What is Design Thinking and why is it important in the digital world?
Do you know what Design Thinking is? How can this concept be essential for the development of technological products? The answers to these questions will be addressed in this article.
Design Thinking is a process that aims to understand users, challenge assumptions, and create creative solutions to problems while creating prototypes.
In recent years, it has become especially relevant to understand human behavior and adapt technology to these ever-changing behaviors. The goal of Design Thinking is to focus development on the human and solve some serious problems for the user.
Design Thinking gives teams a way to think outside the box to solve problems. Companies on a global scale like Google, Apple and Airbnb apply this method of thinking, which is already taught at universities and used by leaders in all sectors.
The Design Thinking process can be divided into five distinct phases: Empathy, Definition, Idealization, Prototypes, Tests.
Empathy is about researching the needs of users. That is, it allows the designer to deeply understand the problem he is trying to solve. Empathy is the first step in the process of human-centered design and one of the most important because it allows one to leave aside assumptions and to have access to the actual perception of the users.
Definition is the stage at which users' needs and problems are defined. The information collected during the first phase is summarized in order to identify the main difficulties. The problem must always be centered on the human being.
The third step, Idealization, serves to challenge assumptions and create ideas that solve problems. This is where the creative process begins. The goal is to look for innovative solutions to the problem that was stated earlier.
The creation of the Prototype is an experimental phase in which the ideas of the previous phase materialize in search of the best possible solution for the problems identified. The teams will create several minimalist and low-cost versions to determine if the solutions are the ideal solutions.
Finally, testers must rigorously test the final product, using the best solutions created in the Prototype phase. In theory, this will be the last phase of the model, but in a repetitive process like Design Thinking, designers may choose to return to the earlier stages of the process.