Design thinking( AKomanga Kaihanga)

 Design thinking is a non-linear, iterative process that teams use to understand users, challenge assumptions, redefine problems and create innovative solutions to prototype and test. Involving five phases—Empathize, Define, Ideate, Prototype and Test—it is most useful to tackle problems that are ill-defined or unknown.

Stage 1: Empathize is the first stage of the design thinking process. Design teams conduct research to get personal grasps of their users’ needs. They set aside assumptions to obtain insights into the users’ world by observing and consulting with users. This way, they can understand users’ experiences, motivations and problems. 

Stage 2: Define—State Your Users' Needs and Problems: It’s time to accumulate the information gathered during the Empathize stage. You then analyze your observations and synthesize them to define the core problems you and your team have identified. These definitions are called problem statements. You can create personas to help keep your efforts human-centred before proceeding to ideation.

Stage 3: Ideate—Challenge Assumptions and Create Ideas: Now, you’re ready to generate ideas. The solid background of knowledge from the first two phases means you can start to “think outside the box”, look for alternative ways to view the problem and identify innovative solutions to the problem statement you’ve created. Brainstorming is particularly useful here..

Stage 4: Prototype—Start to Create Solutions: This is an experimental phase. The aim is to identify the best possible solution for each problem found. Your team should produce some inexpensive, scaled-down versions of the product (or specific features found within the product) to investigate the ideas you’ve generated. This could involve simply paper prototyping.

Stage 5: Test—Try Your Solutions Out: Evaluators rigorously test the prototypes. Although this is the final phase, design thinking is iterative: Teams often use the results to redefine one or more further problems. So, you can return to previous stages to make further iterations, alterations and refinements – to find or rule out alternative solutions.

Overall, you should understand that these stages are different modes that contribute to the entire design project, rather than sequential steps. Your goal throughout is to gain the deepest understanding of the users and what their ideal solution/product would be.