What Is Design Thinking? An Overview

hey I'm Jonathan from AJ and smartin in this video I'm gonna give you an overview of design thinking and why it's still relevant in 2020 almost every innovative company in the world uses some form of design thinking so it's super important for you whether you're a designer whether you're a product manager or whether you're someone just interested in the topic it's super important to really understand what the hell it is because no matter where you go no matter which company you're in they're gonna work on products if you're gonna work on anything related to the

topic of innovation people are gonna start talking about design thinking it's just gonna come up it's everywhere and it's being everywhere for the last 20 years and it's not going anywhere now so this video is a quick overview of design thinking we have new videos every week just like this to help people learn about innovation processes workshops Design Thinking design sprints if you like that kind of thing if you want to see more of that kind of thing in your recommended tab or whatever it is on YouTube just hit the subscribe button alright first question

what is design thinking really simply design thinking is a philosophy and a set of tools to help you solve problems creatively that's the first thing you need to understand when a company is trying to create something new when a company is trying to solve a problem when a team is trying to solve a complex problem you can use design thinking to help you get to that solution but whereas there are many processes that can be used for problem solving design thinking specifically focuses on the human-centered side of creative problem-solving so design thinking really looks at

all of creative problem-solving through the lens of human centered design that's a human centered approach it's about empathizing and figuring out who you are designing for what their needs are and then helping you to solve that problem helping you to innovate based on those needs so whereas many other solving problem solving processes before design thinking we're always about well we have this technology let's make this thing design thinking helps you look at this from the stomer the human perspective there are five main steps to any design thinking process even though in each of these steps

the exercises themselves are the specific process is very very flexible and every company in every designer and every design thinker does it differently but the five steps always remain the same step number one is empathize and this step is basically just about understanding the people you're trying to design the product for the product or the service for and in this step a lot of the time it's about gathering information interviewing doing user interviews creating personas trying to figure out who am I making this for what is their problem and unreal what do these people do

right it's about empathizing with the people you're designing for step two is to define now in the define step you're taking everything you learned in step one in the emphasized step and you're defining and you're really kind of breaking it down and coming to conclusions about what are the users needs based on everything I've learned from interviewing these people what are their needs what are their problems what are their challenges what are the types of things what are the insights we could take from these interviews from empathizing with the users with the customers what are

we taking from that what are we actually going to be able to use as information what are we saying this is a problem this is a common problem this is a common challenge this is an observation we were able to make how do you take everything you learned in the empathized section and turn that into insights and this is what define is step three is to id8 now you're taking everything you learned in the previous two steps and you're coming up with solutions they're coming up with ideas you're coming up with potential matches of products

or services or you know whatever it is you're creating you're trying to match your solution with the insights you figured out in the empathize a defined section of the design thinking process now what you're doing is coming together you're coming up with ideas and often this is the bit that looks sort of like a brainstorming workshop you've got posters everywhere people are coming together people are sharing ideas and people are trying to come up with ideas so it's really about coming up with thoughts and ideas that match what you learned in the previous steps step

four is prototype now what you're doing is you're taking all of these ideas you're breaking it down into a select few that you think might be worth making into something more realistic and you're turning these ideas into simple testable prototypes you know they're not fully designed they're not fully coded they're not fully made into the real thing but they're essentially a facade essentially a fake thing whether that's a digital product or a physical product you're just trying to quickly make something that you can test with real users and that's the final step test and in

the test phase you're taking your prototypes the prototypes that are based on what you created in the third step and fourths that and now you're on to the final step where you're testing with real people and these real people are you know selected based on what you learned in step one and empathize and essentially these real people are gonna use the product and you're going to get feedback from them in real time based on what they're using so you go back through the cycle you go from test once you've got your test results you go

back again into the define phase right you're not done once you've tested there's gonna be a lot of new insights so these insights you're gathering them together again back to the defines phase and then you're back to the id8 phase again based on your new learnings you're coming up with new ideas you're coming up with updated ideas and then you're back to prototype again and then you're back to test again and that is the core Design Thinking cycle and these are the five steps you see every time you search for anything design thinking related and

I just want to be super clear about this you see these you know they'll be overlaid on the screen multiple times here you'll see these five steps and the important thing to understand here is these five steps are that are sort of like the zoomed out map of how Design Thinking how a design thinking process works however the exact exercises within these circles are not defined okay so you need to understand that's an important difference between design thinking and something like design sprints in design thinking you have a broad map of what you're going to

be doing over the next weeks months years but there's no rule set that says you have to do this exercise you have to do this persona you have to do this whereas into something like design sprints it's more like a recipe you have to do it I'm going slightly off-topic but I wanted to get you there because I feel like a lot of people misunderstand that about design thinking design thinking is not a recipe it's not dude this this this this this it's a philosophy and a mindset combined with multiple different exercises you can choose

from depending on how you want to make the dish right so design thinking is essentially pretty freeform it's pretty flexible it's pretty much up to the person who's running the process which can make it actually quite tricky and and that's often why we recommend taking the philosophy of design thinking learning the philosophy of design thinking and using something like the design sprint as a recipe to run a design thinking process so hopefully that quick overview demystified some of design thinking for you the first thing to understand is just the broad philosophy around what design thinking

is and that's the point of this video for more videos on design thinking and for more articles and for more posts we're going to be doing a full week of design thinking content on our LinkedIn profile this week but definitely say hey over there as well I know LinkedIn can be a bit boring but we've got a very exciting LinkedIn page so AJ and smart on LinkedIn if you're looking to get deeper into what exercises exist exactly what the processes can look like exactly how to run Design Thinking workshops workshop or calm is a great

resource for figuring out how to start things like this we've got a great guide called the ultimate beginner's guide to design thinking and we've got new videos every single week of course they're free they're all on YouTube all you got to do is subscribe and we do try our best to try to like give you all the information you could possibly want and where do we get the ideas for making these videos the comments down below so let me know what you want us to make what do you want to see do you want to

see workshops do you want to see more about design thinking more about design sprints just let us know in the comments and thanks so much for watching we really do appreciate it and thanks to everyone who subscribes you know we're trying to get up to a hundred thousand subscribers at the moment maybe when you see this video will already be there but still we're on our way we're on our journey right now thanks so much what are the types of things what are the types of things one of the insights in the empathize and define

section of that in the empathize in the empathize and design hahahaha the empathize and define and you okay and empathizing is and this step [Music] [Music] you [Music]