Design Thinking Part 2: Design Thinking as a Step-by-Step Process

The Design Thinking Tool Set

Part 1 of this series described Design Thinking as both a tool set and a mindset [1, 2]. While it is ultimately more valuable to practice the mindset of Design Thinking [1], the tool set of Design Thinking is a more natural place to begin learning, so it is the focus of this article. 

There are two parts to the Design Thinking tool set. They are (i) the step-by-step process, and (ii) the activities or techniques used during the process, such as brainstorming, interviews, etc. The step-by-step process of Design Thinking is a roadmap that helps us make sense of what we’re doing and why. The activities and techniques are detailed non-abstracted actions we can take to effectively step through the process.

Considering Design Thinking as a process is not new. It’s been considered that way for decades [1, 3]. The first attempts to turn it into a process was in 1969, by Simon [4]. Contemporary forms of that process still exist today, the most popular being the 5-step process in Figure 1, which was introduced by the Stanford Design School in 2005. 

Figure 1: The classic design thinking process graphic, adapted from Stanford’s d.school Executive Education [5]. There is no significance to the shape or the color. Iteration and critique are implied throughout.

Each part of the 5-step process is described below. The goal of those descriptions is to give you enough to understand why the step is important and what to do generally. When we zoom in on the process and look at the activities used during the process, we see where all the action happens. So those too are described or at least mentioned for common activities.

Note that there are countless activities and techniques that can be used for each of the five steps in the Design Thinking process. I’ve mentioned only a few that are good starting points. Google searches for the activities listed will yield more details, as will basic searches for design thinking _____ techniques (fill in the blank with one of the five steps: empathize, ideate, define, prototype, or test). 

Step-By-Step Process with Activities

Step 1: Empathize with people experiencing the problem, to gain insights.

To empathize means to understand and share the feelings of another person, especially with someone who is different than you. This part of the Design Thinking process is a key ingredient of innovation, because it “can help us to comprehend the world in a fresh way” [6], and see problems that were otherwise hidden to us. This is why we develop empathy before we have formed the detailed problem statement (Step 2). Since we don’t start with a completed problem statement, it’s helpful in the Design Thinking process to begin with identifying and understanding the person or group of people who will benefit from the design work. 

To build empathy during this step, we need to interact and engage with people to observe and uncover human behavior in natural settings. Well-known designer Jane Fulton Suri describes this as the starting point for most projects, and “as a way of learning firsthand about the context, habits, rituals, priorities, processes, and values of the people we are designing for… The idea is to reveal how unexceptional incidents, looked at from an inquisitive stance, can inspire thoughts about design opportunities and consequences” [7].

When asked to share advice for people trying to create a greater sense of empathy, Broadway playwright Keenan Scott II (Thoughts of a Colored Man), said “try to surround and immerse yourself in situations and things that are unlike you. Take yourself out of your comfort zone and out of your own personal community, whatever that community is. Once that door opens it’s a beautiful, beautiful, thing to be able to open your mind and your spirit to things unlike yourself” [8].

While outside of our comfort zones, we need to be keenly observant. “Quite simply, this kind of observation can be a direct source of ideas for design. It’s a mistake to interpret observations too literally though… rather we should look for patterns that point to more universal need. When we dig deep enough, behavior that might at first seem arbitrary, surprising, or idiosyncratic usually has an insightful explanation” [7].

Key activities for developing empathy:

1. Observation: An activity of attentive looking and systematic recording of phenomena about people, artifacts, environments, behaviors, and interactions [9].

2. Interviews (not a questionnaire): An activity of attentive asking and listening, and systematic recording of personal accounts of experience, opinions, attitudes, and perceptions [9]. As you interview someone, “let them guide the discussion toward what’s important to them. Be prepared to hear things that will help [you] reframe [your] approach to the problem” [10]. When interviewing, look for stories that people tell, and for moments when they get particularly animated. 

3. Context Immersion: An activity of experiencing the activities, constraints, and daily conditions of people. To succeed, “understand the people you are designing for not just on an intellectual level, but also on an experiential level. Try to do what your constituents do and talk to them about their experience of life, in the moment” [11].

Key attitudes to have when developing empathy:

Abandon preconceived ideas about the person and the situation you are building empathy for. Avoid projecting your life’s experience onto the situation of others. Instead, watch, listen, and try to understand their life’s experience. Be flexible and adapt; “anytime a researcher is surprised, finds a participant’s behavior idiosyncratic, or picks up on a contradiction, there is an opportunity for the researcher to refocus” [9]. Remember that “seeking inspiration from real life is a surprisingly obvious idea, but it is easily overlooked when we become preoccupied by our professional roles, with their traditional domains and established processes [7].”

Step 2: Define the problem in human-centric ways. 

To define the problem in human-centric ways means to combine all the research collected during Step 1 (empathize) and uncover where your constituent’s problems exist [12].

In defining the problem, we formulate (or methodically devise) the bounds of the design problem. The late professor of Urban Planning Donald Schön said: “In order to formulate a design problem to be solved, the designer must frame a problematic design situation; set its boundaries, select particular things and relations for attention, and impose on the situation a coherence that guides subsequent moves” [13]. 

To define the problem, we do as Suri suggests and look for patterns that point to more universal needs [7]. Kees Dorst encourages a theme analysis where we identify and understand the deeper factors that underlie the needs, motivations, and experiences of those we’re designing for. He says that “a theme analysis ends with an understanding of the ‘universals’, a selection of themes that are relevant to the problem situation on a deeper level at which players in the field have much in common” [14]. 

Theme analysis is then followed by rearticulating those “universals” into future-facing opportunities expressed as How Might We Statements [11]. For example, imagine we were tasked with reconsidering economy-class air travel. Through empathy activities we discovered that travelers experienced the highest stress-levels while sitting in their assigned seat during long-haul flights. Theme analysis revealed two major themes: physical discomfort from minimal movement, and emotional discomfort from loss of productivity. Given this, we could frame the problem as: How might we provide the traveler with a comfortable air-travel experience in economy class seats? Or, how might we provide in-seat opportunities to move, stretch, or exercise? Or, how might we create a productive economy-class experience for air-travelers? These statements are stepping stones to ideation, and are stated without embedded solutions/embodiments. 

To be straightforward, these kinds of things (universals, themes, how might we statements...) are unnatural for engineers to think about, since most traditional engineering problems begin with a pre-validated problem statement. With pre-validated problem statements, “the problem solver tries to carefully understand the problem situation before deciding on an elegant and convincing solution” [14]. The Design Thinking process, however, assumes there is more to the problem that is awaiting discovery, which is primarily observed and synthesized during Steps 1 and 2 in the Design Thinking process. Schön sheds light on the iterative nature of this: “The work of framing (defining) is seldom done in one burst at the beginning of a design process. Designing triggers awareness of new criteria for design: problem solving triggers [new] problem setting[s]” [13].

Key activities for defining the problem:

1. Affinity Diagramming: An activity of clustering observations written on sticky notes (or similar) into related groups to reveal themes that bring insight to the problems people face. Similar methods are Thematic Networks, and AEIOU [9].

2. Journey Mapping: An activity for visualizing the process that a person (e.g., user) goes through in order to accomplish a goal [15]. User actions are placed on a timeline, which is then enhanced with user thoughts and emotion at various key points along the timeline. The goal of the map is to identify where in space and time a user experiences points of frustration, friction with a designed system or service, and ultimately uncover the root pain-points in the user’s experience. A similar method for more complex systems is Scenario Description Swimlanes [9], which describes who does what in a process. Another, perhaps more scientifically oriented method is Task Analysis [9].

3. How Might We (HMW) Statements: An activity for framing insights and themes gathered from Step 1 (empathize) into future-facing problem definitions [11]. HMW statements are solution neutral, paving the way for ideation activities. Generally many HMW statements are created and the most promising is taken forward into the ideation step. 

Key attitudes to have when defining the problem:

Recognize that the root of the problem is likely buried and it requires work to extract it from the observations and other data collected. Understand that the problem definition will likely not be fully correct after this step, but it should be developed enough to impose a coherence that guides subsequent moves, as Schön suggests. 

Step 3: Ideate human-centered solutions

To ideate human-centered solutions is to conceive of ways to solve the human-centered design problem defined in Step 2. This is the most obvious part of the Design Thinking process, though it too has its own complexities and is not as fool-proof as it seems. 

The ideation step generally requires multiple rounds of divergent and convergent work, as shown in Figures 2 and 3. Where the goal of the first divergent stage is to generate many candidate options, and the goal of the convergent stage is to identify strengths and weaknesses of the candidates. Importantly, the goal of the second divergent stage (see Figure 3) is to generate new candidates that improve on the weaknesses and capitalize on the strengths found in the convergent stage, as well as to add entirely new concepts [16]. Those rounds are repeated until a promising design that can be prototyped has emerged. 

Figure 2: A single round of divergence and convergence.

Figure 3: Multiple rounds of divergence and convergence.

It can be particularly hard to eliminate good ideas, which is part of the convergent stage. Dorst offered this insight about what to eliminate: In the convergent stage, “we also grudgingly have to weed out frames and ideas that may be great in themselves, but whose implementation would require huge changes in the practices of a stakeholder who has very little to gain” [14].

It’s common for engineers to imagine the solution as only a technical and physical product. People who best use the Design Thinking process abandon the constraint that the solution has to be a physical product. They accept that the solution may be a service, an app, a quick fix, a software update, or an entirely new physical product. For those using the Design Thinking process, the form taken by the solution is highly driven by the needs of those who will use or otherwise be impacted by the product. 

As such, while carrying out this step, the designer is keenly aware of the empathy research and the problem definitions that resulted from Steps 1 and 2, and is directing the ideation toward the human and the underlying problems they face. When a better understanding of the problem emerges while considering solutions, the problem definition is updated. If more empathy is needed, the designer works to develop it -- even if it needs to be developed in the middle of Step 3. 

Key activities for ideating solutions:

1. Brainstorming: A group-based activity for solution exploration that builds on collective group knowledge and synergy [17]. Some basic rules increase the effectiveness of brainstorming [18]; Focus on quantity. Withhold criticism. Welcome unusual ideas. Combine and improve ideas. 

2. Brainwriting: A group-based activity similar to brainstorming but ideas are expressed and built upon through individual sketching and writing [19]. Brainwriting has a few notable benefits over brainstorming, largely that it allows the voice of a quieter team member to be heard, and it can produce more ideas in the same amount of time, compared to brainstorming [20]. 

3. Bodystorming: A group-based activity that “situates brainstorming in a physical experience, combining role playing and simulation to inspire new ideas and empathic spontaneous prototyping [9, 21]. The main idea behind bodystorming is to simulate user situations in low resolution settings, for example lining up three chairs and imagining they are seats on an airplane. The goal is to pay close attention to interactions between people and objects, and to observe people’s emotional response. In this way, bodystorming helps the team create user-centered solutions. 

Key attitudes to have when ideating solutions:

Believe that the best ideas will emerge from multiple people ideating together. A “yes, and…” attitude [22] is valuable because it helps you build on existing ideas in a way that strengthens the ideas without deflating other team members. It also helps to have an understanding of bounded rationality, which “refers to the concept that human problem solvers are rarely in a position to identify all possible solutions to the problem at hand and therefore settle for choices that seem to satisfy the required solution properties of a problem, as they see them at the time” [23]. It is healthier to approach the problem from a bounded rationality perspective than to try to optimize the solution at this point in the development process. Often a solution needs to be chosen, prototyped, and tested before the next layer of insights about the problem can be discovered. 

Step 4: Prototype potential solutions early and often to learn quickly and gain new understanding

“Prototyping is the tangible creation of artifacts at various levels of resolution, for development and testing of ideas within design teams and with clients and users” [9]. It’s common in engineering to use prototypes to capture phenomena we don’t know how to model or don’t have time to model [17]. In human-centered design scenarios, however, the human in the loop will always add complexity that is unpredictable. IDEO engineer Andrew Burroughs said “despite the attempts of designers and engineers to anticipate every twist of an object’s fate, the unforeseen usually happens” [24]. Physical prototypes and their testing with people who need the solution makes some of the unforeseen seen, while there is still time to fix it. 

Perhaps one of the greatest things a designer can do during the Design Thinking process is embrace multi-fidelity or variable-resolution prototypes. Mattson and Sorensen taught “many novice designers believe that predictive models and physical prototypes need to be quasi-perfect to be valuable. The best designers don’t believe this at all. You can take a shoebox and drop it in front of a great designer and call it a defibrillator and the designer will understand and appreciate that it is a low-fidelity prototype. She’ll immediately begin thinking about if it is the right size for a defibrillator, how heavy it might be, how it would be used, and what additional information would need to be defined before a higher-fidelity prototype could be built. Great designers value these low-fidelity prototypes because the amount of learning and thought provoking imagination is very high compared to the cost of making it” [17].

Key activities for prototyping:

1. Physical prototyping: An activity of creating tangible objects for the development and testing of ideas. Generally many prototypes are made and critically evaluated during the Design Thinking process.

2. Experience prototyping: An activity that encourages active participation and live experience with product, system, service, or space prototypes. The goal is to foster a vivid sense of the user’s potential experience [9].  

3. Wizard of Oz (smoke screen): An activity where a design team member simulates system response from behind the scenes, while the user engages with the system that appears to be real [9]. This is an excellent method when your goal is to test user response to technologies before you dedicate significant resources to developing them. 

4. Storyboarding: An activity where a design, its context, and use over time are represented in a series of sketches or photos [25].

Key attitudes to have when prototyping:

Prototype early and often. The faster you can get to a tangible product/experience, the faster you’ll be exposed to the real issues that need to be addressed. Abandon the idea that prototypes need to be perfect. They simply need to answer questions you have about the design decisions being made, which can often be done with low resolution prototypes. Be sure to make prototypes for your internal team work and for external evaluation by people outside the team.

Step 5: Test solutions with real customers/users to gain new insights about the solution and the problem

Testing solutions (typically in the form of a prototype) with real customers/users closes the feedback loop. It uses the empathy-driven solution/prototype to re-engage the people we’re designing for and requires the designer to re-employ tactics similar to those of Step 1 (empathize). The goal is to attentively look, listen, and record pertinent phenomena to gain new insights -- that only the users’ interaction with a prototype could reveal -- about the solution and the problem. 

When testing with people, it is essential that the designer be “a student, not a teacher” [10]. This means that the designer must simply put the prototype and the people in the same place and observe what happens -- don’t teach them what they are supposed to do or how they are supposed to react to the solution. Observe: How do they pick up the prototype? How do they interact with it? Do they understand what it does or how to operate it? How excited are they about the solution? Once they understand what it does, use empathic methods to discover how well the solution alleviates the problem originally identified (in Steps 1 and 2).

Key activities for testing:

1. Unobtrusive measures: An activity for acquiring information without direct contact with users [9]. For example, imagine you designed a hands-free drinking fountain. A prototype version of the fountain could be placed in a park and users and their challenges could be observed from a distance.  

2. Think aloud protocol: An activity that requires users to “verbalize what they are doing and thinking while they complete a task, revealing aspects of interface that delight, confuse, or frustrate” [9].  

3. Desirability testing: An activity for identifying design options (or versions of a single design) that elicits the optimal emotional response from users [9]. The idea is to capture users’ first impressions, which are based on how they feel. Ultimately, this method is used in an iterative way with the other steps of the Design Thinking process to craft the emotional response to be highly desirable. 

4. A/B testing: An activity for testing two versions of a design to see which performs best with users [9]. This is particularly popular when developing software because data collection is nearly automated with button-click tracking. A/B testing can also be useful for physical products.  

Key attitudes to have when testing:

Abandon what you want the reaction to be and simply observe the true response to the solution. Be ok with the idea that iteration is an essential part of this entire process and that it is very unlikely that the first solution you put in front of a user will be perfect, without flaw, and ready for production -- it just won’t be. Accept that the feedback will lead to more work that, if done well, will improve the design.

Closure

This article divided the Design Thinking tool set into process and activities, where the 5-step process served as a road map, and the activities pointed to the detailed actions. If we return to the definition for Design Thinking given in Part 1, it becomes clear that the tool set (process and activities) facilitates Design Thinking. 

Design Thinking is the discipline of finding human problems worth solving and creating viable new offerings in response to those problems [26]. 

The discipline means there is structure and best practice, some of which we discussed in this article. The first two steps of that process, empathize and define, are all about finding human problems worth solving. The next two steps (ideate and prototype) are all about creating new offerings in response to those problems, and the last step (test) is all about making sure those new offerings are viable.

It might be simple to have read about this process and these steps and concluded that they are like any other design process. While it may appear that way, the steps described above are hyper focused on the humans who are served by the design. That hyper focus is Design Thinking.

Access Part 3 of this series on Design thinking, or access the entire free short course here.

Exercises 

For the following exercises, consider a human-centered problem you are currently solving or would like to be solving. 

Exercise 1: Think about, and make a list of people or groups of people (unlike yourself) who might benefit from being the center of good design work. 

Exercise 2: Narrow the list of people from Exercise 1, to those you have reasonable access to. For example, you might have chosen astronauts as a group of people who could benefit from design work, but you might have so little access to them that it will make developing empathy through engagement difficult.

Exercise 3: Reach out to someone you have access to. Ask if you can interview, observe, or do a context immersion with them. Use that opportunity to discover pain points / frustrations /struggles your constituent feels. Although reaching out to just one person is enough to practice Design Thinking, keep in mind that for anything beyond an exercise, it is essential to have more than one data point. I recognize that for many people this may be the point where you decide Design Thinking is not for you. Interacting with people in a deep way is not everyone’s strong suit. It is generally worth the pain, though, since this is how the underlying problems are discovered.

Exercise 4: After completing Exercise 3, thoughtfully and slowly evaluate what you learned; don’t jump to conclusions. Identify several pain points, or challenges the person you interacted with experiences in their lives. Remember, we’re looking for needs that would be shared by many people, not just the needs of the individual you may have interacted with. Cluster your findings into themes. If you didn’t find any pain points, or any challenges, you didn’t look hard enough because everyone has at least one minor frustration in their lives.

Exercise 5: Write at least one How Might We (HMW) Statement for each of the themes identified in Exercise 4. Remember to keep solutions out of the statement.  

Exercise 6: Choose a promising HMW statement and generate as many solutions as you can in 30 minutes. You should be able to generate dozens. Write these on a 3x5 card or on a sticky note. A simple sketch, or a simple set of words will do. 

Exercise 7: Evaluate your ideas from Exercise 6. Identify strengths and weaknesses. Spend 30 more minutes generating new ideas that combine strengths, or reduce weakness. Allow completely new ideas to enter the candidate pool too. You should be able to generate a dozen stronger ideas.

Exercise 8: Choose 1 to 3 great ideas from Exercise 7 and create a 30-minute prototype of each. Keep in mind that a 7-month prototype would be detailed and high resolution, while a 30-minute prototype cannot be. Force yourself to produce a low resolution 30-minute prototype that will be useful for Step 5: Testing. 

Exercise 9: Test one or more of the prototypes resulting from Exercise 8 with people represented by the person you interviewed, observed, or had an immersive experience with. Use empathy activities to really understand how people are reacting to your design. Seek insights from people’s reaction, behavior, comments, and more. 

Exercise 10: Identify key weaknesses in your design and/or in your process. Avoid the temptation to blame the low-resolution of the prototype for any problems you encountered. Instead identify the weakness as they relate to the suitability of the solution. Articulate what you would do next to iterate through the Design Thinking process again. 

If you completed Exercises 1-10, you have completed one run through the Design Thinking process. Pause to reflect on what you have experienced and learned. Have you found tools that are working well for you? Have you been able to use these exercises for more than a superficial experience with Design Thinking? To keep learning and practicing, consider executing the next iteration that you articulated in Exercise 10, as this would be a reasonable approach to acquiring more practice.  

Access Part 3 of this series on Design thinking, or access the entire free short course here.

References

[1] T. Kelley (guest), High Resolution (YouTube), “#16: IDEO’s Tom Kelley is Design Thinking’s Ultimate Disciple, he makes the case as to why,” accessed 20 July 2021. https://youtu.be/L1pBhHjGKvI

[2] C. A. Mattson, “Design Thinking Part 1: Basic Concepts and Principles,” The BYU Design Review, July 2021, accessed 08 August 2021. https://www.designreview.byu.edu/collections/design-thinking-part-1-basic-concepts-and-principles

[3] R. F. Dam and T. Y. Siang, “Design Thinking: Get a Quick Overview of the History,” Interaction Design Foundation, accessed 08 August 2021. https://www.interaction-design.org/literature/article/design-thinking-get-a-quick-overview-of-the-history

[4]  H. A. Simon, The sciences of the artificial, MIT press, 2019. Originally published in 1969.

[5] R. F. Dam and T. Y. Siang, “5 Stages in the Design Thinking Process”, Interaction Design Foundation, 2021, accessed 20 July 2021. https://www.interaction-design.org/literature/article/5-stages-in-the-design-thinking-process

[6] K. Dorst, Understanding design: 175 reflections on being a designer, BIS Publishers, 2007

[7] J. F. Suri, Thoughtless acts?: Observations on intuitive design. Chronicle Books, 2005.

[8] K. Scott II (Guest), “Lexus Add on Empathy,” Design Matters by Debbie Millman, 2021. 

[9] Hanington, Bruce, and Bella Martin. Universal methods of design expanded and revised: 125 Ways to research complex problems, develop innovative ideas, and design effective solutions. Rockport publishers, 2019.

[10] Kumar, Vijay. 101 design methods: A structured approach for driving innovation in your organization. John Wiley & Sons, 2012.

[11] IDEO, Ed. "Human centered design: toolkit. Palo Alto, CA. IDEO, 2011." Reference Source.

[12] S. Gibbons, “Design Thinking 101,” 2016, Nielsen/Norman Group, accessed 08 August 2021.  https://www.nngroup.com/articles/design-thinking/

[13] Schön, Donald A. "Designing: Rules, types and worlds." Design studies 9.3 (1988): 181-190.

[14] Dorst, Kees. Frame innovation: Create new thinking by design. MIT press, 2015.

[15] S. Gibbons, “Journey Mapping 101,” 2018, Nielsen/Norman Group, https://www.nngroup.com/articles/journey-mapping-101/

[16] C. A. Mattson, “How to Get the Most Out of an Evaluation Matrix,” The BYU Design Review, December 2020, accessed 20 July 2021. https://www.designreview.byu.edu/collections/how-to-get-the-most-out-of-an-evaluation-matrix

[17] Mattson, Christopher A., and Carl D. Sorensen. Product Development: Principles and Tools for Creating Desirable and Transferable Designs. Springer Nature, 2019.

[18] A. Osborn, Applied Imagination; Principles and Procedures of Creative Problem-Solving, Scribner, New York, 1963.

[19] A. B. VanGundy, "Brain Writing for New Product Ideas: An Alternative to Brainstorming", Journal of Consumer Marketing, Vol. 1 No. 2, pp. 67-74, 1984. https://doi.org/10.1108/eb008097

[20] C. A. Mattson, “How to Ideate as a Team,” The BYU Design Review, November 2019, accessed 20 July 2021. https://www.designreview.byu.edu/collections/how-to-ideate-as-a-team

[21] C. Burns, E. Dishman, W. Verplank, and B. Lassiter, “Actors, Hairdos & Videotape -- Informance Design: Using Performance Techniques in Multidisciplinary Observation-based Design,” CHI 94 Conference Companion, 1994: 119-120.

[22] Wikipedia, “Yes, And...,” accessed 08 August 2021. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yes,_and…

[23] P. G. Rowe, Design thinking. MIT Press, 1987.

[24] A. Burroughs, Everyday Engineering: What Engineers See, Chronicle Books, 2007.

[25] Van Boeijen, Annemiek, et al. Delft Design Guide: Design Strategies and Methods. 2014.

[26] Dawan Stanford (guest), “A Short Introduction to Design Thinking with Dawan Stanford,” Design Thinking 101 (podcast), episode 32, accessed 20 July 2021. https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/short-introduction-to-design-thinking-dawan-stanford/id1376884817?i=1000451883583