Make your idea a reality. Ensure your solution happens and makes a difference to the people using it. This step is crucial in the framework, but it’s often overlooked. Don’t forget that design thinking isn’t just about coming up with ideas – you must make things happen. It’s not magic; it’s about putting in the work to create real change.
Return to your users for feedback. Ask yourself, "Does this solution meet their needs?" and "Has it improved how they feel, think, or do their tasks?" Put your solution before real customers and verify that it solves their issues. Has the users’ perspective during onboarding improved? Does the new landing page increase the time or money spent on your site? As you are executing your vision, continue to test along the way.
In the design thinking framework, the focus shifts towards testing the solution with actual users and implementing it based on their feedback. During this phase, the prototype—whether a early product, service, or strategy—is evaluated for its effectiveness in meeting user needs and expectations. You put the vision into effect and ensure that your solution is materialized and touches the lives of your end users.
This phase involves creating an early, inexpensive, and scaled-down version of the product to reveal any problems with the current design. Prototyping allows you to bring your ideas to life, test the practicability of the current design, and potentially investigate how a sample of users think and feel about a product before investing heavily.
This stage you will focus on generating a multitude of ideas to address the defined problem. Unlike earlier stages, where the focus is on understanding users and clarifying the issues, ideate aims to produce quantity over quality. The goal here is to foster creativity and innovation, enabling you to consider various perspectives, brainstorm alternative ways to view the problem and identify solutions to the problem statement.
Try to generate as many solutions as possible during this solution exploration phase. If you collaborate with your team members, cultivate an open, judgment-free ideation space. Venture away from the norms, explore new angles, and think outside the box to approach complex problems from a human perspective. The goal is to explore as many possibilities as possible without constraints.
An integral part of the design thinking process is the definition of a meaningful and actionable problem statement, which you will focus on solving. This is perhaps the most challenging part of the framework, as the definition of a problem will require you to synthesize your observations about your users from the previous empathize stage.
Understand your users by researching what they do, say, think, and feel. For example, to improve the onboarding process for new users, talk to them directly and observe their actions, thoughts, and desires. Ask questions like “What makes them happy or unhappy?” or “Where do they face problems?” This helps you empathize with users and understand their viewpoints.
Research methods such as Quantitative Research and Qualitative Research are complementary methods that you can combine in your surveys to get results that are both wide-reaching and deep.
The author of Change by Design, Tim Brown (2010) proposed that “reforming everything starts with design”. It refers to
the process of analytical and creative problem solving and all the steps involved such as generating
ideas, building prototypes, testing the prototypes, obtaining feedback, and integrating new feedback
into the original design.
