1. Empathise

The first stage of the Design Thinking process is to gain an empathic understanding of the problem you are trying to solve or the opportunity you are trying to grasp. This involves consulting experts to find out more about the area of concern and opportunities through observing, engaging and empathizing with people involved (personas like users, clients, partners, authorities)  to understand their experiences and motivations, as well as immersing yourself in the physical environment (like the product design) so you can gain a deeper personal understanding of the issues and possibilities involved. Empathy is crucial to a human-centered design process such as Design Thinking, and empathy allow design thinkers to set aside their own assumptions about the world in order to gain insight into users and their needs.

Depending on time constraints, a substantial amount of information is gathered at this stage to use during the next stage and to develop the best possible understanding of the users, their needs, and the problems that underlie the development or improvement of that particular product.

This step is determined by the entry point you choose for making your physical products digital – shape, ship or share – so how you balance your focus on authenticity, supply chain and digital marketing.

Also during this phase you validate the level of understanding and adoption of technologies like NFC, pdi, QR and blockchain.

2. Define (the Problem or the Opportunity)

During the Define stage, you put together the information you have created and gathered during the Empathise stage. This is where you will analyse your observations and synthesise them in order to define the core problem and opportunities that you and your team have identified up to this point. You should seek to define the problem or opportunity as a statement in a human-centred manner.

To illustrate, instead of defining the challenge as your own wish or a need of the company such as, “We need to reduce fake with 10%,” a much better way to define the challenge would be, “Buyers of fake need to be discouraged, and seduced to buy our authentic product’.

The Define stage will help the designers in your team gather great ideas to establish features, functions, and any other elements that will allow them to solve the problems or, at the very least, allow users to resolve issues themselves with the minimum of difficulty. In the Define stage you will start to progress to the third stage, IdeAte, by asking questions which can help you look for ideas for solutions by asking: “Would it be great if we… encourage selected personas to perform an action that benefits them and also involves your company’s product?”

3. IdeAte

Where the name IdeAtics is refering to….during the third stage of the Design Thinking process, designers are ready to start generating ideas. You’ve grown to understand your users and their needs in the Empathise stage, and you’ve analysed and synthesised your observations in the Define stage, and ended up with a human-centered problem / opportunity statement. With this solid background, you and your team members can start to “think outside the box” to identify new solutions to the statements you’ve created, and you can start to look for alternative ways of viewing the problem. 

4. Prototype

Here you can use start up product from our shop … the design team will now produce a number of inexpensive, scaled down versions of the product or specific features found within the product, so they can investigate the problem solutions generated in the previous stage. Prototypes may be shared and tested within the team itself, in other departments, or on a small group of people outside the design team. This is an experimental phase, and the aim is to identify the best possible solution for each of the problems identified during the first three stages. The solutions are implemented within the prototypes, and, one by one, they are investigated and either accepted, improved and re-examined, or rejected on the basis of the users’ experiences. By the end of this stage, the design team will have a better idea of the constraints inherent to the product and the problems that are present, and have a clearer view of how real users would behave, think, and feel when interacting with the end product.

5. Test

Designers or evaluators rigorously test the complete product using the best solutions identified during the prototyping phase. This is the final stage of the 5 stage-model, but in an iterative process, the results generated during the testing phase are often used to redefine one or more problems and inform the understanding of the users, the conditions of use, how people think, behave, and feel, and to empathise. Even during this phase, alterations and refinements are made in order to rule out problem solutions and derive as deep an understanding of the product and its users as possible.

The Non-Linear Nature of Design Thinking

We may have outlined a direct and linear Design Thinking process in which one stage seemingly leads to the next with a logical conclusion at user testing. However, in practice, the process is carried out in a more flexible and non-linear fashion. For example, different groups within the design team may conduct more than one stage concurrently, or the designers may collect information and prototype during the entire project so as to enable them to bring their ideas to life and visualise the problem solutions. Also, results from the testing phase may reveal some insights about users, which in turn may lead to another brainstorming session (Ideate) or the development of new prototypes (Prototype)A