Design Thinking Process - Week 1

The design thinking process is used to come up with products that satisfy a customer's needs. There are five steps:

1. Empathize
This step is used to find out the customer's preferences. Since the designer's purpose is to satisfy and make a product for that customer, this step is especially important. By interviewing the customer, the designer can get a sense for the requirements the customer puts on the products as well as his or her likes or dislikes. After the designer has a list of the customer's requirements, he or she may not be able to design a product that can incorporate all of them, so the designer would have to ask the customer what the most important requirements are.

2. Define
After looking at the customer's preferences, the designer has to define the problem. Then, when he or she knows what to focus on, the designer would think up solutions to the challenge they have defined.

3. Ideate
In the Ideate phase, the designer comes up with a few rough sketches of the product that they are making, based on both the Empathize and Define phases. In this way, he or she can visualize the product that they are making. After this, the designer shows the customer the sketches and explains his or her ideas. The customer would then give objective feedback based on what they want to accomplish with that product and their own personal preferences.

4. Prototype
In this phase, the designer has to create a small scale version of the product.

5. Test
In this phase, the designer tests the prototype, making sure that all of the user requirements are incorporated.