What is design thinking

What is design thinking and why is it important?

Here’s what you need to know about this creative problem-solving technique, including a definition and why it’s taking the business world by storm

Design thinking started out as a process for creating sleek new technology and products. But this methodology is now widely used across both the private and public sectors, for business and personal projects, all around the world.

Design-thinking methodology was popularized by design consulting firm IDEO. The methods gained momentum in the larger business world after Tim Brown, the chief executive officer of IDEO, wrote an article in 2008 for the Harvard Business Review about the use of design thinking in business—including at a California hospital, a Japanese bicycle company, and the healthcare industry in India. Today, one of the most popular courses at Stanford University is Designing Your Life, which applies design thinking to building a joyful career and life.

Here’s what design thinking is, how it works, and why it’s important.

What is design thinking?

Design thinking is a process for solving problems by prioritizing the consumer’s needs above all else. It relies on observing, with empathy, how people interact with their environments, and employs an iterative, hands-on approach to creating innovative solutions.

Design thinking is “human-centered,” which means that it uses evidence of how consumers (humans) actually engage with a product or service, rather than how someone else or an organization thinks they will engage with it. To be truly human-centered, designers watch how people use a product or service and continue to refine the product or service in order to improve the consumer’s experience. This is the “iterative” part of design thinking. It favors moving quickly to get prototypes out to test, rather than endless research or rumination.

In contrast to traditional problem-solving, which is a linear process of identifying a problem and then brainstorming solutions, design thinking only works if it is iterative. It is less of a means to get to a single solution, and more of a way to continuously evolve your thinking and respond to consumer needs.

Why is design thinking important?

Design thinking enables organizations to create lasting value for consumers. The process is useful in any complex system (not just design systems) because it:

Aims to solve a concrete human need

Using an observational, human-centric approach, teams can uncover pain points from the consumer that they hadn’t previously thought of, ones that the consumer may not even be aware of. Design thinking can provide solutions to those pain points once they’re identified.

Tackles problems that are ambiguous or difficult to define

Consumers often don’t know what problem they have that needs solving or they can’t verbalize it. But upon careful observation, one can identify problems based on what they see from real consumer behavior rather than simply working off of their ideas of the consumer. This helps define ambiguous problems and in turn makes it easier to surface solutions.

Leads to more innovative solutions

Humans are not capable of imagining things that are not believed to be possible, which makes it impossible for them to ask for things that do not yet exist. Design thinking can help surface some of these unknown pain points that would otherwise have never been known. Using an iterative approach to tackle those problems often lead to non-obvious, innovative solutions.

Makes organizations run faster and more efficiently

Rather than researching a problem for a long time without devising an outcome, design thinking favors creating prototypes and then testing to see how effective they are.

WeWork Innovation Pointe 2 in Lehi, UT.

The five stages of the design-thinking process

Design thinking follows a five-stage framework.

1. Empathize

In this first stage, the designer observes consumers to gain a deeper understanding of how they interact with or are affected by a product or issue. The observations must happen with empathy, which means withholding judgment and not imparting preconceived notions of what the consumer needs. Observing with empathy is powerful because it can uncover issues the consumer didn’t even know they had or that they could not themselves verbalize. From this point, it’s easier to understand the human need for which you are designing.

2. Define

In this second stage, you gather your observations from the first stage to define the problem you’re trying to solve. Think about the difficulties your consumers are brushing up against, what they repeatedly struggle with, and what you’ve gleaned from how they’re affected by the issue. Once you synthesize your findings, you are able to define the problem they face.

3. Ideate

The next step is to brainstorm ideas about how to solve the problem you’ve identified. These ideation sessions could be in a group, where your team gathers in an office space that encourages creativity and collaboration, an innovation lab, or can be done solo. The important part is to generate a bunch of different ideas. At the end of this process, you’ll come up with a few ideas with which to move forward.

4. Prototype

This is the stage that turns ideas into an actual solution. Prototypes are not meant to be perfect. The point of a prototype is to come out quickly with a concrete version of the idea to see how it is accepted by consumers. Examples of prototypes include a landing page to test consumer desire for a product or a video that demonstrates streamlined logistic processes.

5. Test

Once you give a prototyped solution to consumers, you must observe how they interact with it. This testing stage is the one in which you collect feedback on your work.

The design-thinking process is an iterative, rather than linear, one. At the end of the fifth stage, you’ll likely have to go back to one or several of the other stages. Perhaps the testing has shown you need to develop another prototype, for which you’d return to the fourth stage. Or perhaps it’s shown that you’ve misdefined the consumer’s needs. If so, you would have to return to an earlier stage of the process.

What industries and roles can benefit from design thinking?

While design thinking originated with designers, it is now widely used by people from all disciplines. Even among design agencies the work is famously cross-functional: IDEO and similar agencies hire non-designers—chefs, engineers, social scientists, biologists—and integrate them into their project teams to add perspective.

Our growth innovation team at WeWork comprises a designer, who focuses on applying this method for the end consumer of a project; a technologist, who uses this technique to deliver value to engineers; and a business strategist, who applies this method to deliver value for business owners and various stakeholders.

Design thinking has been used at Kaiser Permanente to overhaul the system of shift changes among nursing staff. It has helped the Singapore government make the process for securing a work pass in the nation-state easier and more human. Design thinking has been used to solve business problems at companies like Toyota, Intuit, SAP, and IBM.

One reason for the proliferation of design thinking in industries is that it’s useful to break down problems in any complex system, be it business, government, or social organizations. It can be used to explore big questions about how to respond to the growth of technology and globalization, how to pivot in response to rapid change, and how to support individuals while catering to larger organizations.

Design thinking can be used by all departments in a business. It can be fostered by bright, airy physical workspaces that cater to the way employees prefer to work. To employ design thinking in all projects, managers should first define the consumers they’re trying to help and then employ the five stages of design thinking to define and tackle the identified problems. Employing a design-thinking process makes it more likely a business will be innovative, creative, and ultimately more human.

What Is Design Thinking?

In this article

Learn how UI/UX designers use design thinking to solve user-focused problems and discover how to acquire key design thinking skills.

Design thinking is a five-stage methodology that fuels outside-the-box thinking and manifests creative solutions to user problems. Its human-centric approach provides UI/UX designers with a range of user-specific goals and offers businesses the chance to innovate and improve customer satisfaction and retention.

The design thinking process is broken up into five specific design thinking stages: empathy, definition, ideation, prototyping, and testing.

What Is Design Thinking?

For most designers, envisioning the end result of a large project—the development of a new product, the construction of a building, or the engineering of a new machine—is thrilling. But the journey to get there is often less so. This is where design thinking can help.

Design thinking lays the foundation of structural and iterative practices used to refine, test, and evolve new ideas.

Why Is Design Thinking Important?

Design thinking is critical for business because it focuses on solutions, not problems. The creative and critical thinking skills of design thinking have proven to be a repeatable problem solving protocol that allows businesses to achieve greater results.

The ultimate goal of design thinking is to design user-friendly products and services. Design thinking allows designers to blueprint solutions to unique user challenges and constantly innovate while doing so.

How Do You Learn Design Thinking?

It’s nearly impossible to work in modern UX or UI design without utilizing the basics of design thinking. Many education tracks, career paths, online bootcamps, and design degrees emphasize a strong core understanding of design thinking early in their curriculums. Design thinking workshops and design thinking training now make up part of every robust design curriculum.

It’s important to note that design thinking is not a replacement for UI/UX design. Rather, design thinking is a philosophical means of solving problems, while user experience is the overall end goal of the effort.

In order to learn design thinking, you must possess a solid foundation in UI/UX design, and a key number of essential skills, including:

Design thinking courses and bootcamps will help you gain a more advanced of the design thinking methodology, and usually cover things like:

For example, Springboard’s UI/UX Design Career Track has a dedicated module that covers more than 17 hours of material on design thinking.

What Are the 5 Stages of Design Thinking?

As with any good methodology, design thinking has an iterative and non-linear routine. Design thinking encompasses five different stages that encourage creators to examine different problems and assumptions from a variety of untested angles.

There are five stages of design thinking:

What Are the Key Design Thinking Tools?

Tools like Typeform, Sketch, and HotJar are all popular platforms that designers lean into to track progress throughout design thinking. For more design-centric tooling, design thinkers lean into popular wire-framing platforms such as InVisionApp or Figma to sketch ideas and iterate frequently as they learn.

What Are Design Thinking Best Practices?

Design thinking best practices encompass a few major points.

How Springboard Can Help You Master Design Thinking

Springboard can help you walk away with a comprehensive understanding of every stage in the design thinking processes, including competitive research, user research, and usability testing.

Springboard’s comprehensive design courses require you to apply design thinking skills in real-time during portfolio and industry projects. You will also learn several tools frequently used across all corners of design thinking, including Sketch, Adobe XD, and Figma.

Springboard’s Introduction to Design course allows you to experience the Springboard curriculum in a bite-sized, easily digestible format in four-weeks-time. For aspiring designers who are either curious about new technical skills or want to see if a career in design is a good fit, the design thinking course offers basic design concepts. You will learn how to:

For those ready to jump into a more intensive design learning experience, Springboard’s UI/UX Design Career Track teaches more in-depth design concepts. You will learn:

Success Story: How Airbnb Used Design Thinking To Grow Its Business

The travel company Airbnb is a good example of continuous design thinking. Initially seeded as a Y-Combinator company in 2008, Airbnb was struggling after a lackluster launch in 2009. Rather than doubling down and leaning into their assumptions around building a scalable homestay business, Airbnb’s founders instead leaned in another direction after they noticed that almost all online homestay listings featured poor-quality photographs.

This was a human experience problem. Airbnb’s first customers couldn’t afford, didn’t own, or know how to utilize high-end cameras to spice up their listings. To remedy this, Airbnb’s founders rented a camera, traveled to the various homes available for rent, and upgraded every available listing’s photographs themselves. While this obviously wasn’t scalable, it worked as a short-term solution. In less than a month, Airbnb had not only doubled its revenue but had also effectively adopted empathetic design thinking as a core part of its culture.

Since you’re here…
Are you a future UX designer? Enroll in our UI/UX Bootcamp and join over 10,000 students who have successfully changed careers with us. Want to get wireframing right this second? Check out our free UX learning path today.

About Sakshi Gupta

Sakshi is a Senior Associate Editor at Springboard. She is a technology enthusiast who loves to read and write about emerging tech. She is a content marketer and has experience working in the Indian and US markets.

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What Is Design Thinking? A Comprehensive Beginner’s Guide

Design thinking is both an ideology and a process, concerned with solving complex problems in a highly user-centric way.

In this guide, we’ll give you a detailed definition of design thinking, illustrate exactly what the process involves, and underline why it matters: What is the value of design thinking, and in what contexts is it particularly useful?

We’ll also analyze the relationship between user experience design and design thinking and discuss two real-world case studies that show design thinking in action.

All sound a little overwhelming? Don’t worry—we’ve broken the guide down into digestible chunks. First, watch this video for a gentle introduction to the field from design expert and CareerFoundry mentor, Camren Browne:

If you want to skip to a certain section, just click on the relevant menu heading and you’ll go straight there.

Ready to explore the fascinating world of Design Thinking? Let’s go!

1. What is Design Thinking?

Design thinking is an approach used for practical and creative problem-solving. It is based heavily on the methods and processes that designers use (hence the name), but it has actually evolved from a range of different fields—including architecture, engineering and business. Design thinking can also be applied to any field; it doesn’t necessarily have to be design-specific.

It’s important to note that design thinking is different from user-centered design. Learn more about this other approach to design here: Design Thinking vs. User-Centered Design.

Design thinking is extremely user-centric. It focuses on humans first and foremost, seeking to understand people’s needs and come up with effective solutions to meet those needs. It is what we call a solution-based approach to problem-solving.

What does this actually mean? Let’s take a look.

What’s the difference between Solution-Based and Problem-Based Thinking?

As the name suggests, solution-based thinking focuses on finding solutions; coming up with something constructive to effectively tackle a certain problem. This is the opposite of problem-based thinking, which tends to fixate on obstacles and limitations.

A good example of these two approaches in action is an empirical study carried out by Bryan Lawson, a Professor of Architecture at the University of Sheffield. Lawson wanted to investigate how a group of designers and a group of scientists would approach a particular problem.

He set each group the task of creating one-layer structures from a set of coloured blocks. The perimeter of the structure had to use either as many red bricks or as many blue bricks as possible (we can think of this is as the solution, the desired outcome), but there were unspecified rules regarding the placement and relationship of some of the blocks (the problem or limitation).

Lawson published his findings in his book How Designers Think, in which he observed that the scientists focused on identifying the problem (problem-based thinking) whilst the designers prioritized the need to find the right solution:

“The scientists adopted a technique of trying out a series of designs which used as many different blocks and combinations of blocks as possible as quickly as possible. Thus they tried to maximise the information available to them about the allowed combinations. If they could discover the rule governing which combinations of blocks were allowed, they could then search for an arrangement which would optimise the required colour around the layout.”

The designers, on the other hand:

“…selected their blocks in order to achieve the appropriately coloured perimeter. If this proved not to be an acceptable combination, then the next most favourably coloured block combination would be substituted and so on until an acceptable solution was discovered.”

Lawson’s findings go to the heart of what Design Thinking is all about: it’s an iterative process which favours ongoing experimentation until the right solution is found.

To learn more, check out this video introduction to design thinking, led by expert designer Camren Browne. For now, let’s take a look at the design thinking process and what that entails.

2. What is the Design Thinking process?

As already mentioned, the Design Thinking process is progressive and highly user-centric. Before looking at the process in more detail, let’s consider the four principles of Design Thinking as laid out by Christoph Meinel and Harry Leifer of the Hasso-Plattner-Institute of Design at Stanford University, California.

The Four Principles of Design Thinking

The Five Phases of Design Thinking

Based on these four principles, the Design Thinking process can be broken down into five steps or phases, as per the aforementioned Hasso-Plattner-Institute of Design at Stanford (otherwise known as d.school): Empathise, Define, Ideate, Prototype and Test. Let’s explore each of these in more detail.

Phase 1: Empathise

Empathy provides the critical starting point for Design Thinking. The first stage of the process is spent getting to know the user and understanding their wants, needs and objectives.

This means observing and engaging with people in order to understand them on a psychological and emotional level. During this phase, the designer seeks to set aside their assumptions and gather real insights about the user. Learn all about key empathy-building methods in our guide.

Phase 2: Define

The second stage in the Design Thinking process is dedicated to defining the problem. You’ll gather all of your findings from the empathise phase and start to make sense of them: what difficulties and barriers are your users coming up against? What patterns do you observe? What is the big user problem that your team needs to solve?

By the end of the define phase, you will have a clear problem statement. The key here is to frame the problem in a user-centered way; rather than saying “We need to…”, frame it in terms of your user: “Retirees in the Bay area need…”

Once you’ve formulated the problem into words, you can start to come up with solutions and ideas — which brings us onto stage three.

Phase 3: Ideate

With a solid understanding of your users and a clear problem statement in mind, it’s time to start working on potential solutions. The third phase in the Design Thinking process is where the creativity happens, and it’s crucial to point out that the ideation stage is a judgement-free zone!

Designers will hold ideation sessions in order to come up with as many new angles and ideas as possible. There are many different types of ideation technique that designers might use, from brainstorming and mindmapping to bodystorming (roleplay scenarios) and provocation—an extreme lateral-thinking technique that gets the designer to challenge established beliefs and explore new options and alternatives.

Towards the end of the ideation phase, you’ll narrow it down to a few ideas with which to move forward. You can learn about all the most important ideation techniques in this guide.

Phase 4: Prototype

The fourth step in the Design Thinking process is all about experimentation and turning ideas into tangible products. A prototype is basically a scaled-down version of the product which incorporates the potential solutions identified in the previous stages. This step is key in putting each solution to the test and highlighting any constraints and flaws.

Throughout the prototype stage, the proposed solutions may be accepted, improved, redesigned or rejected depending on how they fare in prototype form. You can read all about the prototyping stage of Design Thinking in our in-depth guide.

Phase 5: Test

After prototyping comes user testing, but it’s important to note that this is rarely the end of the Design Thinking process. In reality, the results of the testing phase will often lead you back to a previous step, providing the insights you need to redefine the original problem statement or to come up with new ideas you hadn’t thought of before. Learn all about user testing in this guide.

Is Design Thinking a linear process?

No! You might look at these clearly defined steps and see a very logical sequence with a set order. However, the Design Thinking process is not linear; it is flexible and fluid, looping back and around and in on itself! With each new discovery that a certain phase brings, you’ll need to rethink and redefine what you’ve done before—you’ll never be moving in a straight line!

3. What is the purpose of Design Thinking?

Now we know more about how Design Thinking works, let’s consider why it matters. There are many benefits of using a Design Thinking approach—be it in a business, educational, personal or social context.

First and foremost, Design Thinking fosters creativity and innovation. As human beings, we rely on the knowledge and experiences we have accumulated to inform our actions. We form patterns and habits that, while useful in certain situations, can limit our view of things when it comes to problem-solving.

Rather than repeating the same tried-and-tested methods, Design Thinking encourages us to remove our blinkers and consider alternative solutions. The entire process lends itself to challenging assumptions and exploring new pathways and ideas.

Design Thinking is often cited as the healthy middle ground of problem-solving—it is not steeped wholly in emotion and intuition, nor does it rely solely on analytics, science and rationale; it uses a mixture of both.

Another great benefit of Design Thinking is that it puts humans first. By focusing so heavily on empathy, it encourages businesses and organizations to consider the real people who use their products and services—meaning they are much more likely to hit the mark when it comes to creating meaningful user experiences. For the user, this means better, more useful products that actually improve our lives. For businesses, this means happy customers and a healthier bottom line.

What’s a “wicked problem” in Design Thinking?

Design Thinking is especially useful when it comes to solving “wicked problems”. The term “wicked problem” was coined by design theorist Horst Rittel in the 1970s to describe particularly tricky problems that are highly ambiguous in nature.

With wicked problems, there are many unknown factors; unlike “tame” problems, there is no definitive solution. In fact, solving one aspect of a wicked problem is likely to reveal or give rise to further challenges. Another key characteristic of wicked problems is that they have no stopping point; as the nature of the problem changes over time, so must the solution.

Solving wicked problems is therefore an ongoing process that requires Design Thinking! Some examples of wicked problems in our society today include things like poverty, hunger, and climate change.

If you’d like to learn more about them, and how Design Thinking can help tackle them, check out our full guide to wicked problems.

4. Design Thinking in the workplace: How do Design Thinking, lean, and agile work together?

Now we know what Design Thinking is, let’s consider how it fits into the overall product design process. You may be familiar with the terms “lean” and “agile”—and, as a UX designer, it’s important to understand how these three approaches work together.

What are lean and agile?

Based on the principles of lean manufacturing, lean UX focuses on streamlining the design process as much as possible—minimizing waste and maximizing value. Some core tenets of lean UX are:

Lean UX is a technique that works in conjunction with agile development methods. Agile is a software development process that works in iterative, incremental cycles known as sprints. Unlike traditional development methods, agile is flexible and adaptive. Based on the Agile Development Manifesto created in 2001, agile adheres to the following principles:

Combining Design Thinking with lean and agile

Design Thinking, lean, and agile are often seen as three separate approaches. Companies and teams will ask themselves whether to use lean or agile or Design Thinking—but actually, they can (and should!) be merged for optimal results.

Why? Because applying Design Thinking in a lean, agile environment helps to create a product development process that is not only user-centric, but also highly efficient from a business perspective. While it’s true that each approach has its own modus operandi, there is also significant overlap.

Combining principles from each can be crucial in keeping cross-functional teams on the same page—ensuring that designers, developers, product managers, and business stakeholders are all collaborating on one common vision.

So how do Design Thinking, lean, and agile work together?

As Jonny Schneider, Product Strategy and Design Principal at ThoughtWorks, explains: “Design Thinking is how we explore and solve problems; Lean is our framework for testing our beliefs and learning our way to the right outcomes; Agile is how we adapt to changing conditions with software.”

That’s all well and good, but what does it look like in practice?

As we’ve learned, Design Thinking is a solution-based approach to exploring and solving problems. It focuses on generating ideas with a specific problem in mind, keeping the user at the heart of the process throughout. Once you’ve established and designed a suitable solution, you’ll start to incorporate lean principles—testing your ideas, gathering quick and ongoing feedback to see what works—with particular emphasis on cross-team collaboration and overcoming departmental silos.

Agile ties all of this into short sprint cycles, allowing for adaptability in the face of change. In an agile environment, products are improved and built upon incrementally. Again, cross-team collaboration plays a crucial role; agile is all about delivering value that benefits both the end user and the business as a whole.

Together, Design Thinking, lean, and agile cut out unnecessary processes and documentation, leveraging the contributions of all key stakeholders for continuous delivery and improvement.

5. What are the benefits of Design Thinking at work?

As a designer, you have a pivotal role to play in shaping the products and experiences that your company puts to market. Integrating Design Thinking into your process can add huge business value, ultimately ensuring that the products you design are not only desirable for customers, but also viable in terms of company budget and resources.

With that in mind, let’s consider some of the main benefits of using Design Thinking at work:

Whether you’re establishing a Design Thinking culture on a company-wide scale, or simply trying to improve your approach to user-centric design, Design Thinking will help you to innovate, focus on the user, and ultimately design products that solve real user problems.

6. Design Thinking methodology in action: Case studies

So we’ve looked in quite some detail at the theory behind Design Thinking and the processes involved — but what does this look like in action? Let’s explore some case studies where Design Thinking has made a huge real-world impact.

Healthcare Case Study: How Design Thinking transformed the Rotterdam Eye Hospital

Executives at the Rotterdam Eye Hospital wanted to transform the patient experience from the typically grim, anxiety-riddled affair into something much more pleasant and personal. To do this, they incorporated Design Thinking and design principles into their planning process. Here’s how they did it:

Empathise

First, they set out to understand their target user — patients entering the hospital for treatment. The hospital CEO, CFO, managers, staff and doctors established that most patients came into hospital with the fear of going blind.

Define

Based on their findings from the empathise stage, they determined that fear reduction needed to be a priority. Their problem statement may have looked something like the following: “Patients coming into our hospital need to feel comfortable and at ease.”

Ideate

Armed with a deep understanding of their patients and a clear mission statement, they started to brainstorm potential solutions. As any good design thinker would, they sought inspiration from a range of both likely and unlikely sources. They looked to flagship airline KLM and supermarket chain Albert Heijn to learn about scheduling, for example, while turning to other medical organizations for inspiration on operational excellence.

Prototype

In the prototyping stage, the team presented the most promising ideas they had come up with so far to those in charge of caregiving at the hospital. These teams of caregivers then used these insights to design informal, small-scale experiments that could test a potential solution and see if it was worthy of wide-scale adoption.

The testing phase consisted of running the aforementioned experiments and seeing if they took off. As Dirk Deichmann and Roel van der Heijde explain, the “transition to formal adoption of these ideas tended to be more gradual. If an idea worked, sooner or later other groups would ask if they could try it too, and the best ideas spread organically.”

The outcome

By adopting a Design Thinking approach, the Rotterdam Eye Hospital were able to get to the heart of their users’ needs and find effective solutions to fulfil them. In doing so, they have greatly improved the user experience: patient intake has risen 47%, and the hospital has since won several awards for safety, quality and design.

Business Case Study: How Design Thinking helped financial service provider MLP regain consumer trust

After the financial crisis hit, financial service provider MLP found that consumer trust was at an all-time low. They needed to re-engage with their target users and come up with new ways of building trust. In search of innovation, they decided to test out a Design Thinking approach. Here’s what they learned:

Empathise

By focusing on their users and making a conscious effort to understand their needs first-hand, MLP learned that the assumptions they’d been going on were not so accurate after all. As Thomas Freese, division manager for marketing at MLP, explains:

“We always used to speak to customers about the goals they want to achieve. But they do not want to commit to a certain goal, as they often do not know themselves what that is. Rather, they want to talk about their ideas as it is more open and flexible regarding their financial planning.”

Define

With this newfound empathy for their users, MLP were able to reframe their mission statement. They knew that they needed to rebuild consumer trust, and that the way to do this would be to speak to the customer in their own language and become a more relatable brand.

Ideate and Prototype

During the ideate and prototype phases, they decided to experiment with a completely new image. Instead of the formal business attire typically associated with the financial sector, the MLP team members went out in casual clothing. They tested Lego prototypes and homemade posters in designated hotspots — including a university campus and train stations.

By testing this new approach, they learned some extremely valuable lessons about their users and how to communicate with them. They found that even something as simple as dressing more casually had a huge impact in reducing the negative connotations associated with financial services. They also learned the value of asking open questions; rather than trying to sell their prototype, Design Thinking taught them to ask questions that focus on the user’s needs.

The Outcome

Their first foray into Design Thinking proved to be a huge learning curve for MLP. Taking the time to speak to their users gave them the insights they needed to redesign their messaging, allowing them to start marketing much more effectively.

In light of their findings, MLP opened up a new office space in a student district, putting their editorial and social media teams in close proximity to their customer base. Of course, Design Thinking is an iterative process, so this is just one way in which MLP hopes to continue learning to speak their customers’ language.

7. What is the relationship between Design Thinking and UX Design?

At this point, you’ve no doubt noticed lots of similarities between Design Thinking and user experience design, and may be wondering how they relate to one another. Both are extremely user-centric and driven by empathy, and UX designers will use many of the steps laid out in the Design Thinking process, such as user research, prototyping and testing.

Despite these similarities, there are certain distinctions that can be made between the two. For one, the impact of Design Thinking is often felt on a more strategic level; it explores a problem space—in the context of understanding users, technological feasibility, and business requirements—to discover possible solutions. As we have seen from the Rotterdam Eye Hospital and MLP case studies, Design Thinking is embraced and implemented by all different teams across the business, including C-level executives.

If Design Thinking focuses on finding solutions, UX design is concerned with actually designing these solutions and making sure they are usable, accessible and pleasant for the user.

You can think of Design Thinking as a toolset that UX designers dip into, and if you’re operating within the UX design field, it is one of many crucial methodologies you’ll rely on when it comes to creating fantastic user experiences. You can learn more about UX Design and Design Thinking in our UX Design Course, as well as earn a design thinking certification by completing a course in it.

Further reading

Want to see what design thinking looks like in practice? Here’s an article for you: 5 Game-Changing Examples of Design Thinking.

And if you’re new to the design field and wondering what all these newfangled terms mean, you may well be interested in the following guides:

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Originally from England, Emily moved to Berlin after studying French and German at university. She has spent the last seven years working in tech startups, immersed in the world of UX and design thinking. In addition to writing for the CareerFoundry blog, Emily has been a regular contributor to several industry-leading design publications, including the InVision blog, UX Planet, and Adobe XD Ideas.

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What Is Design Thinking? (And How Do You Get Started?)

Written by Jamie Juviler

Design thinking. It might at first sound like one of those vague, nebulous terms you sometimes hear and dismiss as a trend. At least, that’s what I thought when I first heard about it.

But, as it turns out, design thinking isn’t just a trend — it’s a valuable, impactful, cost-effective approach to tackling big problems across a wide range of contexts. And it’s a whole lot more than just thinking about design.

Design thinking has changed the way that businesses approach large-scale challenges like improving their products, growing their user base, and ultimately creating a positive impact on their customers, the market, and beyond.

At the same time, any business can implement design thinking, as long as you’re willing to put in the effort and fully commit to the process. In return, you’ll have a new creative framework for elevating your business in any area, design-related or otherwise.

Sound like something worth knowing about? In this intro guide to design thinking, we’ll be covering:

What is design thinking?

Design thinking is a user-based approach to problem-solving that combines spontaneous, creative thinking with extensive, hands-on testing. It incorporates qualitative and quantitative research, as well as frequent ideation and prototyping, to reach innovative solutions to complex and difficult problems. While frequently applied to product and service development, design thinking can be used in any field that requires creative thinking.

Design thinking can be understood as both a philosophy of design and a series of design steps, with the former shaping the latter. First, let’s touch on the most important aspects of the design thinking philosophy:

Design thinking is user-centric. Above all else, design thinking solves for people. The interests of the company, historical trends, and even stakeholders come secondary to the people actually using the product or service. By focusing on the customers’ needs first and foremost, companies create human solutions that customers will enjoy, which in turn benefits everyone involved.

Design thinking is solutions-based. While we’ve called it a “problem-solving” approach, design thinking is less concerned with obsessing over challenges and more about finding solutions. Certainly, knowing your problem is important, but the bulk of the design thinking process is spent fixing it.

Design thinking is hands-on. If you want to try it, prepare to be active. From user research to idea generation to testing prototypes, every step of the process involves activities to make ideas tangible and testable.

Design thinking is iterative. Teams are expected to repeat activities, steps, and quite possibly the entire process until they’ve weeded out the bugs and found the best solution. Design thinking thrives on frequent experimentation, since you’re probably not going to get it right the first time.

Why is design thinking important?

As you may have realized by this point, design thinking is a highly involved and laborious process. Why go through all the effort? Here are some reasons why design thinking has gained so much traction across industries:

Design thinking makes us think differently.

After so much time spent … well, living, we’ve all developed our own ways of thinking and approaching problems. This is usually helpful, as we don’t have time to creatively address every little problem we face. Our minds are very good at identifying patterns in situations, then applying tried-and-true solutions to them.

However, this problem-solving mindset gets us stuck in one perspective. We may not be used to, or even be afraid of, breaking from our normal thought patterns and trying new things.

Design thinking remedies this by forcing us to adopt a different perspective and consider alternative ideas and strategies. It encourages us to reevaluate our preconceptions. Working against our brains is difficult, but ultimately leads to better innovation and a more impactful, perhaps less conventional final product.

In short, let’s think outside the box.

Design thinking helps us tackle big problems.

Some problems are straightforward — for example “Should I cook dinner or get takeout?” or “Where did I leave my wallet?” While I face these small problems on a regular basis, they’re common and therefore easy for me to understand and resolve.

But what about the problems that don’t fit into our everyday lives, or problems that are difficult to even define in the first place? What if you’ve received feedback from customers that your product design is poor or unintuitive? What if you’re struggling to break into a new market? What if you’re launching a food delivery app that needs to stand out from the big players? (Full disclosure: I’m a bit hungry writing this.)

Design thinking was made for these big problems, the ones without proven solutions that require creativity and introspection to unravel. The solution — and even the actual problem itself — might be far from what you expect.

Design thinking makes customers happier.

To keep us from getting carried away with our own interests, design thinking stays firmly user-centric. Every ideation session, experiment, and prototype is rooted in customer needs. By better understanding your audience, you’re more likely to serve a better user experience that people will actually want and recommend to others.

Design thinking is faster.

While it’s exciting to explore all the directions you can go with a project, that’s usually not realistic — you probably need definitive results within some time frame. Another advantage of design thinking is that it doesn’t stall around. Instead, it gets products to market quickly and thus saves organizations money.

As long as those involved are committed to the process, design thinking has been shown to yield large returns on investment compared to other strategies. This is because design thinking emphasizes solutions and rapid, repeated experimentation and keeps participants from fixating on challenges and limitations.

Anyone can use design thinking.

Design thinking is less “thinking for designers” and more “thinking like designers.” Though it first gained traction within the fields of design and engineering, design thinking has established a much broader appeal among businesses, nonprofits, academia, media and the arts, government organizations, and many other fields and industries that necessitate problem-solving. It’s by no means limited to designers — anyone can embrace the designer mindset to improve their product, service, business model, etc.

How is design thinking so adaptable? Again, we’ll circle back to prioritizing people. In the end, human problems require human solutions, something that major companies like IBM, Apple, and Bank of America have realized and embraced through design thinking. Your users hold the key, so find out what they need from you.

The Four Rules of Design Thinking

So far, we’ve learned the gist of the design thinking ideology and its benefits. Now, let’s see what actually makes up the design thinking process itself.

Many versions of the design thinking process have been developed, but they all follow the same general path. Here, we’ll cover the four rules and the five steps of the design thinking process formalized by Larry Leifer and Christoph Meinel at the influential Hasso Plattner Institute of Design at Stanford University, widely known as the d.school.

Let’s first start with the four rules that shape the process. These are:

The Human Rule

The human rule states that design is a social activity. In order to adopt a user-centric mindset, it’s best to collaborate in groups. This helps us challenge our preconceptions, think up more solutions, and stay grounded in the human side of design.

The Ambiguity Rule

The ambiguity rule of design thinking states that ambiguity is inevitable — you’re not going to have all of the answers, especially at the start. You can’t remove ambiguity either, so it’s best to embrace it by experimenting and exploring unknowns.

The Redesign Rule

According to the redesign rule, all design is redesign. While the circumstances surrounding our designs do change as we evolve socially and technologically, our core desires do not. Therefore, all designs are just ways to reach the same outcome in new contexts.

The Tangibility Rule

This last rule is more straightforward — the tangibility rule states that the best way to communicate ideas is through tangible things. While discussions, drawings, and walls of sticky notes can be useful, these are just a means to a physical prototype.

The Five Steps of Design Thinking

Next, let’s walk through the five stages of the design thinking process, starting at user research and simple experiments, and ending with testing your prototypes.

Note that, though I’m presenting these steps in a set linear order, the process itself isn’t so rigid. Design thinking is highly iterative and non-sequential: From start to finish, you’ll find yourself repeating steps and jumping back to previous steps as you encounter new obstacles and formulate better solutions. Steps can also occur simultaneously across different teams.

Applying some structure is valuable, though — it keeps projects on track and helps those without design experience adjust to the challenging process. So, let’s begin at step one.

1. Empathize with your users.

The first phase of any design thinking project is getting to know your audience. Once again, it’s all about the users, so start by identifying and understanding their wants, needs, challenges, and delight moments.

To do this, gather feedback from your users through interviews, surveys, focus groups, and observation sessions. Watch users as they test your product, being careful not to inject your own thoughts into their experience. Expect users to behave differently than you assume — after all, you know the product better than anyone. Getting it wrong is okay (and expected), and learning how to correct based on feedback is a strength, not a weakness.

2. Define the problem.

The second step of a design thinking project is unpacking the results of your user research to uncover the main problem you’ll address. Highlight any standout feedback or recurring challenges your users encountered in your tests. Then, discuss with your team to find the root of these issues.

Again, put aside your assumptions in this phase of the project. The real problem may be different than what you expected and require ideas that diverge from what you’re comfortable doing. If you don’t have any clear takeaways, don’t guess about what users want — go back to the empathy phase and gather more data.

At the end of this phase, you’ll come up with a problem statement, a brief description that clearly defines the problem and guides your remaining work. Always frame your problem statement in terms of your customers’ interests to keep your designs user-focused. For example, “Our users need an easier, more intuitive way to order food through our delivery app.”

Notice how this design statement doesn’t specify how the problem should be solved, allowing for more creativity in solving it down the road. However, the end goal is still clear enough to pursue with confidence.

3. Ideate possible solutions.

At this phase, we move away from finding our problem and toward the meat of the process, solving our problem. The ideation phase is really just a fancy way of saying “brainstorm” — get as many ideas out in the open as you can without judgment, no matter how obvious or impractical they may be.

Facilitate ideation sessions through a variety of activities and games. For some ideas, check out our brainstorming recommendations. You can also try other creative exercises beyond brainstorming to extract even more solutions, and research other comparable products and services as inspiration for yours. Quantity is more important than quality in this phase, and the best activities are whichever get people thinking and sharing the most.

At the end of the ideation phase, you’re looking to take away a few ideas to bring to the next stage, prototyping.

4. Prototype your ideas.

The prototyping phase brings your ideas into the physical world. A prototype is a rough version of your idea used to test your solutions. The key word here is “rough” — these don’t have to be elegant, as long as they capture the essence of your idea. A prototype can take the form of a paper model, a 3D print of a product, or even a model with Lego bricks. For our delivery app, a slide deck can simulate the experience of navigating a user interface.

Developing prototypes will bring to light any immediate flaws in the idea without investing in a fleshed-out solution, so you can head back to the ideation phase if necessary. You may discover that a prototype works well with some minor tweaks, or it might be best to scrap completely. As long as you’re discovering these things and continuing to iterate, the process is working.

5. Test your product.

Once you’ve found success in one or more of your prototypes, the final stage in the process is scaling up to higher-fidelity designs and testing them on real users. In this phase, you can continue to refine your product based on observations and feedback from your audience.

Despite this being the final step, your design thinking probably won’t end here. It’s more likely that your testing will uncover some flaws in your prototypes, a shortcoming in your idea, or even a mischaracterization of the whole problem. Don’t get discouraged — again, this is to be expected. You should always return to a previous step and repeat it when warranted.

Does design thinking really work?

We’ve covered the benefits and the details of the design thinking process. Still, some of you may point out that I haven’t addressed the obvious question: Is it worth it? Does design thinking yield real results?

To be blunt, we wouldn’t be telling you about it if it didn’t. Design thinking is a widely acclaimed and proven approach to problem-solving at companies ranging from enterprises to startups, not to mention organizations in public health, education, philanthropy, and governance.

And, best of all, it doesn’t matter what field you’re in, what product or service you’re developing, whether you’re just starting your business, or if you’re well-rooted in your space — design thinking is as flexible as it is robust. It can be adopted by anyone to provide real value to the people who matter most, your customers.

So, start learning what your audience needs, then get creating. And, if you really are testing out a food delivery app and need participants, feel free to reach out to me.

Originally published Jul 6, 2021 7:00:00 AM, updated July 06 2021

What is Design Thinking and Why Is It So Popular?

Design Thinking is not an exclusive property of designers—all great innovators in literature, art, music, science, engineering, and business have practiced it. So, why call it Design Thinking? What’s special about Design Thinking is that designers’ work processes can help us systematically extract, teach, learn and apply these human-centered techniques to solve problems in a creative and innovative way—in our designs, in our businesses, in our countries, in our lives.

Some of the world’s leading brands, such as Apple, Google and Samsung, rapidly adopted the design thinking approach, and leading universities around the world teach the related methodology—including Stanford, Harvard, Imperial College London and the Srishti Institute in India. Before you incorporate design thinking into your own workflows, you need to know what it is and why it’s so popular. Here, we’ll cut to the chase and tell you what design thinking is all about and why it’s so in demand.

What is Design Thinking?

Design thinking is an iterative and non-linear process that contains five phases: 1. Empathize, 2. Define, 3. Ideate, 4. Prototype and 5. Test.

Design thinking is an iterative process in which you seek to understand your users, challenge assumptions, redefine problems and create innovative solutions which you can prototype and test. The overall goal is to identify alternative strategies and solutions that are not instantly apparent with your initial level of understanding.

Design thinking is more than just a process; it opens up an entirely new way to think, and it offers a collection of hands-on methods to help you apply this new mindset.

In essence, design thinking:

Revolves around a deep interest to understand the people for whom we design products and services.

Helps us observe and develop empathy with the target users.

Enhances our ability to question: in design thinking you question the problem, the assumptions and the implications.

Proves extremely useful when you tackle problems that are ill-defined or unknown.

Involves ongoing experimentation through sketches, prototypes, testing and trials of new concepts and ideas.

In this video, Don Norman, the Grandfather of Human-Centered Design, explains how the approach and flexibility of design thinking can help us tackle major global challenges.

What Are the 5 Phases of Design Thinking?

Hasso-Platner Institute Panorama

Design thinking is an iterative and non-linear process that contains five phases: 1. Empathize, 2. Define, 3. Ideate, 4. Prototype and 5. Test. You can carry these stages out in parallel, repeat them and circle back to a previous stage at any point in the process.

The core purpose of the process is to allow you to work in a dynamic way to develop and launch innovative ideas.

Design thinking is an iterative and non-linear process that contains five phases: 1. Empathize, 2. Define, 3. Ideate, 4. Prototype and 5. Test.

Design Thinking Makes You Think Outside the Box

Design thinking can help people do out-of-the-box or outside-the-box thinking. People who use this methodology:

Attempt to develop new ways of thinking—ways that do not abide by the dominant or more common problem-solving methods.

Have the intention to improve products, services and processes. They seek to analyze and understand how users interact with products to investigate the conditions in which they operate.

Ask significant questions and challenge assumptions. One element of outside-the-box / out-of-the-box thinking is to falsify previous assumptions—i.e., make it possible to prove whether they’re valid or not.

As you can see, design thinking offers us a means to think outside the box and also dig that bit deeper into problem-solving. It helps us carry out the right kind of research, create prototypes and test our products and services to uncover new ways to meet our users’ needs.

The Grand Old Man of User Experience, Don Norman, who also coined the very term User Experience, explains what Design Thinking is and what’s so special about it:

“…the more I pondered the nature of design and reflected on my recent encounters with engineers, business people and others who blindly solved the problems they thought they were facing without question or further study, I realized that these people could benefit from a good dose of design thinking. Designers have developed a number of techniques to avoid being captured by too facile a solution. They take the original problem as a suggestion, not as a final statement, then think broadly about what the real issues underlying this problem statement might really be (for example by using the «Five Whys» approach to get at root causes). Most important of all, is that the process is iterative and expansive. Designers resist the temptation to jump immediately to a solution to the stated problem. Instead, they first spend time determining what the basic, fundamental (root) issue is that needs to be addressed. They don’t try to search for a solution until they have determined the real problem, and even then, instead of solving that problem, they stop to consider a wide range of potential solutions. Only then will they finally converge upon their proposal. This process is called «Design Thinking.»

— Don Norman, Rethinking Design Thinking

Design Thinking is for Everybody

How many people are involved in the design process when your organization decides to create a new product or service? Teams that build products are often composed of people from a variety of different departments. For this reason, it can be difficult to develop, categorize and organize ideas and solutions for the problems you try to solve. One way you can keep a project on track, and organize the core ideas, is to use a design thinking approach—and everybody can get involved in that!

Tim Brown, CEO of the celebrated innovation and design firm IDEO, emphasizes this in his successful book Change by Design when he says design thinking techniques and strategies belong at every level of a business.

Design thinking is not only for designers but also for creative employees, freelancers and leaders who seek to infuse it into every level of an organization. This widespread adoption of design thinking will drive the creation of alternative products and services for both business and society.

“Design thinking begins with skills designers have learned over many decades in their quest to match human needs with available technical resources within the practical constraints of business. By integrating what is desirable from a human point of view with what is technologically feasible and economically viable, designers have been able to create the products we enjoy today. Design thinking takes the next step, which is to put these tools into the hands of people who may have never thought of themselves as designers and apply them to a vastly greater range of problems.”

— Tim Brown, Change by Design, Introduction

Design thinking techniques and strategies belong at every level of a business. You should involve colleagues from a wide range of departments to create a cross-functional team that can utilize knowledge and experience from different specialisms.

© Interaction Design Foundation, CC BY-NC-SA 3.0.

Tim Brown also shows how design thinking is not just for everybody—it’s about everybody, too. The process is firmly based on how you can generate a holistic and empathic understanding of the problems people face. Design thinking involves ambiguous, and inherently subjective, concepts such as emotions, needs, motivations and drivers of behavior.

In a solely scientific approach (for example, analyzing data), people are reduced to representative numbers, devoid of emotions. Design thinking, on the other hand, considers both quantitative as well as qualitative dimensions to gain a more complete understanding of user needs. For example, you might observe people performing a task such as shopping for groceries, and you might talk to a few shoppers who feel frustrated with the checkout process at the store (qualitative data). You can also ask them how many times a week they go shopping or feel a certain way at the checkout counter (quantitative data). You can then combine these data points to paint a holistic picture of user pain points, needs and problems.

Tim Brown sums up that design thinking provides a third way to look at problems. It’s essentially a problem-solving approach that has crystallized in the field of design to combine a holistic user-centered perspective with rational and analytical research—all with the goal to create innovative solutions.

“Design thinking taps into capacities we all have but that are overlooked by more conventional problem-solving practices. It is not only human-centered; it is deeply human in and of itself. Design thinking relies on our ability to be intuitive, to recognize patterns, to construct ideas that have emotional meaning as well as functionality, to express ourselves in media other than words or symbols. Nobody wants to run a business based on feeling, intuition, and inspiration, but an overreliance on the rational and the analytical can be just as dangerous. The integrated approach at the core of the design process suggests a ‘third way.’”

— Tim Brown, Change by Design, Introduction

Design Thinking Has a Scientific Side

Design thinking is both an art and a science. It combines investigations into ambiguous elements of the problem with rational and analytical research—the scientific side in other words. This magical concoction reveals previously unknown parameters and helps to uncover alternative strategies which lead to truly innovative solutions.

The scientific activities analyze how users interact with products, and investigate the conditions in which they operate. They include tasks which:

Research users’ needs.

Pool experience from previous projects.

Consider present and future conditions specific to the product.

Test the parameters of the problem.

Test the practical application of alternative problem solutions.

Once you arrive at a number of potential solutions, the selection process is then underpinned by rationality. As a designer, you are encouraged to analyze and falsify these solutions to arrive at the best available option for each problem or obstacle identified during phases of the design process.

With this in mind, it may be more correct to say design thinking is not about thinking outside the box, but on its edge, its corner, its flap, and under its bar code—as Clint Runge put it.

Clint Runge is Founder and Managing Director of Archrival, a distinguished youth marketing agency, and adjunct Professor at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.

© Interaction Design Foundation, CC BY-SA 3.0.

Resetting Our Mental Boxes and Developing a Fresh Mindset

Thinking outside of the box can provide an innovative solution to a sticky problem. However, thinking outside of the box can be a real challenge as we naturally develop patterns of thinking that are modeled on the repetitive activities and commonly accessed knowledge we surround ourselves with.

Some years ago, an incident occurred where a truck driver tried to pass under a low bridge. But he failed, and the truck was lodged firmly under the bridge. The driver was unable to continue driving through or reverse out.

The story goes that as the truck became stuck, it caused massive traffic problems, which resulted in emergency personnel, engineers, firefighters and truck drivers gathering to devise and negotiate various solutions for dislodging the trapped vehicle.

Emergency workers were debating whether to dismantle parts of the truck or chip away at parts of the bridge. Each spoke of a solution that fitted within his or her respective level of expertise.

A boy walking by and witnessing the intense debate looked at the truck, at the bridge, then looked at the road and said nonchalantly, “Why not just let the air out of the tires?” to the absolute amazement of all the specialists and experts trying to unpick the problem.

When the solution was tested, the truck was able to drive free with ease, having suffered only the damage caused by its initial attempt to pass underneath the bridge. The story symbolizes the struggles we face where oftentimes the most obvious solutions are the ones hardest to come by because of the self-imposed constraints we work within.

It’s often difficult for us humans to challenge our assumptions and everyday knowledge because we rely on building patterns of thinking in order to not have to learn everything from scratch every time. We rely on doing everyday processes more or less unconsciously—for example, when we get up in the morning, eat, walk, and read—but also when we assess challenges at work and in our private lives. In particular, experts and specialists rely on their solid thought patterns, and it can be very challenging and difficult for experts to start questioning their knowledge.

Stories Have the Power to Inspire

Why did we tell you this story about the truck and the bridge? Well, it’s because stories can help us inspire opportunities, ideas and solutions. Stories are framed around real people and their lives and are important because they’re accounts of specific events, not general statements. They provide us with concrete details which help us imagine solutions to particular problems.

Stories also help you develop the eye of a designer. As you walk around the world, you should try to look for the design stories that are all around you. Say to yourself “that’s an example of great design” or “that’s an example of really bad design” and try to figure out the reasons why.

When you come across something particularly significant, make sure you document it either through photos or video. This will prove beneficial not only to you and your design practice but also to others—your future clients, maybe.

The Take Away

Design Thinking is an iterative and non-linear process. This simply means that the design team continuously uses their results to review, question and improve their initial assumptions, understandings and results. Results from the final stage of the initial work process inform our understanding of the problem, help us determine the parameters of the problem, enable us to redefine the problem, and, perhaps most importantly, provide us with new insights so we can see any alternative solutions that might not have been available with our previous level of understanding.

© Interaction Design Foundation, CC BY-SA 3.0

Design thinking is a non-linear, iterative process that consists of 5 phases: 1. Empathize, 2. Define, 3. Ideate, 4. Prototype and 5. Test. You can carry out the stages in parallel, repeat them and circle back to a previous stage at any point in the process—you don’t have to follow them in order.

It’s a process that digs a bit deeper into problem-solving as you seek to understand your users, challenge assumptions and redefine problems. The design thinking process has both a scientific and artistic side to it, as it asks us to understand and challenge our natural, restrictive patterns of thinking and generate innovative solutions to the problems our users face.

Design thinking is essentially a problem-solving approach that has the intention to improve products. It helps you assess and analyze known aspects of a problem and identify the more ambiguous or peripheral factors that contribute to the conditions of a problem. This contrasts with a more scientific approach where the concrete and known aspects are tested in order to arrive at a solution.

The iterative and ideation-oriented nature of design thinking means we constantly question and acquire knowledge throughout the process. This helps us redefine a problem so we can identify alternative strategies and solutions that aren’t instantly apparent with our initial level of understanding.

Design thinking is often referred to as outside-the-box thinking, as designers attempt to develop new ways of thinking that do not abide by the dominant or more common problem-solving methods—just like artists do.

The design thinking process has become increasingly popular over the last few decades because it was key to the success of many high-profile, global organizations. This outside-the-box thinking is now taught at leading universities across the world and is encouraged at every level of business.

“The ‘Design Thinking’ label is not a myth. It is a description of the application of well-tried design process to new challenges and opportunities, used by people from both design and non-design backgrounds. I welcome the recognition of the term and hope that its use continues to expand and be more universally understood, so that eventually every leader knows how to use design and design thinking for innovation and better results.”

— Bill Moggridge, co-founder of IDEO, in Design Thinking: Dear Don

References & Where to Learn More

Read this informative article “What Is Design Thinking, and How Can SMBs Accomplish It?” by Jackie Dove:
https://www.business.com/articles/what-is-design-thinking/

Check out Tim Brown’s book “Change by Design: How Design Thinking Transforms Organizations and Inspires Innovation Introduction,” 2009

Learn more about Design Thinking in the article “Design Thinking: Dear Don” by Bill Moggridge:
http://www.core77.com/posts/17042/design-thinking-dear-don-17042

Images

© Interaction Design Foundation, CC BY-SA 3.0