and where it needs improving. Based on user feedback, you can make changes and improvements before you spend time and money developing and/or implementing your solution.
• How? You’ll run user testing sessions where you observe your target users as they interact with your prototype. You may also gather verbal feedback. With everything you learn from the testing phase, you’ll make changes to your design or come up with a completely new idea altogether!
• For example: You decide to test the yoga idea for two months to see how employees respond. You find that people enjoy the yoga classes, but are put off by the fact that they are in the middle of the day and there is nowhere to shower. Based on this feedback, you decide to move the yoga classes to the evening.

Applying the design thinking framework to your own work

Design thinking can also start small—you don’t need to become a UX designer in order to apply design thinking to your own work! You might choose to focus on just one aspect of the design thinking process, such as getting to know your customers and making a conscious effort to be more empathy-driven on a day to day basis. If you’re struggling to gather positive customer reviews, for example, you might choose to conduct user interviews in order to find out what your customers are missing.

Perhaps you want to focus on the collaborative nature of design thinking, in which case you might hold ideation sessions with representatives from a diverse variety of teams. If you notice that marketing and design constantly struggle to see eye-to-eye, for example, a few design thinking-style brainstorming sessions might help to get everybody on the same page.

Another increasingly popular method of applying design thinking is through design thinking workshops . If you have a specific problem you want to solve, such as coming up with a new product idea or figuring out how to boost employee retention, a design thinking workshop will take you through the entire design thinking process in a short space of time. Design thinking workshops are also used to teach non-design professionals how to innovate and find creative solutions—an essential skill in any area of business.

Examples of design thinking success

Product and service design are the most obvious contexts to benefit from design thinking. However, the design thinking framework can be used to tackle all kinds of challenges beyond the realm of design!

Design thinking is increasingly being integrated into business as a way to foster innovation and teamwork. IBM developed their Enterprise Design Thinking framework in order to “help multidisciplinary teams align around the real needs of their users,” claiming that businesses who use the framework are twice as quick to get their products to market, 75% more efficient in terms of teamwork, and enjoy a 300% return on investment.

Insurance firm MassMutual used a design thinking approach to tackle the challenge of getting young adults to purchase life insurance. In partnership with IDEO , they conducted extensive user research over the course of two years. Based on what they learned, they then embarked on a further two years of prototyping and testing. The end result was Society of Grownups , a suite of digital tools that help to educate young people to make smart financial choices.

Here at CareerFoundry , we not only teach design thinking as part of our UX Design Course , but we also incorporate it in the way we work and make decisions. The majority of our users are adult learners who are juggling online study with full-time work, and so one of the biggest challenges they face is time management. Based on the design thinking framework, we conducted extensive user research, including an in-house time management workshop with real students. With these new insights, we redesigned certain aspects of our e-learning dashboard—such as how project milestones are displayed, for example. In true design thinking fashion, we’ll continue to gather user feedback in order to iterate on and improve our current solution.

Now you know what design thinking is and how it can be applied to almost any context. If you’d like to learn more about design thinking, this comprehensive beginner’s guide explains how design thinking, lean, and agile work together, and sheds some light on the relationship between design thinking and UX design. If you’re keen to start incorporating design thinking into your work right away, check out these nine design thinking tools to try with your team .

Want to learn more about design thinking?

• 9 design thinking tools to try with your team
• 4 ways to improve your design thinking process
• Why the world needs more design thinking

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What is design thinking?

Discover what is design thinking and why it’s important, including the five stages of design thinking. Deep dive into a few case studies and learn how to apply design thinking.

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Design thinking is a mindset that breeds innovation. While it’s based on the design process, anyone in any profession can use it when they’re trying to come up with creative solutions to a problem. 

In this guide, we’ll walk you through what design thinking is and why it’s important, including the five stages of design thinking. Then we’ll present a couple of design thinking case studies and wrap up with a primer on how to apply design thinking. And don’t worry, this guide is broken down into easily digestible chunks, as follows:

Let’s get started!

What is design thinking? A definition

Design thinking is an approach used for problem-solving. Both practical and creative, it’s anchored by human-centred design.

Design thinking is extremely user-centric in that it focuses on your users before it focuses on things like technology or business metrics. 

Design thinking is also solution-based, looking for effective solutions to problems, not problem-based, which looks at the problem itself and tends to focus on limitations. 

Design thinking is all about getting hands-on with solutions. The aim is to quickly turn your ideas into testable products so you can see what works and what doesn’t.

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Why is design thinking important? 

Design thinking is important because it challenges assumptions and fosters innovation. While many ways of thinking rely on the habits and experiences we’ve formed, they can limit us when it comes to thinking of design solutions. Design thinking, however, encourages us to explore new ideas. 

It’s an actionable technique that allows us to tackle “wicked problems,” or problems that are ill-defined. For example, achieving sustainable growth or maintaining your competitive edge in business count as wicked problems, and on a broader scale, poverty and climate change are wicked problems too. Design thinking uses empathy and human-centred thinking to tackle these kinds of problems.

Who uses design thinking?

The short answer? Everyone! Design thinking can help you in whatever your role or industry. People in business, government, entertainment, health care, and every other industry can benefit from using design thinking to come up with innovative solutions. 

The most important thing design thinking does is help people focus on their customers or end users. Instead of focusing on problems to fix, design thinking keeps things user-centric, which boosts customer engagement. 

What are the 5 stages of design thinking?

According to the Hasso Plattner Institute of Design at Stanford University (known as d-school), the five stages of design thinking are: 

Although these stages appear to be linear, following one after the other, design thinking isn’t a linear process. Stages are often run in parallel or out of order, or repeated when necessary.

Phase 1: Empathise 

Your goal here is to research your users’ needs to gain an empathic understanding of the problems they face. You’ll get to know your users and their wants and needs so you can make sure your solutions put them front and centre. This means setting aside your own assumptions and getting to know your users on a psychological and emotional level. You’ll observe, engage, watch and listen. 

Phase 2: Define

Here you state your users’ needs by compiling the information you gathered during the Empathise phase and then analysing it until you can define the core problem your team has identified. 

You do this by asking questions like: what patterns do you see in the data? What user issues need to be resolved? The conclusion of this phase comes when you’ve figured out a clear problem statement that is defined by the users’ needs. For example, “Bank customers in Glasgow need…”

You can learn more about how to write a problem statement in this guide.

Phase 3: Ideate

In this phase, you’ll generate ideas and solutions. You and your team will hold ideation sessions where you can come up with as many ideas as possible. No idea is too silly for this stage. The important thing is getting all ideas out on the table. There are a variety of techniques you can use, like brainstorming and mind mapping, to come up with solutions. This phase ends when you’ve managed to narrow down your ideas to just a few of the best ones.

Phase 4: Prototype

Your goal in this phase is to find the best solution to the problem by prototyping —that is, producing scaled down versions of the product or its features found in the previous phase. You’ll put each solution to the test by improving, redesigning, accepting, or rejecting it.

Phase 5: Test

Here you’ll try out the solutions you arrived at in the previous phases by user testing them. However, while this is the final stage of design thinking in theory, it’s rarely the final stage in reality. Design thinking often includes going back to previous phases to find other solutions or to further iterate or refine your existing solution.

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Design thinking examples and case studies

Now that you understand the theory and process of design thinking, let’s look at some examples in action where design thinking had a real-world impact.

Case Study 1: American Family Insurance’s Moonrise App

American Family Insurance, a company that offers life, business, auto, and home insurance, came to design company IDEO with the goal of innovating in a way that would help working families. 

Stages 1 & 2: Empathise and Define

While American Family thought their customers might benefit from budgeting tools, IDEO found from their research in the Empathise phase that, actually, people needed a way to build up their savings against unforeseen needs.

They noticed a lot of people had meticulously planned budgets, which made budgeting tools a moot point. But they were living just within their means and an extra expense, like a doctor’s visit or kid’s basketball uniform, could throw their budget off. These people didn’t want to take on debt though, they wanted extra work so they could have a cushion.

Stages 3 & 4: Ideate and Prototype

IDEO took that idea and ran with it, creating Moonrise, an app that matches people looking for work with extra hours and income. Today’s businesses depend on on-demand work but the temp agencies they work with tend to want permanent placements. Moonrise does things differently. It enables companies to find people who are already employed elsewhere for short-term work through a simple text message interface. The employers can list shifts on the platform and workers are paid as soon as they finish their shifts.

Stage 5: Test

To test the app, 11 Moonrisers, six employers, and a team of designers and programmers were assembled for a one week period to work out the kinks in the platform. 

Based on the test’s success, American Family Insurance now owns the startup Moonrise, which launched in Chicago in 2018 and has since expanded to additional states. In 2018, over 7,000 shifts have been fulfilled and over $500,000 has been earned by people on the app.

Case Study 2: GE Healthcare’s Scanning Tools

GE Healthcare has cutting-edge diagnostic imaging tools at its disposal, but for kids they’re an unpleasant experience. 

“The room itself is kind of dark and has those flickering fluorescent lights…. That machine that I had designed basically looked like a brick with a hole in it,” explained Doug Dietz , a designer who worked for GE. How could they make the experience better for kids?

The team at GE began by observing and gaining empathy for children at a daycare centre and talking to specialists who knew what paediatric patients went through. The team then recruited experts from a children’s museum and doctors from two hospitals. This gave them a lot of insight into what children went through when they had to sit for these procedures and what could be done to lessen the children’s stress.

Stages 3, 4 & 5: Ideate, Prototype, and Test

The first prototype of the new and improved “Adventure Series” scanner was invented. Through research and pilot programs, the redesign made imaging machines more child-friendly, making sure they have other things to focus on than the scary looks and sounds of the machine. For example, the Coral City Adventure in the emergency room gives children an underwater experience where they get into a yellow submarine and listen to the sound of harps while their procedure takes place.

Patient satisfaction scores increased to 90% and children no longer suffer such anxiety about their scans. The children hold still for their procedures more easily, making repeats of the scans unnecessary. There’s also less need for anesthesiologists, which improved the bottom line for those hospitals that used the scanning machines because more patients could get scanned each day.

How to apply design thinking 

If you want to apply design thinking in your own work, follow these steps and best practices:

• Improve design thinking skills. Use training to explain, improve, and practically implement the phases of design thinking. You can do this in several ways such as workshops, online courses, or case studies shared with your team.
• Identify the correct problem. Listen to users and ask them unbiased questions in order to understand their perspectives. Engage with everyone and stay open-minded, so you can identify the correct problem, not the problem you or your organisation thinks users are having. 
• Have more debriefs. Be open about what went right and what went wrong in your process. Openly discuss why things succeeded or failed and why. View failure as learning, not as an excuse to give up.
• Iterate and iterate some more. The goal of design thinking is finding the best answer possible—and that probably won’t come in the first round of iteration. You’ll need to test and iterate as much as possible with new ways to solve the problem.

Design thinking is so popular—and so effective—because it places the user’s needs front and centre. For more user-centric design tips, learn how to incorporate user feedback in product design , get to grips with user research ethics , and learn how to conduct effective user interviews .

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8 October 2024

What Is Design Thinking? A Comprehensive Beginner's Guide

Design thinking is both an ideology and a process, concerned with solving complex problems in a highly user-centric way.

In this guide, we’ll give you a detailed definition of design thinking, illustrate exactly what the process involves, and underline why it matters: What is the value of design thinking, and in what contexts is it particularly useful?

We’ll also analyze the relationship between user experience design and design thinking and discuss two real-world case studies that show design thinking in action.

All sound a little overwhelming? Don’t worry—we’ve broken the guide down into digestible chunks.

If you want to skip to a certain section, just click on the relevant menu heading and you’ll go straight there.

• What is Design Thinking?
• What is the Design Thinking process?
• What is the purpose of Design Thinking?
• How do Design Thinking, lean, and agile work together?
• What are the benefits of Design Thinking at work?
• Design Thinking methodology in action: Case studies
• What is the relationship between Design Thinking and UX Design?

Ready to explore the fascinating world of Design Thinking? Let’s go!

1. What is Design Thinking?

Design thinking is an approach used for practical and creative problem-solving. It is based heavily on the methods and processes that designers use (hence the name), but it has actually evolved from a range of different fields—including architecture, engineering and business. Design thinking can also be applied to any field; it doesn’t necessarily have to be design-specific.

For an audio-visual introduction, watch this video from design expert and CareerFoundry mentor, Camren Browne:

It’s important to note that design thinking is different from user-centered design . Learn more about this other approach to design here: Design Thinking vs. User-Centered Design .

Design thinking is extremely user-centric. It focuses on humans first and foremost , seeking to understand people’s needs and come up with effective solutions to meet those needs. It is what we call a solution-based approach to problem-solving.

What does this actually mean? Let’s take a look.

What’s the difference between Solution-Based and Problem-Based Thinking?

As the name suggests, solution-based thinking focuses on finding solutions; coming up with something constructive to effectively tackle a certain problem. This is the opposite of problem-based thinking, which tends to fixate on obstacles and limitations.

A good example of these two approaches in action is an empirical study carried out by Bryan Lawson, a Professor of Architecture at the University of Sheffield. Lawson wanted to investigate how a group of designers and a group of scientists would approach a particular problem.

He set each group the task of creating one-layer structures from a set of coloured blocks. The perimeter of the structure had to use either as many red bricks or as many blue bricks as possible (we can think of this is as the solution, the desired outcome), but there were unspecified rules regarding the placement and relationship of some of the blocks (the problem or limitation).

Lawson published his findings in his book How Designers Think , in which he observed that the scientists focused on identifying the problem (problem-based thinking) whilst the designers prioritized the need to find the right solution:

“The scientists adopted a technique of trying out a series of designs which used as many different blocks and combinations of blocks as possible as quickly as possible. Thus they tried to maximise the information available to them about the allowed combinations. If they could discover the rule governing which combinations of blocks were allowed, they could then search for an arrangement which would optimise the required colour around the layout.”

The designers, on the other hand:

“…selected their blocks in order to achieve the appropriately coloured perimeter. If this proved not to be an acceptable combination, then the next most favourably coloured block combination would be substituted and so on until an acceptable solution was discovered.”

Lawson’s findings go to the heart of what Design Thinking is all about: it’s an iterative process which favours ongoing experimentation until the right solution is found.

To learn more, check out this video introduction to design thinking , led by expert designer Camren Browne. For now, let’s take a look at the design thinking process and what that entails.

2. What is the Design Thinking process?

As already mentioned, the Design Thinking process is progressive and highly user-centric . Before looking at the process in more detail, let’s consider the four principles of Design Thinking as laid out by Christoph Meinel and Harry Leifer of the Hasso-Plattner-Institute of Design at Stanford University, California.

The Four Principles of Design Thinking

• The human rule: No matter what the context, all design activity is social in nature, and any social innovation will bring us back to the “human-centric point of view”.
• The ambiguity rule: Ambiguity is inevitable, and it cannot be removed or oversimplified. Experimenting at the limits of your knowledge and ability is crucial in being able to see things differently.
• The redesign rule: All design is redesign. While technology and social circumstances may change and evolve, basic human needs remain unchanged. We essentially only redesign the means of fulfilling these needs or reaching desired outcomes.
• The tangibility rule: Making ideas tangible in the form of prototypes enables designers to communicate them more effectively.

The Five Phases of Design Thinking

Based on these four principles, the Design Thinking process can be broken down into five steps or phases, as per the aforementioned Hasso-Plattner-Institute of Design at Stanford (otherwise known as d.school): Empathise, Define, Ideate, Prototype and Test. Let’s explore each of these in more detail.

Phase 1: Empathise

Empathy provides the critical starting point for Design Thinking . The first stage of the process is spent getting to know the user and understanding their wants, needs and objectives.

This means observing and engaging with people in order to understand them on a psychological and emotional level. During this phase, the designer seeks to set aside their assumptions and gather real insights about the user. Learn all about key empathy-building methods in our guide .

Phase 2: Define

The second stage in the Design Thinking process is dedicated to defining the problem. You’ll gather all of your findings from the empathise phase and start to make sense of them: what difficulties and barriers are your users coming up against? What patterns do you observe? What is the big user problem that your team needs to solve?

By the end of the define phase, you will have a clear problem statement . The key here is to frame the problem in a user-centered way; rather than saying “We need to…”, frame it in terms of your user: “Retirees in the Bay area need…”

Once you’ve formulated the problem into words, you can start to come up with solutions and ideas — which brings us onto stage three.

Phase 3: Ideate

With a solid understanding of your users and a clear problem statement in mind, it’s time to start working on potential solutions. The third phase in the Design Thinking process is where the creativity happens, and it’s crucial to point out that the ideation stage is a judgement-free zone!

Designers will hold ideation sessions in order to come up with as many new angles and ideas as possible. There are many different types of ideation technique that designers might use, from brainstorming and mindmapping to bodystorming (roleplay scenarios) and provocation—an extreme lateral-thinking technique that gets the designer to challenge established beliefs and explore new options and alternatives.

Towards the end of the ideation phase, you’ll narrow it down to a few ideas with which to move forward. You can learn about all the most important ideation techniques in this guide .

Phase 4: Prototype

The fourth step in the Design Thinking process is all about experimentation and turning ideas into tangible products. A prototype is basically a scaled-down version of the product which incorporates the potential solutions identified in the previous stages. This step is key in putting each solution to the test and highlighting any constraints and flaws.

Throughout the prototype stage, the proposed solutions may be accepted, improved, redesigned or rejected depending on how they fare in prototype form. You can read all about the prototyping stage of Design Thinking in our in-depth guide .

Phase 5: Test

After prototyping comes user testing, but it’s important to note that this is rarely the end of the Design Thinking process. In reality, the results of the testing phase will often lead you back to a previous step, providing the insights you need to redefine the original problem statement or to come up with new ideas you hadn’t thought of before. Learn all about user testing in this guide .

Is Design Thinking a linear process?

No! You might look at these clearly defined steps and see a very logical sequence with a set order. However, the Design Thinking process is not linear; it is flexible and fluid, looping back and around and in on itself! With each new discovery that a certain phase brings, you’ll need to rethink and redefine what you’ve done before—you’ll never be moving in a straight line!

3. What is the purpose of Design Thinking?

Now we know more about how Design Thinking works, let’s consider why it matters. There are many benefits of using a Design Thinking approach—be it in a business, educational, personal or social context.

First and foremost, Design Thinking fosters creativity and innovation. As human beings, we rely on the knowledge and experiences we have accumulated to inform our actions. We form patterns and habits that, while useful in certain situations, can limit our view of things when it comes to problem-solving.

Rather than repeating the same tried-and-tested methods, Design Thinking encourages us to remove our blinkers and consider alternative solutions. The entire process lends itself to challenging assumptions and exploring new pathways and ideas.

Design Thinking is often cited as the healthy middle ground of problem-solving—it is not steeped wholly in emotion and intuition, nor does it rely solely on analytics, science and rationale; it uses a mixture of both.

Another great benefit of Design Thinking is that it puts humans first. By focusing so heavily on empathy, it encourages businesses and organizations to consider the real people who use their products and services—meaning they are much more likely to hit the mark when it comes to creating meaningful user experiences. For the user, this means better, more useful products that actually improve our lives. For businesses, this means happy customers and a healthier bottom line.

What’s a “wicked problem” in Design Thinking?

Design Thinking is especially useful when it comes to solving “wicked problems”. The term “wicked problem” was coined by design theorist Horst Rittel in the 1970s to describe particularly tricky problems that are highly ambiguous in nature.

With wicked problems, there are many unknown factors; unlike “tame” problems, there is no definitive solution. In fact, solving one aspect of a wicked problem is likely to reveal or give rise to further challenges. Another key characteristic of wicked problems is that they have no stopping point; as the nature of the problem changes over time, so must the solution.

Solving wicked problems is therefore an ongoing process that requires Design Thinking! Some examples of wicked problems in our society today include things like poverty, hunger, and climate change.

If you’d like to learn more about them, and how Design Thinking can help tackle them, check out our full guide to wicked problems .

4. Design Thinking in the workplace: How do Design Thinking, lean, and agile work together?

Now we know what Design Thinking is, let’s consider how it fits into the overall product design process. You may be familiar with the terms “lean” and “agile”—and, as a UX designer, it’s important to understand how these three approaches work together.

What are lean and agile?

Based on the principles of lean manufacturing, lean UX focuses on streamlining the design process as much as possible—minimizing waste and maximizing value. Some core tenets of lean UX are:

• Cross-functional collaboration between designers, engineers, and product managers.
• Gathering feedback quickly and continuously, ensuring that you’re constantly learning and adapting as you go.
• Deciding as late as possible and delivering fast, with less focus on long-term deliverables.
• A strong emphasis on how the team operates as a whole.

Lean UX is a technique that works in conjunction with agile development methods. Agile is a software development process that works in iterative, incremental cycles known as sprints. Unlike traditional development methods, agile is flexible and adaptive. Based on the Agile Development Manifesto created in 2001, agile adheres to the following principles:

• Individuals and interactions over processes and tools.
• Working software over comprehensive documentation.
• Customer collaboration over contract negotiation.
• Responding to change over following a plan.

Combining Design Thinking with lean and agile

Design Thinking, lean, and agile are often seen as three separate approaches. Companies and teams will ask themselves whether to use lean or agile or Design Thinking—but actually, they can (and should!) be merged for optimal results.

Why? Because applying Design Thinking in a lean, agile environment helps to create a product development process that is not only user-centric, but also highly efficient from a business perspective. While it’s true that each approach has its own modus operandi, there is also significant overlap.

Combining principles from each can be crucial in keeping cross-functional teams on the same page—ensuring that designers, developers, product managers, and business stakeholders are all collaborating on one common vision.

So how do Design Thinking, lean, and agile work together?

As Jonny Schneider, Product Strategy and Design Principal at ThoughtWorks , explains: “Design Thinking is how we explore and solve problems; Lean is our framework for testing our beliefs and learning our way to the right outcomes; Agile is how we adapt to changing conditions with software.”

That’s all well and good, but what does it look like in practice?

As we’ve learned, Design Thinking is a solution-based approach to exploring and solving problems. It focuses on generating ideas with a specific problem in mind, keeping the user at the heart of the process throughout. Once you’ve established and designed a suitable solution, you’ll start to incorporate lean principles —testing your ideas, gathering quick and ongoing feedback to see what works—with particular emphasis on cross-team collaboration and overcoming departmental silos.

Agile ties all of this into short sprint cycles, allowing for adaptability in the face of change. In an agile environment, products are improved and built upon incrementally. Again, cross-team collaboration plays a crucial role; agile is all about delivering value that benefits both the end user and the business as a whole.

Together, Design Thinking, lean, and agile cut out unnecessary processes and documentation, leveraging the contributions of all key stakeholders for continuous delivery and improvement.

5. What are the benefits of Design Thinking at work?

As a designer, you have a pivotal role to play in shaping the products and experiences that your company puts to market. Integrating Design Thinking into your process can add huge business value, ultimately ensuring that the products you design are not only desirable for customers, but also viable in terms of company budget and resources.

With that in mind, let’s consider some of the main benefits of using Design Thinking at work:

• Significantly reduces time-to-market: With its emphasis on problem-solving and finding viable solutions, Design Thinking can significantly reduce the amount of time spent on design and development—especially in combination with lean and agile.
• Cost savings and a great ROI: Getting successful products to market faster ultimately saves the business money. Design Thinking has been proven to yield a significant return on investment; teams that are applying IBM’s Design Thinking practices , for example, have calculated an ROI of up to 300% as a result.
• Improves customer retention and loyalty: Design Thinking ensures a user-centric approach, which ultimately boosts user engagement and customer retention in the long term.
• Fosters innovation: Design Thinking is all about challenging assumptions and established beliefs, encouraging all stakeholders to think outside the box. This fosters a culture of innovation which extends well beyond the design team.
• Can be applied company-wide: The great thing about Design Thinking is that it’s not just for designers. It leverages group thinking and encourages cross-team collaboration. What’s more, it can be applied to virtually any team in any industry.

Whether you’re establishing a Design Thinking culture on a company-wide scale, or simply trying to improve your approach to user-centric design, Design Thinking will help you to innovate, focus on the user, and ultimately design products that solve real user problems.

6. Design Thinking methodology in action: Case studies

So we’ve looked in quite some detail at the theory behind Design Thinking and the processes involved — but what does this look like in action? Let’s explore some case studies where Design Thinking has made a huge real-world impact .

Healthcare Case Study: How Design Thinking transformed the Rotterdam Eye Hospital

Executives at the Rotterdam Eye Hospital wanted to transform the patient experience from the typically grim, anxiety-riddled affair into something much more pleasant and personal. To do this, they incorporated Design Thinking and design principles into their planning process. Here’s how they did it:

First, they set out to understand their target user — patients entering the hospital for treatment. The hospital CEO, CFO, managers, staff and doctors established that most patients came into hospital with the fear of going blind.

Based on their findings from the empathise stage, they determined that fear reduction needed to be a priority. Their problem statement may have looked something like the following: “Patients coming into our hospital need to feel comfortable and at ease.”

Armed with a deep understanding of their patients and a clear mission statement, they started to brainstorm potential solutions. As any good design thinker would, they sought inspiration from a range of both likely and unlikely sources. They looked to flagship airline KLM and supermarket chain Albert Heijn to learn about scheduling, for example, while turning to other medical organizations for inspiration on operational excellence.

In the prototyping stage, the team presented the most promising ideas they had come up with so far to those in charge of caregiving at the hospital. These teams of caregivers then used these insights to design informal, small-scale experiments that could test a potential solution and see if it was worthy of wide-scale adoption.

The testing phase consisted of running the aforementioned experiments and seeing if they took off. As Dirk Deichmann and Roel van der Heijde explain , the “transition to formal adoption of these ideas tended to be more gradual. If an idea worked, sooner or later other groups would ask if they could try it too, and the best ideas spread organically.”

The outcome

By adopting a Design Thinking approach, the Rotterdam Eye Hospital were able to get to the heart of their users’ needs and find effective solutions to fulfil them. In doing so, they have greatly improved the user experience: patient intake has risen 47%, and the hospital has since won several awards for safety, quality and design.

Business Case Study: How Design Thinking helped financial service provider MLP regain consumer trust

After the financial crisis hit, financial service provider MLP found that consumer trust was at an all-time low. They needed to re-engage with their target users and come up with new ways of building trust. In search of innovation, they decided to test out a Design Thinking approach. Here’s what they learned:

By focusing on their users and making a conscious effort to understand their needs first-hand, MLP learned that the assumptions they’d been going on were not so accurate after all. As Thomas Freese, division manager for marketing at MLP, explains :

“We always used to speak to customers about the goals they want to achieve. But they do not want to commit to a certain goal, as they often do not know themselves what that is. Rather, they want to talk about their ideas as it is more open and flexible regarding their financial planning.”

With this newfound empathy for their users, MLP were able to reframe their mission statement. They knew that they needed to rebuild consumer trust, and that the way to do this would be to speak to the customer in their own language and become a more relatable brand.

Ideate and Prototype

During the ideate and prototype phases, they decided to experiment with a completely new image. Instead of the formal business attire typically associated with the financial sector, the MLP team members went out in casual clothing. They tested Lego prototypes and homemade posters in designated hotspots — including a university campus and train stations.

By testing this new approach, they learned some extremely valuable lessons about their users and how to communicate with them. They found that even something as simple as dressing more casually had a huge impact in reducing the negative connotations associated with financial services. They also learned the value of asking open questions; rather than trying to sell their prototype, Design Thinking taught them to ask questions that focus on the user’s needs.

The Outcome

Their first foray into Design Thinking proved to be a huge learning curve for MLP. Taking the time to speak to their users gave them the insights they needed to redesign their messaging, allowing them to start marketing much more effectively.

In light of their findings, MLP opened up a new office space in a student district, putting their editorial and social media teams in close proximity to their customer base. Of course, Design Thinking is an iterative process, so this is just one way in which MLP hopes to continue learning to speak their customers’ language.

7. What is the relationship between Design Thinking and UX Design?

At this point, you’ve no doubt noticed lots of similarities between Design Thinking and user experience design , and may be wondering how they relate to one another. Both are extremely user-centric and driven by empathy, and UX designers will use many of the steps laid out in the Design Thinking process, such as user research , prototyping and testing.

Despite these similarities, there are certain distinctions that can be made between the two. For one, the impact of Design Thinking is often felt on a more strategic level; it explores a problem space—in the context of understanding users, technological feasibility, and business requirements—to discover possible solutions. As we have seen from the Rotterdam Eye Hospital and MLP case studies, Design Thinking is embraced and implemented by all different teams across the business, including C-level executives.

If Design Thinking focuses on finding solutions, UX design is concerned with actually designing these solutions and making sure they are usable, accessible and pleasant for the user.

You can think of Design Thinking as a toolset that UX designers dip into, and if you’re operating within the UX design field, it is one of many crucial methodologies you’ll rely on when it comes to creating fantastic user experiences. You can learn more about UX Design and Design Thinking in our UX Design Course , as well as earn a design thinking certification by completing a course in it.

Further reading

Want to see what design thinking looks like in practice? Here’s an article for you: 5 Game-Changing Examples of Design Thinking .

And if you’re new to the design field and wondering what all these newfangled terms mean, you may well be interested in the following guides:

• Learn How To Run Your Very Own Design Thinking Workshop!
• What Are Design Sprints?
• A Brief Guide To The Steps And Principles Of The Design Thinking Process
• How To Learn UX Design And Become A UX Designer

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4 Stages of Design Thinking

• 08 Feb 2022

Design thinking has changed the way people think about innovation—especially in business. While the concept originated from designers, professionals have adapted the process to solve business problems more effectively.

Here’s what you need to know about the design thinking process and how you can apply it.

Access your free e-book today.

What Is Design Thinking?

Design thinking is an approach to problem-solving and innovation that’s both user-centric and solutions-based—that is, it focuses on finding solutions instead of problems.

For example, if a business is struggling with bad reviews, design thinking would advise it to focus on improving how it treats customer-facing employees (a solution) rather than scrutinizing reviews (the problem).

User-centric solutions require empathy at all stages and must consider how people are impacted. While this may seem obvious, it’s a crucial element that can’t be overlooked in the innovation process.

Four Stages of Design Thinking

There are several models that systematize the design thinking process. In the online course Design Thinking and Innovation , Harvard Business School Dean Srikant Datar leverages a four-stage framework: clarify, ideate, develop, and implement.

The clarification stage involves observing and framing findings. Your observations form the foundation of your design thinking, so it’s important to be unbiased.

First, identify and empathize with your audience. Where are they coming from? What are their common pain points? Why do they need your solution? How will they benefit?

Once your observations are clearly defined, consolidate them and take note of any that stand out. Outliers can help reframe findings into a problem statement or question that guides the design thinking process to the final stage.

Try to focus on the big picture, and don’t be afraid to frame and reframe observations as you glean additional insights. The clarification stage is vital to the entire process’s success.

With your problem statement or question defined, you can use observations to think of potential solutions. Don’t feel limited as you ideate.

There are several ways you can approach this phase:

• Search for similarities in pain points and categorize them.
• Evaluate what resources you have and consider how they can be used to solve the problem.
• Brainstorm ideas that could yield positive results.

Whatever method you choose, remember that all ideas are possible solutions.

The third stage focuses on developing ideas from the ideation phase. This is done through testing possible solutions and noting the successes and failures of each.

At this point, adjustments aren’t only acceptable but recommended. The purpose isn’t to find the final solution but to test, adjust, prototype, and experiment. If something doesn’t work, try an iteration of it or go back a stage or two in the process.

4. Implement

The final stage—implementation—is the culmination of the previous three phases. It’s where you take all your observations, ideas, and developments and implement a solution.

It’s important to note that testing and experimentation don’t abruptly end. You can expect additional iterations and modifications to the solution that entail returning to a previous stage. Continue refining until you find a successful solution and implement it. Once you’ve done that, the design thinking process is complete.

Check out the video about the design thinking process below, and subscribe to our YouTube channel for more explainer content!

The Importance of Design Thinking Across Industries

Design thinking can be applied in any industry to any problem. Whether you work in manufacturing or finance, you can utilize design thinking to address pain points.

For example, if you work for a finance company struggling with employee engagement—a common problem with the rise in remote work—you could benefit from an unconventional approach to problem-solving . Your leadership and human resources teams could use design thinking to come up with ways to increase employee satisfaction, such as offering more benefits or mental health-focused programs.

Design thinking can seem like a massive undertaking, but it’s an accessible and adaptable method for all professionals who recognize the value of user-centric, solutions-based innovation.

Design Thinking as a Tool

Design thinking is a valuable addition to your professional toolbox. Through its four stages, it teaches how to assess situations with an unbiased view, ideate without assumptions, and continually experiment, test, and reiterate for better results.

Are you interested in learning more about design thinking? Explore our online course Design Thinking and Innovation to discover how to use design thinking principles and innovative problem-solving tools to help you and your business succeed.

About the Author

When design meets business – basics of the design thinking process

This is a guest post by Judit Kertesz , management consultant and design thinker.

Last week I went to a presentation with a friend where we heard about some draft pilot projects implemented with the design thinking process. The presentation team consisted of different people: an HR specialist, a designer, a strategy consultant and an engineer. The presentation introduced a pilot tool which could support any group of people who are willing to organize learning groups, meetups and general “learning together” events.

When the presentation ended, my friend – who happens to be a web designer – asked me: “I like the idea, but where was the design?”

I told him: “It was there, in their thinking process”.

Those who have already heard about design thinking know that it is a human-centered method used in problem solving. But it is much more than that.

What is the design thinking process?

Design thinking is not a linear process that has certain milestones and where the steps are undertaken sequentially. Instead, it is an iterative process where steps may loop around between stages. In the end, insights and possible solutions are constantly fine-tuned, and as a result, a sustainable, feasible and viable product, service, or process is developed.

The term “design thinking” was popularized by Roger L. Martin (Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto), Tim Brown and David Kelley (IDEO), and developed further by Stanford’s d.School, an institution devoted to design thinking. It’s a different way of problem solving which brings in the human factor to find out what works. It aims to empathize with users and understand their needs, involve them in brainstorming and problem solving processes, build on their feedback in the final service or product, then test and verify innovative solutions with them.

Next, we’ll discuss the background and basics of design thinking and the reason why it can be a competitive advantage.

How can knowledge be boosted forward?

In his book Design of Business, Roger L. Martin discusses the idea of a “knowledge funnel”, which introduces the evolution of knowledge (let’s not call it innovation). Imagine that there is a problem or issue that we would like to solve.

• During the first stage, we don’t know what kind of signs to look for — there are no such cases, no best practices to read. We are in a grey fog. He calls this stage a “mystery”.
• During the next stage, we still don’t have a clear problem statement, but at least we know what we need to pay attention to, which means that we “drop out” the useless information and try to concentrate on the important parts (this stage is called ”heuristic”).
• When our goal is getting more clear we create algorithms that can be easily automatized, and work according to pre-set rules.

For businesses finding the right algorithm can mean success short- or medium-term, but long-term, it is more important to advance the knowledge forward and come up with new solutions, new answers to problems that haven’t answered before.

Analytical vs. Intuitive thinking

Let’s suppose that there are two kinds of people: analytical and intuitive thinkers. They have totally different characteristics.

Analytical thinkers hold and refine the knowledge that they already know at the current stage. They don’t like the mystery stage — they are aiming to move from the “we don’t know anything about this” stage to creating algorithms quickly in order to automatize processes so they can predict the results, calculate ROI and be sure that everything will go according to plan. They apply inductive reasoning (proving what is already known) and deductive logic (proving what should happen). In other words, they analyze the past experiences to predict the future. Their magic word is reliability. Business people are said to be more analytical thinkers.

Intuitive thinkers tend to see things differently. They are more sensible and they are happy in the mystery stage. They are concerned with how things ought to be. They are happy to explore new areas, and the possible solutions of the problems are based on their feelings without any reasoning. Their magic word is validity , meaning that if you do something, it produces the results that you want. Designers are said to be intuitive thinkers.

These two types of thinking are two extremes and applying only one of them will not advance knowledge. Analytical thinking is based on past data, so we can hardly imagine that applying only this kind of thinking will come up something genuinely new. Solely intuitive thinking might also have some risks, for example the illusion of validity, which is a cognitive bias, meaning that it results in the overestimation of an observation’s long-term outcome (described by Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tvertsky, Nobel Prize psychologists in 1973).

The best combination: Design thinking

Design thinking is the productive mixture of analytical and intuitive thinking. It involves enough viability to enable to move the knowledge forward and keep up with the changing needs of the users and enough reliability for corporate minds as well. In other words it takes the the invention of the future from intuitive thinking and some parts of the inductive and the deductive reasoning from the analytical thinking.

As CEO and president of IDEO Tim Brown says :

“Design thinking is a discipline that uses the designer’s sensibility and methods to match people’s needs with what is technologically feasible and what a viable business strategy can convert into customer value and market opportunity.”

Turn the future into the past – competitive advantage

For a design thinker, probably abductive reasoning is one of the most important tools of problem solving. Abductive logic takes the invention of the future from intuitive thinking by understanding a certain problem, and empathizing the users’ point of view, design thinkers ask:

“What might happen?”, and “What if …?”.

Taking into consideration technologically feasible and viable possibilities business-wise, design thinkers might say “I have a prediction about the future”. But as we know, new ideas cannot be proven in advance. By applying a design thinking approach, it’s possible to try these ideas in advance by showing them to the users and testing them (prototyping). During testing, the most important thing is to try the “prediction” with the right users, who can provide reliable and valid feedback according to which the prototype can be modified. This way, design thinkers can turn the predicted future to the past and find a competitive advantage.

The design thinking process

Firstly, I would like to point out that the application of the design thinking approach requires a completely new mindset, patience, openness to new knowledge and to work in a multidisciplinary team. If we bear with these prerequisites, we can apply design thinking as an approach in many areas of our life: we can use it to tackle social issues, business challenges, upgrade public services and we can even design our lives with this approach.

Wherever you apply design thinking approach you should follow these steps:

Step 1: Try to understand what is going on and look for the needs

Explore the environment, get to know the stakeholders, stay with them, talk to them, listen to them, try to understand the whole situation. Don’t forget that this is a human-centered approach, which means that you need to understand the ’humans’ (users/ customers, etc.) who are affected by the activities you’d like to upgrade or change. You need to empathize with them, find out their needs in a sensible way. In the end of this phase you must have a lots of insights that can be shown on a variety of tools ( customer journey map , user persona , service blueprint , empathy map , etc.), depending on the type of service/ issue that you are designing.

Step 2: Decide what is the main problem that you are actually solving – be focused

I think this is one of the most important points in the beginning of the process — to set the focus. After collecting insights in the first step, we can create a so called “point-of-view” statement or question. Such a question sounds like this: “How might we encourage children to eat healthy food at school?” The question includes the user, the need and the insight. If you work in a creative place (or are lucky enough to have a design thinking room), you can write the POV on a poster and stick it on the wall, so you won’t forget it during the process.

There is a great startup quote: “Fall in love with the problem, not the solution”.

Step 3: Ideate, go crazy

Go outside into nature, talk to people from other disciplines/ professions. It is important to talk with other people, there is no such thing as “your” idea. With thorough understanding and focusing on the problem, the design thinking approach helps you to create possible solutions, which are desirable (i.e. meets the user’s needs), technologically feasible and economically viable, so they can be converted into customer value and market opportunity. If you are upgrading an existing service, involve the stakeholders in this ideation. This way, you can ensure ownership.

Step 4: Prototype your ideas and ask for feedback

You can prototype your possible solutions with different tools. The only limit is the creativity — lego, paper, storyboards, glue, theater, etc. Really, anything can come up here as a model to the solution. You should show your prototype to future users in a design thinking presentation, ask for their feedback and modify your model. Don’t forget that design thinking is an iterative approach, which means that you may go back to the previous steps anytime and refine the process. Failing is a good sign in this case: it means that you are on the way to find the best solution.

Step 5: Implement the solution

When your prototype is refined enough, you can implement the service or process that you were working on. Since you have involved the users in the design process, the ownership should be ensured, and the project’s sustainability is more likely, as well.

About the author

Judit is an management consultant professional with over 8 years of experience. She is also a design thinker, learning and experiencing a lot in this area. Judit has gained her consulting experience at a Big4 company and now she combines her background as strategy consultant and project manager with design thinking and service design.

Since 2014 she has been freelancing and working on different fields as a project manager, strategy and creativity consultant in multinational and multidisciplinary teams. She believes that design plays an important role in the future of innovation.

Judit is also interested in psychology, management, knowledge sharing, mentoring, and storytelling in business. She is also a hobby photographer, and also loves baking cakes and cookies. Her hometown is Budapest, Hungary, but she likes travelling around and discovering different cultures.

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Design thinking methodology: 5 principles to follow

When user empathy is at the core of product development, everyone wins. 

Your users feel seen and heard, and your product development process is resilient and efficient. That’s the power of embracing design thinking.

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In this chapter, we unpack five principles of the design thinking methodology to help you build excellent products and features for your customers.

Make your users a priority

Use Hotjar to learn what your users need and how your product fits in so you can launch updates and features that make their lives better.

A quick refresher: what is design thinking? 

Design thinking is an iterative process for solving problems in product development. The main thing to remember about design thinking is that the search for a solution puts the user front-and-center.

It’s a framework that empowers you to ask important questions about your product and how it affects users. If you want to throw out assumptions about your product experience and never hear “that’s how we’ve always done it” as reasoning for a product decision, design thinking is the way to go.

The 5 core principles of the design thinking methodology

The design thinking methodology is made of five principles:

User-centricity and empathy: your users, their problems, and their experience in your product are a priority, not an afterthought

Collaboration: every level and every role can contribute to, and see results from, design thinking

Ideation: the goal is to generate as many solutions as possible for a problem you’ve identified

Experimentation and iteration: the best solution ideas are turned into prototypes you can run experiments on

A bias towards action: ideas are most powerful when executed in real life, so taking action is essential

The focus on user empathy and action is the name of the game in design thinking; everything you do within design thinking ties back to the user and product experience.

Let’s dive into each principle and the role it plays in your work as a product team.

1. User-centricity and empathy

User-centricity and empathy are at the forefront of design thinking. When you explore solutions through design thinking, you do so based on human needs and user feedback.

The approach is about understanding what the user wants, needs, and struggles with when it comes to your product and its role in their life. It involves digging into how they feel about your product.

Think about it this way: if you struggle with customer churn, your business goal might be to reduce your churn rate (or increase your retention rate). But when you prioritize user-centricity and empathy, your actual goal is to improve the experience your customers have when using your product—which in turn positively impacts your business metrics.

Here are a few ways to start understanding your users and prioritizing empathy:

Surveys: ask users for direct feedback in key moments, like when they’re taking longer to complete a task or are about to abandon their session before reaching their goal

Recordings: peek over users’ virtual shoulders to understand what draws their attention, what frustrates them, and where they struggle

User interviews : unbiased, open-ended questions can reveal a mountain of insights you otherwise might not spot

It’s important to remember that the work you do to prioritize empathy never ends; you’ll never be ‘done’ understanding your users. Some of the biggest companies in the world know this: UberEats constantly interviews restaurant workers, delivery drivers, and meal recipients; Apple makes iterative customer involvement part of their design and development process.

Learn more about these (and other) examples in the design thinking examples chapter of this guide.

Hotjar helps us empathize with our users. It reminds us that there are real human beings on the other end. It also confirms that our work as a product development team has an impact, and is making our customer's lives easier. Hotjar helps us empathize with our users. It reminds us that there are real human beings on the other end. It also confirms that our work as a product development team has an impact, and is making our customer's lives easier.

2. Collaboration

Collaboration is a key dimension of design thinking. It allows product teams to step outside of your usual problem-solving and decision-making patterns and consider diverse ideas and perspectives. It sets the base for innovation and potential product solutions that would otherwise remain hidden.

In design thinking, input from teams like customer support, marketing, sales, customer success, and data or business intelligence is particularly useful in creating a problem statement—an actionable, concise sentence or question that drives your UX purpose and direction.

An effective problem statement is one that considers the entire user journey, start-to-finish—and this is where collaboration comes in: marketing and sales have a deeper insight into the earlier part of the customer journey, while support and customer success understand customer needs and struggles as they use your product.

We really love Hotjar. I share all the insights I find with the team. We get the Customer Success Manager to watch Recordings. UX person to watch recordings. Devs watch recordings. It’s a team effort. It’s democratic learning.

The wide range of skills across different teams is crucial to make your problem statement as useful as possible.

One excellent example of this in practice is Citrix. Knowing that many employees have little or no contact with users, they actively encourage design thinking and focus on the problems that matter to customers (and ultimately benefit the business, too).

See more problem statement examples in the problem statement chapter of this guide.

​​ 🔥 If you’re using Hotjar

Share product experience insights that would otherwise remain hidden to other teams. For example:

Use Recordings to show your customer support team the user behavior that led to an issue users told them about over live chat

Use Feedback to give the marketing team in-depth insights about parts of the pricing page that confuse potential customers

Use Surveys to share open-ended survey responses to user onboarding with sales reps who won them over

3. Ideation

In design thinking, designers hold ideation sessions to generate as many potential solutions to an issue as possible. Design thinking can’t happen without ideation—after all, it is a solution-focused process. Ideas are its essential building material.  

The goal is to propose as many solutions as possible—no matter how 'good' or 'bad' they might be—based on what you learn through user empathy and collaboration on a problem statement.

Here are a few things to keep in mind to get the most out of your ideation sessions:

Create a judgment-free zone: every idea is welcome, and the best way to generate as many ideas as possible is to ensure no one is holding back

No HiPPOs: the Highest Paid Person’s Opinion (HiPPO) can make one person's ideas seem more important or relevant than others’, so prevent that by giving all ideas equal space

Use as many ideation techniques as you can: take advantage of brainstorming, mind mapping, brain writing, sketching, and any other method that suits the people involved

Ignore the obstacles (for now): note down and log all ideas that come up during this process, even those that don’t seem feasible given the circumstances and resources you have

With people from different teams and rich, diverse skill sets taking part in ideation, you’ll end up with ideas you can combine, reframe, and consider in different contexts of your product.

💡 Pro tip: make the most of your product experience insights —the data that reveals how your users interact with your product—in the ideation phase.

For example, heatmaps might give you an idea of UX updates that will make the user journey smoother. Or you could compare session recordings between users who completed a task and those who abandoned it to brainstorm product improvements that might help more users reach their goal with your product.

4. Experimentation and iteration

With a bank of ideas, your next step is to narrow them down to a few you can focus on and—most importantly—run experiments with.

Embracing a product experimentation culture is key to product teams that put the customer first. It’s no wonder it also fits into the design thinking methodology. Use product prioritization to choose an idea to focus on and create a prototype you can test:

First, build thorough experiments. Define your goal, build a hypothesis, and choose KPIs you’ll use to measure results. This is essential to understand the true impact of your design thinking solutions. Otherwise, you’ll end up making assumptions and educated guesses (at best) about why a solution worked or failed.

Then, measure and iterate. As you run experiments on your ideas, like A/B tests or funnel tests, monitor results daily and keep an eye on additional quantitative and qualitative insights that give you context about the user experience.

For example, if you tweak a step in your product onboarding for a portion of your users, track the KPIs that measure its success, such as the completion rate. But don’t stop there: look at session recordings to better understand user progression and behavior during onboarding, and set up a Customer Effort Score survey to track ease of use for the original and updated versions.

5. A bias towards action

Much about the first four principles is focused on ideas—relying on empathy for the user to create as many ideas as possible, then testing prototypes in the real world.

The final building block of the design thinking methodology is to consistently and cyclically take action.

Ideas that stay in a team member’s mind don’t have any impact.

Ideas you experiment with have the potential to help a small portion of your users.

And ideas you choose to learn from, tweak, and release to your user base can have a lasting impact on both your users and your company’s success and long-term viability.

Consider the approach that RazorPay, an end-to-end payment solutions provider, took when updating their user dashboard:

Instead of endlessly hypothesizing and making vague assumptions, the RazorPay team released their redesign to just 10% of their users.

Then, instead of only tracking standard web analytics to measure success, they also kept an eye on the score these users gave their experience on a scale from 1 to 10. If the score was low, users could explain their rating in an open-ended survey.

At this point, RazorPay didn’t pat themselves on the back for a job well done— they kept working on the dashboard through multiple iterations based on continuous user feedback.

Read RazorPay's full story here .

Use design thinking to keep learning about your users

As you embrace design thinking and learn how your product team can make the most of it, remember: there’s no end to the process , and you can always use what you’ve learned from taking action to refine the ideas you’ve developed. 

Make product decisions based on what your users need

Use insights from Recordings, Heatmaps, Surveys, and Feedback to learn what your users need—and build a product that fits right in.

FAQs about design thinking methodology

What are the five design thinking principles.

The design thinking methodology focuses on solving issues by embodying these five principles:

User-centricity and empathy for user problems and experiences

Collaboration between teams

Ideation and generating as many solutions as possible

Experimentation and iteration of best ideas

A bias towards action and learning from experiments

Where can you find ideas for design thinking solutions?

Design thinking solution ideas can originate from anywhere in the user journey, from their experience signing up and onboarding to product usage and drop-off points.

Use design thinking software to find and develop ideas. A tool like Hotjar lets you observe user behavior in your product and ask the right questions at the right time. Other design thinking tools help you conduct live user interviews, run collaborative brainstorming sessions, and shape ideas into prototypes.

What is the key to making the design thinking methodology work?

Design thinking emphasizes taking action. Even the best ideas are wasted if you don’t implement them and learn from them for future improvements.

For example, when you brainstorm a new feature based on what you know about your customers, prototype it and test it with real users. Data like session recordings and survey responses will give you a world of learning you can build upon to improve your product.

Design thinking process

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Examples of design thinking

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Why Design Thinking Works

• Jeanne Liedtka

While we know a lot about practices that stimulate new ideas, innovation teams often struggle to apply them. Why? Because people’s biases and entrenched behaviors get in the way. In this article a Darden professor explains how design thinking helps people overcome this problem and unleash their creativity.

Though ostensibly geared to understanding and molding the experiences of customers, design thinking also profoundly reshapes the experiences of the innovators themselves. For example, immersive customer research helps them set aside their own views and recognize needs customers haven’t expressed. Carefully planned dialogues help teams build on their diverse ideas, not just negotiate compromises when differences arise. And experiments with new solutions reduce all stakeholders’ fear of change.

At every phase—customer discovery, idea generation, and testing—a clear structure makes people more comfortable trying new things, and processes increase collaboration. Because it combines practical tools and human insight, design thinking is a social technology —one that the author predicts will have an impact as large as an earlier social technology: total quality management.

It addresses the biases and behaviors that hamper innovation.

Idea in Brief

The problem.

While we know a lot about what practices stimulate new ideas and creative solutions, most innovation teams struggle to realize their benefits.

People’s intrinsic biases and behavioral habits inhibit the exercise of the imagination and protect unspoken assumptions about what will or will not work.

The Solution

Design thinking provides a structured process that helps innovators break free of counterproductive tendencies that thwart innovation. Like TQM, it is a social technology that blends practical tools with insights into human nature.

Occasionally, a new way of organizing work leads to extraordinary improvements. Total quality management did that in manufacturing in the 1980s by combining a set of tools—kanban cards, quality circles, and so on—with the insight that people on the shop floor could do much higher level work than they usually were asked to. That blend of tools and insight, applied to a work process, can be thought of as a social technology.

• JL Jeanne Liedtka is a professor of business administration at the University of Virginia’s Darden School of Business.

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• The Complete Design Thinking Process [2024 Guide]

The Complete Design Thinking Process

Learn about the Design Thinking process powering today’s most user-friendly products, services and solutions.

About The Design Thinking Process

What is the design thinking process.

The Design Thinking process helps teams use work through “wicked” problems and turn opportunities into innovations. When teams apply the Design Thinking process, they work through a series of steps and activities toward a solution that is desirable, feasible and viable — also known as the Three Lenses of Human-Centered Design .

Given the iterative nature of design, the Design Thinking process can be considered more of a playbook than a predefined agenda. When teams need to learn more about their users, they turn to Empathy. When it’s time to test models, they pivot to Prototype. Often, Test results can reframe the opportunity, resulting in fresh rounds of Ideation and Definition.

Who participates in the Design Thinking process?

Unlike methods made for manufacturing or software development, the Design Thinking Process is designed for everybody. In fact, the Design Thinking process becomes more efficient as more skill sets are added to the team. This is because Design Thinking leans heavily on empathy and divergence, which both benefit from increased perspectives.

In practice, the most effective Design Thinking teams usually include 6 – 12 core members with diverse strategic and technical profiles. Some participants may be designers, but most will be experts and leaders in connected disciplines such as strategy, technology or marketing. Users are also common participants on the Design Thinking teams, as are other stakeholders or community members.

When building a Design Thinking team, consider the range of skills you need in order to make effective decisions during the workshop itself. This usually means having a mix of strategic and technical experts on-hand. In practice, teams with a mixture of “T-profiles” are most effective — that is, subject matter experts with a range of experiences.

Who facilitates the Design Thinking process?

While anyone can participate in Design Thinking, coaching a team through the process does take practice. Facilitating the Design Thinking process typically entails coordinating research efforts and running multi-day workshops.

According to a study published by the Hasso Plattner Institute of Design [1], the three most active facilitators of Design Thinking in organizations are:

• Research & Development Leads
• Design Thinking Consultants
• Marketing Leads

The Design Thinking Framework

The Design Thinking framework provides a convenient mental model of the decision making process. It breaks the innovation process into simple steps, and helps teams know where to focus and when.

The framework was pioneered by John Arnold, an MIT professor who described an early version as: Question, Observe, Associate and Predict. [2]

Arnold encouraged the iteration of his approach, and the Design Thinking framework has since been widely adapted to suit diverse organizations, technologies and needs.

The Double Diamond Model

The Double Diamond model is one of the most influential models of the Design Thinking framework. It was published by the British Design Council in the early 2000s, and helped crystallize underlying concepts for the working world. Specifically, the Double Diamond model depicts how the two phases of divergent and convergent thinking work together to develop ideas. Other common cyclical Design Thinking models include those published by Nielsen Norman Group and IDEO.

Basically, there’s a problem statement at the beginning and a solution at the end, and the solution is reached in an iterative procedure.

The Integrated Model

Staged frameworks are designed to help organizations integrate the iterative design process. The Integrated Design Thinking framework at Konrad is divided into three major stages containing a total of seven steps.

The following sections describe the Stages and Steps of the Design Thinking process, including what their objectives and key activities.

Design Thinking Stages

What are the stages of design thinking.

There are three primary stages of the Design Thinking process: Discover, Design, Deliver. Referred to as the 3 “Ds”, stages help organizations adopt Design Thinking into their existing processes. Together, the three stages provide a convenient way to coordinate complex projects containing iterative steps.

Design Thinking Stage 1: Discover

“We’ve sensed an opportunity and are exploring the space”

Every Design Thinking project kicks off in Discover. The goal of Discover is to move from a sense of the opportunity to a clear picture of the current landscape. This stage is often completed by a core project team who share their results with the broader team during Design Thinking workshops.

Key Output: A comprehensive landscape of the opportunity

Design Thinking Stage 2: Design

“We’ve aligned on objectives and are building experiences”

The Design stage is where rapid iteration occurs as teams shape insights into innovation. During the Design stage, teams work through five core steps of every Design Thinking process: Empathy, Define, Ideate, Prototype and Test. These steps are completed through a series of design workshops and sprints that are tailored to each team.

Key Output: A working prototype ready to scale

Design Thinking Stage 3: Deliver

“We’ve found our solution and are ready to grow”

The Deliver stage is where lead prototypes are integrated with new and existing technologies. Whereas earlier stages are focused on working through ambiguity, the Deliver stage focuses on efficient execution and streamlined integration through training and technology.

Key Output: A real-world solution

The Design Thinking Process in Practice

How gillette designed india’s favorite shave.

Read how Gillette used Design Thinking to develop the Gillette Guard: A made-for-India experience for 400-million people.

Gillette’s Opportunity

Shortly after Gillette was acquired by P&G in 2005, they set out to redesign the shaving experience for 400 million men in India. At the time, Gillette’s Western-style offerings were only catering to a sliver of the market, and the vast majority relied on (very) low-cost double-edged razors. After mapping the value chain from the steel to the sink, a cross functional team leveraged Design Thinking to re-learn the art of shaving in India — and bring an innovative product to market.

The Insights

The team met with men from across the country and saw first-hand how different the shaving experience was compared to in the United States. They saw how many men sat on the ground to shave using a mirror in their free hand. Often, only a small bowl of water was used to clean the blade. They saw the care it took to avoid cuts, and how long it could take (up to 30 minutes). While men had become experts in the craft, the desire for a less strenuous experience was clear — as long as it fit their current needs:

• a faster, more relaxing experience
• can still handle beards without running water
• doesn’t clog easily from hair/shaving lather
• priced competitively

The Innovation

With these criteria, the team worked through a series of design iterations before arriving at the Gillette Guard: A made-for-India experience that delivered a relaxing shave for an affordable price. What makes the Guard unique is how it uses small plastic “teeth” to flatten the skin ahead of the blade, along with a custom pivoting head that works well in still water.

Thanks to a cost-saving design and distributed manufacturing model, the Gillette Guard sells profitably for 25 cents — or just 2% of the Mach 3 price. Launched in 2010, today 2 out of every 3 razors sold in India are Gillette Guards. [4]

Read more about how P&G tripled its innovation success by engineering reverse innovations at Harvard Business Review.

Design Thinking Steps

What are the steps of design thinking.

Instead of trying to jump from mountains of research data straight to ideas, the Design Thinking steps help unpack the black box of creativity, and provide clear objectives for collaboration. Each step of the Design Thinking process works through a handful of core activities, completed with an array of tools.

Design Thinking steps begin with Research, end with Implement, and traverse an iterative 5-step core of Empathy, Define, Ideate, Prototype and Test. This core set of 5 steps has been adopted by diverse industries and is championed by leading UX design communities including the Interaction Design Foundation.

Step 1 Design Thinking Research

Build the Foundation . Research helps move from sensing an opportunity, to seeing it in the context. It requires carefully studying the opportunity from every direction, and provides the foundation cross-functional teams need to work together effectively. Without a holistic view of the opportunity, teams will struggle to find feasible solutions that satisfy their innovation goals.

Core Design Thinking Research Activities

Create a current landscape.

The current landscape describes all the systems and structures expected to underpin the solution. While the elements of the landscape are tailored to every project, the goal is always the same: Create a holistic view of the opportunity so disciplines can make decisions in real-time. The landscape is often created by a core team of project owners and design thinking consultants, and then shared with the complete team during design thinking workshops. Research Tools like AEIOU can help organize your landscape and identify any gaps.

Consider Key Performance Indicators

The most successful design thinking projects begin with a shared understanding of what success looks like. Discussing the quantitative and qualitative KPIs early in the process helps teams have better conversations about the feasibility and viability of their ideas. If you aren’t sure where to start, you can use the Three Lenses of Human Centered Design as a guide (desirability, feasibility, viability).

Draft a Statement of Opportunity

After the current landscape has been created and shared among the team, and the KPIs have been discussed and drafted, teams are ready to “align on 1 line” with a statement of opportunity. Also called a problem statement, this activity helps complex teams speak the same language by articulating the high-level opportunity in simple terms. The most important part of the statement of opportunity is ensuring all disciplines are involved in drafting it.

Step 2 Design Thinking Empathy

Become your Users . The first step of the Design stage, Empathy is where teams immerse themselves in the user experience and challenge their own assumptions. Often referred to as ethnography , the Empathy step studies people in the context of their culture and environment. Depending on the scale and complexity of the opportunity, the Empathy step can take just a few days or up to several months, as was the case in the Gillette Guard example above.

Before drafting jumping into Empathy activities, teams must be clear who their primary users are. For a company like AirBnB, that means considering both people who rent apartments, and the people with apartments to rent. These two groups have very different needs, and should be considered separately to avoid compromising designs. When drafting user personas, these groups would be further divided based on shared travel interests, demographics, or other criteria.

Core Design Thinking Empathy Activities

Connect with user experiences.

Design Thinking Empathy is about immersing yourself in the user experience. That means interviewing real users, observing them in their daily life, and walking a mile in their shoes. Direct observation is a powerful creative tool, and small details can be very inspiring during ideation. Teams should look to connect both directly and indirectly with users, creating a holistic view of their experience through interviews, analytics and heuristic approaches.

Draft user personas

User personas help design teams put a face to a name. They are the center of human-centered design, and a critical activity of the Empathy step. If you have worked with personas before, you’ll appreciate the level of realism and clarity of purpose Design Thinking personas provide. Personas are commonly drafted in advance of workshops by a core team and finalized together.

Generate user stories

User stories allow teams to clearly articulate what users want and why. Without user stories (or closely related job stories / jobs to be done) teams would be overwhelmed trying to compare all the competing insights and user goals. It’s best to generate as many specific user stories as possible before converging on the top opportunities in a later activity.

Step 3 Design Thinking Define

Make choices . The Define step helps teams frame insights from Research and Empathy steps into a compass for their collaboration. During Define, teams validate, prioritize and align on next moves using guided activities in Design Thinking workshops. Without the Design Thinking process, aligning a cross functional team on human-centered opportunities would be very difficult, if not impossible. By the end of the Define step, ideas for solutions will begin to appear everywhere.

Core Design Thinking Define Activities

Validate statement of opportunity.

It’s important for teams to challenge their Statement of Opportunity several times throughout the Design Thinking process. Does it still stand? Or should it be updated to reflect new insights about users or feasibility? Validating the statement during Define keeps everyone on the same page.

Validate user personas

A user persona should be as realistic as possible to inspire desirable ideas. Given how critical strong user personas are, design thinking teams should take care to make sure they reflect reality. Workshop tools like the Gallery Walk can be a refreshing way to review and revise draft personas, especially when combined with Dot Voting or other consensus-generating methods.

Rank user stories

User stories provide UX teams with a single source of truth to design solutions with. Design Thinking provides transparent prioritization tools to help teams identify and apply the most effective criteria.

Map user journeys

User journeys are a powerful visualization technique that combine user personas and user stories into a complete experience roadmap. Defining the journey helps uncover new moments and opportunities to delight users and improve the user experience.

Define solution requirements

Defining the requirements of the solution is a major milestone in the Design Thinking process. While the statement of opportunity outlines what the team is hoping to achieve, the requirements (sometimes called the Minimum Viable Product) give shape to the solution. For example, a team may begin with the opportunity to improve their online shopping experience, and after Research and Empathy they align on what specific user goals they need to support.

A design team working in the normal way might never appreciate that the problem had so many ramifications.”

Step 4 Design Thinking Ideate

Create choices . Ideate is where the magic of Design Thinking happens. Following weeks of research and immersion in the user experience, teams will begin seeing human-centered solutions everywhere they look. Core activities in the Ideate step help structure brainstorms and inspire new perspectives with creative tools like Brainwriting and SCAMPER. The Ideate step is usually revisited several times during the design thinking process as teams reframe opportunities and refine their solutions.

Core Design Thinking Ideate Activities

Share inspiration.

Sharing inspiring or innovative solutions among the team helps spark new ideas and creates a frame of reference for members with widely different professional disciplines or experiences. When planning a Design Thinking workshop, save time to have participants discuss a design or service that has personally surprised or delighted them. And be sure to look for inspiration outside your sector — hospitals can learn a lot from hospitality and vice versa.

Brainstorm solutions

Brainstorming is where human insights become innovative ideas. It is a highly divergent activity, dedicated to creating as many interesting avenues as possible. In practice, brainstorms are most effective when they’re focused on supporting a specific user goal. For example, “how can we help people get from X to Y”. For this reason, Design Thinking teams often split into small groups when brainstorming, each tackling one user story or moment. While not every brainstorm idea will be feasible or financially viable, each will reveal some truth about what users really want, which may inspire new ideas or be further expanded.

Expand on ideas

Step 5 design thinking prototype.

Create context . The Prototype step puts ideas in context, allowing teams to make performance-based design decisions before any big commitments are made. Prototyping begins with low-resolution sketches that can be quickly created and compared, adding resolution as more is learned. In practice, the best prototypes provide just enough context to keep users focused on the aspects you want to learn about.

Core Design Thinking Prototype Activities

Prototype the concept.

Making abstract ideas more tangible is an important first step in prototyping. It allows teams to compare strategic alternatives before committing resources, and provides valuable context for technical teams during production. Sketches, storyboards, or other ways to capture the concept will work well.

Prototype the experience

Modern prototyping tools are a design thinking superpower. From cloud-based tools to 3D printing, today’s designers can quickly simulate and iterate realistic experiences unlike ever before. This removes a lot of guesswork from the traditional design process, and creates more connected experiences at launch.

Step 6 Design Thinking Test

Measure outcomes . The Test step in Design Thinking Test helps teams gather valuable feedback from users and other stakeholders. This step works hand-in-hand with Prototyping to inspire fresh ideas and refine working solutions. And just like with prototyping, the fidelity of the test should fit the situation — while “launch and learn” may be the best test for some projects, others have far lower risk tolerance.

Core Design Thinking Test Activities

Test for impressions.

You only get one chance to make a first impression, so it’s important to know what users say, think and feel when they first encounter your solution. Tools like the Feedback Capture Grid help organize user impressions to inform the design of higher-fidelity prototypes.

Test for risks

While not mandatory, evaluating solutions using tools like crowdsourced QA or live A/B testing can dramatically de-risk production.

Step 7 Design Thinking Implement

Make reality . Implement is the final step of the Design Thinking process, and the first step of full-scale development. Here, teams map out how to integrate their proven prototype with the current landscape they explored during Research, optimizing as needed along the way. If you’re interested in learning more about what end-to-end design thinking consultants can offer, contact us .

Core Design Thinking Tools

Design Thinking tools help teams combine perspectives and shape ideas. Each tool supports specific steps of the design thinking process, and comes in several flavors. The following section introduces the most popular Design Thinking tools, with additional links to more detailed resources.

Empathy Map

Develop a holistic understanding of your current or potential users and capture it in a simple cognitive canvas.

Empathy maps help organize and compare emotional insights about your users. They are typically divided into six parts to create a holistic view of a person’s experience and needs: Think + Feel, Say + Do, See, Hear, Pain and Gain While not a requirement of all Design Thinking projects, empathy maps are an excellent source of insight most often used to build user personas, brainstorm user stories and map user journeys.

How to create an Empathy Map

• Divide a whiteboard or sheet of paper into the six sections above — preferably right after a user interview ends
• Arrange your notes and verbatims around the canvas
• Review interview recordings to fill in any gaps and dig deeper
• Compare notes with other interviewers and look to build on one another’s observations
• Share your empathy map with the broader team and align on the major Pains and Gains

Note: If you are working alone or in small groups, waiting to complete the pains and gains sections as a team can help create better ideas and alignment.

User Persona

Create a rich, realistic profile of your users that brings their experience to life for the entire team.

A user persona is a fictitious character profile that embodies one segment of your potential audience. They contain detailed descriptions on their background (age, career, education), behaviors (patterns, interests), and goals.

User personas are created based on observations from a variety of user surveys, interviews and analytics. As a critical piece of the Design Thinking process, user personas help teams focus all their downstream problem-solving efforts.

How to create a User Persona

• Think about a specific user role or goal you want to support
• Name your persona
• Fill out their personal details based on your observations of similar users
• Write a brief description about their current role and responsibilities as they pertain to your project
• List 4-5 relevant behaviors or patterns they have using the insights gathered in an empathy map, interview for empathy or other Design Thinking research tool
• Add a photo or mood board that captures their personality

Note: Avoid making more user personas than your team can remember in detail at once. Working with 3-6 user personas is usually best. Also consider scheduling quarterly team reviews of all your active user personas. This has the dual-benefit of keeping your users top of mind and your personas up to date.

User Journey Map

Develop a bird’s eye view of one user persona that encompasses all the important touch points relevant to your solution over time.

User journey maps are a powerful visualization technique. They are built in small teams using inputs from ethnographic research, empathy and ideation activities.

Common elements of user journey maps include basic details about the user persona, a timeline from start to finish, the user’s thoughts and emotions at each key moment, and significant opportunities to improve the experience.

How to create a User Journey Map

• Select one of your user personas
• Fill in basic details about the scenario
• Divide the journey into overarching phases
• Subdivide each phase into key moments
• Overlay emotions and quotes from interviews and empathy maps
• Identify user needs and opportunities to exceed expectations
• Discuss your journey map with the full team and iterate until complete

Note: Mapping your user’s entire journey – not just when they interact with you – is a great source for inspiration. You can upgrade a user journey to a service blueprint by connecting KPIs and organizational processes.

User Stories

Describe what your users want and why in a format that can be easily captured and compared among the team.

User stories help teams align on high-priority opportunities to improve the user experience. They are formatted as a single sentence that answers 3 W-H questions: WHO is the user, WHAT do they want, and WHY.

User stories are often created during brainstorming activities and discussed as a team using tools like a cluster matrix. User stories are common in Agile methodologies, and can be grouped together to form epics and themes .

How to create a User Story

• Grab post its or open your user stories template
• As a [person in a specific role]
• I want [to perform a specific action]
• So that [I can achieve a specific goal]
• Write as many stories about your different users as you can
• Review user stories as a team

Note: Defining what needs to happen to “complete” the story can add more clarity for designers downstream. This is called the “acceptance criteria”.

Build upon an existing idea or solution with a simple, structured brainstorming technique.

SCAMPER is a brainstorming activity for breaking through to unexpected ideas. The word is an acronym for seven words that serve as cognitive prompts to help push thinking “outside the box”. SCAMPER stands for: Substitute, Combine, Adapt, Modify, Put to another use, Eliminate and Revers

How to brainstorm with SCAMPER

• Start with a solution you want to improve
• Answer probing questions labelled under each letter
• Generate as many ideas as possible
• Move to the next letter if you get stuck

Note: Assigning one letter per person and rotating every 2-3 minutes can push ideas even farther.

Statement of Opportunity

Align on a singular statement that encompasses the spirit and scope of the current opportunity.

The statement of opportunity, also called a problem statement, is a simple tool for aligning teams. They answer the WHO, WHAT and WHY of your project in a single line, and are similar to user stories but with a different focus.

Statement of opportunity is usually developed early in a Design Thinking workshop and revisited throughout the process.

How to create a Statement of Opportunity

• Grab post its or open your statement of opportunity template
• Write down what you believe the project’s strategic opportunity to be
• Share your statements with the team
• Align on a single statement of opportunity

Note: It is more helpful to focus on writing exactly what you feel the statement should be, instead of generating a pile of half-thought ideas

Gallery Walk

Share immersive user research with a broader team to mine for insights and opportunities.

Gallery walks are an engaging way to share detailed results discovered during the Research or Empathy steps. They are intended to replicate the thoughtful experience of browsing in an art gallery, and participants are given worksheets or encouraged to record what stood out or surprised them.

Gallery walks are most often used to pressure test working user personas, with one large poster dedicated to visualizing each user type.

How to conduct a Gallery Walk

• Create a “canvas” for each user persona
• Hang your canvases around the room
• Invite the full team come and browse
• Provide a worksheet to focus discussion
• Discuss the show and validate findings

Note: Gallery walks are best when stakeholders can actually walk. Use large posters, big pictures and fat markers. In addition, rules like no talking and changing stations at set intervals makes it easier to organize your thoughts.

So what is the Design Thinking process?

Simply put, the Design Thinking process is a playbook that helps teams shape a field of opportunities into specific innovations. It breaks down the human-centered design process into a series of stages and steps, and guides complex collaborations with tools and activities.

Given the collaborative nature, most Design Thinking activities are completed during design workshops with the help of experienced facilitators. To learn more about putting the process into practice, see our guide How to Run a Design Thinking Workshop .

• Schmiedgen J, Rhinow H, Köppen E. Parts without a whole?: The current state of Design Thinking practice in organizations. Universitätsverlag Potsdam; 2016.
• Smith P. Creativity: An Examination of the Creative Process; a Report on the Third Communications Conference of the Art Directors Club of New York. Paul Smith, Editor. 1959.
• Lewrick M, Link P, Leifer L. The Design Thinking Playbook: Mindful Digital Transformation of Teams, Products, Services, Businesses and Ecosystems. John Wiley & Sons; 2018.
• Harvard Business Review, Brown T, Christensen CM, Nooyi I, Govindarajan V. HBR’s 10 Must Reads on Design Thinking (with featured article “Design Thinking” By Tim Brown). Harvard Business Press; 2020.
• Jones JC. Design Methods. John Wiley & Sons; 1992.

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10 Insightful Design Thinking Frameworks: A Quick Overview

If you’ve just started to embark on your journey into the field of design thinking , you may have noticed different frameworks cropping up here and there. This is nothing to worry about—it’s simply the result of different people’s perceptions of the design thinking process. To help you get your head around these interpretations, we’ve prepared a useful summary of the most popular design thinking frameworks used by global design firms and national design agencies .

Design thinking means many things to many people—not only in its definition, but also in its practical implementation. A wide variety of design thinking frameworks and visualizations exist in the world today , and each typically contains between three and seven stages. Before we dive into these different frameworks, let’s look at a quick overview of the fundamental principles which form the basis behind all variations of the design thinking process.

Traits that are common across design thinking processes:

Starts with empathy . A deep focus on the humans involved will ensure you stay on track and follow the course of action most likely to bring about preferred solutions for individuals, business and society.

Reframes the problem or challenge at hand. This helps you gain new perspectives and explore different ways to think about the problem, and allows a more holistic approach towards reaching a preferred solution.

Initially employs divergent styles of thinking. This allows participants to generate and explore as many solutions as possible in an open , judgment-free ideation space.

Later employs convergent styles of thinking. This will allow your team to isolate, combine and refine potential solution streams out of your more mature ideas.

Creates and tests prototypes . Solutions which make it through the previous stages get tested further to remove any potential issues.

Iterates. You will revisit empathic frames of mind as you progress through the various stages and may redefine the challenge as new knowledge is gathered.

The process is all done in a collaborative, multidisciplinary team that leverages the experience and thinking styles of many folks to solve complex problems. It can feel quite chaotic at first, if you’re not used to it—however, if done correctly, it can result in emergent solutions that are desirable, feasible and viable.

Different implementation frameworks or models have different names and numbers of stages, but they all consist of the same principles and all involve points at which you will empathize , reframe, ideate, prototype and test. Let’s now take a quick look at 10 popular frameworks to further understand this innovative and revolutionary process.

1. The 5-Stage Design Thinking Process—d.school

First, let’s look at the 5-stage model that we will be following in this course.

The Stanford Design School (d.school), now known as the Hasso Plattner Institute of Design, initially taught design thinking via a simple but powerful 3-step process: Understand, Improve, Apply.

They have since built upon this, to formulate and openly share a famous 5-stage process which is widely used around the world, including here at the Interaction Design Foundation. The process they outlined is as follows:

The d.school also represents this 5-stage process through their hexagonal design thinking visualization. This ensures the stages are seen more as enablers or modes of thinking, rather than concrete linear steps.

The d.school’s model of design thinking consists of five iterative, non-linear phases: Empathize, Define, Ideate, Prototype and Test.

© Stanford d.School web, Public License. Source.

2. The Early Traditional Design Process—Herbert Simon

The earliest versions of the design thinking process still reflected the traditional design process . As design thinking evolved, however, deeper empathy, more collaboration and a multidisciplinary approach were thrown into the mix.

As Herbert Simon states in his 1969 seminal work The Sciences of the Artificial , the design process consists of the following seven stages: define , research , ideate , prototype , choose , implement and learn —and this has been the cornerstone of design processes ever since.

© Daniel Skrok and the Interaction Design Foundation, CC BY-NC-SA 3.0.

3. Head, Heart and Hand—AIGA

The American Institution of Graphic Arts (AIGA) states the value of modern design practice comes from designers’ unique blend of head, heart and hand. For example, design thinking participants wear many hats during the process and rely on their heads to solve complex problems. In the early stages, they also use their hearts to empathize and understand human needs and emotions . The particular gift of designers, however, is their ability to dive into practical creation by hand. The three combined create a holistic process which utilizes input from all of our faculties to be successful.

Designers have a unique blend of head, heart, and hand skills which combine to create holistic problem-solving abilities.

4. DeepDive™ Methodology—IDEO

The DeepDive™ technique was developed by IDEO as a way to rapidly immerse a group into a situation where they can effectively problem-solve and generate ideas. They expressed this variant of the design thinking process live on ABC Nightline back in the late ’90s.

An abridged version from the report about IDEO's DeepDive™ Methodology that was aired on ABC Nightline in the late '90s.

IDEO's DeepDive™ comprised the following steps:

© Daniel Skrok and Interaction Design Foundation, CC BY-NC-SA 3.0.

The DeepDive™ methodology was further documented and enhanced by Andy Boynton and Bill Fischer of the International Institute for Management Development (IMD) business school, and Deloitte Consulting then acquired the rights in 2006.

5. The 3-Stage Design Thinking Process—IDEO

IDEO uses a different process and, while it only has three stages, it covers pretty much the same ground as the other processes in this compilation.

IDEO’s 3-Stage Design Thinking Process consists of inspiration, ideation and implementation.

© IDEO, Public License.

The three stages are:

Inspire : The problem or opportunity inspires and motivates the search for a solution.

Ideate : A process of synthesis distills insights which can lead to solutions or opportunities for change.

Implement : The best ideas are turned into a concrete, fully conceived action plan.

IDEO also released a deck of IDEO Method Cards which cover the modes Learn , Look , Ask and Try —each with their own collection of methods for an entire innovation cycle.

6. Design Kit: The Human-Centered Design Toolkit—IDEO

IDEO has also developed contextualized toolkits, which repackage the design thinking process. One such iteration focuses on the social innovation setting in developing countries. For this context, the terminology needs to be simplified, made memorable and restructured for the typical challenges faced in those environments. The Human-Centered Design (HCD) Toolkit they developed for this purpose was re-interpreted as an acronym to mean hear , create and deliver.

IDEO’s 3-Stage Design Thinking Process was reinterpreted as Hear, Create, Deliver to coincide with the “HCD” acronym for Human-Centered Design.

Hear : Similar to early phases in other design thinking processes , the hear stage develops an empathic understanding of users, and defines the problem the team is trying to solve. It helps participants gain a solid foundation in the context of the problem and sufficiently reframe it to take on new perspectives.

Create : The create stage is concerned with exploration, experimentation and learning through making—similar to the ideate and prototype phases in d.school’s 5-stage approach. Potential areas of exploration are pinpointed, and those closest to the problem will be engaged with further to co-create solutions. This allows design teams to maintain the highest levels of empathy during early design phases and weed out any potential problematic assumptions made by designers who do not sufficiently understand the context.

Deliver : The deliver phase of the HCD process is centered around logistical implementation. It also aims to help overcome any obstacles which may exist when rolling out a solution within the required context. It is essential that solutions integrate into communities and bypass other roadblocks during implementation, and this stage will help participants achieve that.

7. The “Double Diamond” Design Process Model—Design Council

In the mid-2000s the British Design Council popularized the Double Diamond diagram, based on Béla H. Bánáthy’s 1996 “divergence-convergence” model. The Double Diamond diagram graphically represents a design thinking process. It highlights the divergent and convergent styles of thinking involved, and is broken down into four distinct phases:

Discover : The start of the project is based around an initial idea or inspiration, often gained from the identification of user needs .

Define : These user needs are interpreted and aligned with business objectives.

Develop : Design-led solutions are developed, iterated and tested.

Deliver : The end product or service is finalized and launched into the market.

The Double Diamond diagram from the Design Council helps to visualize the divergent and convergent stages of the design thinking process, and highlights the different modes of thinking that designers use.

8. Collective Action Toolkit (CAT) — Frog Design

Frog Design is an organization committed to social impact. They developed the Collective Action Toolkit (CAT) as a way to make the design process accessible to communities around the world—with the hope it will help them organize, collaborate and create solutions for the specific problems which affect their local area.

Frog’s Collective Action Toolkit process.

© Frog, Public License.

Frog’s CAT breaks the process down into six stages:

Clarify your goal : Agree on the problem you want to try and solve, as well as what goals you want to achieve.

Build your group : Bring people together in your community, identify their strengths and map out their commitment to your goals.

Seek new understanding : Ask questions, explore how people live and discover unmet needs to inform and inspire your group, and gain others’ perspectives.

Imagine new ideas : Come up with new solutions and decide what makes some of them more achievable than others.

Make something real : Test and experiment your better ideas and see what you discover.

Plan for action : Organize what each group member should do to reach your shared goals.

Frog make it clear these stages form a non-linear process, and you might have to revisit stages multiple times during a project—particularly the clarification stage.

9. Designing for Growth—Jeanne Liedtka & Tim Ogilvie

Jeanne Liedtka is a professor at the University of Virginia’s Darden School of Business, and Tim Ogilvie is CEO of innovation strategy consultancy firm Peer Insight. Both are experts in design thinking and strategic thinking, and their book, Designing for Growth , puts forward a unique spin on the design thinking journey. It reframes the terminology into a more inquisitive and intuitive set of four what questions:

What is ? Explore the current reality.

What if ? Envision alternative futures.

What wow s? Get users to help you make some tough choices.

What works ? Make the solution work in-market, and as a business.

“What if...?”—one of the most powerful phrases in the English language, and for good reason.

© Christine Prefontaine, CC BY-SA 2.0.

10. The LUMA System of Innovation—LUMA Institute

The LUMA System of Innovation process consists of looking, understanding and making.

© LUMA Institute, Public License.

The LUMA Institute is a global firm that teaches innovation and human-centered design. The team at LUMA have developed their own expression of the design thinking process which they have distilled into three key design skills: Looking , Understanding and Making.

They claim their system is flexible and versatile so it can be used for any type of problem, in any type of setting. The process unfolds through either a single set of activities or a combination of multiple methods—the latter being required for more complex challenges.

The Take Away

You could spend weeks exploring the many versions of the design thinking process which exist in the world today. Their differences and similarities are, in fact, celebrations of variety and non-conformity.

Now you’ve read the 10 most popular frameworks above, maybe you’ve decided on a favorite. Regardless of which approach you like the most, it’s important you peel away the steps and terminology and focus instead on its principles. At first sight, the design thinking process can seem mysterious, chaotic and, at times, complex. However, it's a discipline which will mature in you with direct practice. You will learn things in a practical manner and grow in confidence with each new experience of it. You may even be tempted to develop your own expression of these steps, modes and phases to suit a completely new context—that's part of the beauty of design thinking!

References & Where to Learn More

Herbert Simon, The Sciences of the Artificial , 1969.

Mike Morrison, Deep-Dive Brainstorming Technique – IDEO , 2018.

d.school, An Introduction to Design Thinking PROCESS GUIDE , 2010: https://web.stanford.edu/~mshanks/MichaelShanks/files/509554.pdf

David Clifford, Equity-Centered Design Framework .

IDEO, Design Kit: The Human-Centered Design Toolkit .

Jeanne Liedtka and Tim Ogilvie, Designing for Growth: A Design Thinking Tool Kit for Managers , 2011.

LUMA Institute, Our System .

Hero Image: © Teo Yu Siang and the Interaction Design Foundation, CC BY-NC-SA 3.0.

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