Overview

Design Thinking stresses the importance of cultivating empathy for end users, interpreting and framing problems they experience, creative solution generation, and continuous prototyping and testing. A new way of thinking ‘outside ourselves’ with creativity and innovation in order to find new solutions to the same old issues.

Design Process

•  Empathize by conducting user research and building empathy maps
•  Define the users problem(s)
•  Ideate creative solutions
•  Prototype and build tactile representations for a range of ideas
•  Test to gather feedback

Benefits

•  Understand how to apply human centered design principles to tackle complex challenges
•  Develop a deeper understanding of day to day design work
•  Promote ideas on how Design Thinking can positively affect your organization
•  Learn techniques to improve ideation and prototyping, generating multiple solutions in a short time
•  Build methods for understanding and framing problems
•  Conduct research methods cultivating empathy
•  Discover how to tell a compelling story to engage audiences

Example

Design Thinking – NNGroup.com


Empathy Map

An Empathy Map is a simple, visual of who your user is: how they think, feel, and things they may say or do. Empathy maps should be used throughout any UX process to establish common ground among team members and to understand and prioritize user needs.

•  Define: the what and why
•  Create: empathy map
•  Gather: qualitative data
•  Share: share out and update the map

Empathy Map