Design Thinking, Its Process, and User Empathy.
Design Thinking
Design thinking can be referred to as a process for creative problem-solving.
Design thinking is a human-centered approach to innovation coupled with understanding customer’s needs, rapid prototyping, and generating creative ideas that will have an effect on the way you develop products, services, processes, and organizations.
Design Thinking is an iterative process, It provides a solution-based approach to solving problems, Design Thinking helps us in the process of questioning and deriving a solution suitable for the challenge at hand.
Design Thinking Processes
Design Thinking Process is an actionable approach that can be used to tackle any problems. Its focuses are on user-centricity, creativity, innovation, and out-of-the-box thinking.
The design thinking process focuses on these 5 stages Empathize, Define, Ideate, Prototype, And Test.
Empathize
During the empathize phase, you’ll engage with and observe your target audience. At this stage, you want to feel the pain of your users and understand their challenges so you ask your target audience questions to understand their challenges and empathize with them.
Define
This is the next stage in the Design Process; here you define the problem based on the feedback you received from your target audience, Your problem statement sets out the specific challenge you will address throughout the design process. Here you focus solely on the user's need and what their main challenges are.
Ideate
This is the stage that follows the Define stage in Design Process. Herewith the problem statement clear in mind, you’ll now aim to come up with as many ideas and potential solutions as possible. Here you’ll use a range of different ideation techniques such as brainstorming, reverse thinking, and worst possible idea. Deliberate on all ideas and move on to the next stage. The Prototype Stage.
Prototype
After you have deliberated all different ideas in the Ideate Stage and you have narrowed your ideas down to the one that suits the challenge at hand, then you’ll now turn them into prototypes for user testing, Prototypes can be in the form of Wireframes, High-fidelity, Low fidelity Design, or Mockups which can be tested on real users for feedback and iterations.
Test
The last stage in the design thinking process is the Testing Stage, You will be testing your prototypes on real or representative users to gather feedback to further improve and iterate on the design for further testing or launching of the solution.
User Empathy
Empathy is defined as the ability to understand and share the feelings of another.
It describes the ability to put yourself in another person’s shoes; to truly see the world through their eyes in a given context or situation.
User Empathy is witnessed during the empathize phase, the designer spends time getting to know the user and understanding their needs, wants, and objectives.
A designer needs to see the problem he is trying to solve from the user's perspective to further understand the problem at hand and provide a solution for it.
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