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Design Thinking

Design Thinking

What is design thinking?

Design thinking is a user-centric approach to design. It combines a mindset, principles, tools, and activities to help you solve design problems in a creative way. A common design thinking model consists of five key stages: empathize, define, ideate, prototype, and test.

What are the benefits of using Design Thinking?

Popular in the product design and UX/UI world, design thinking is also being used in other areas such as learning design as it:

  • Places the learner’s needs into focus – taking a human-centric approach
  • Questions assumptions
  • Leads to greater creativity and innovation by considering more ideas
  • Tests ideas with learners to get insightful feedback
  • Saves development time and money

The 5 Steps of Design Thinking

Empathize

Purpose – Get to know your learners so you can understand and anticipate their needs. This is a learner-centric approach that provides insights to help you accurately define the problems that need to be solved.

Tools – Shadowing, interview, survey, empathy map, user journey map, persona.

Define

Purpose – Use the insights gathered during the empathize stage to define the problem. This will then provide direction when solutions are being considered during the ideate stage.

Tools – Problem statement (pain points and frustrations), hypothesis statement (a best guess on how to address the problem), and value proposition (features and benefits).

Ideate

Purpose – This is where the creative and innovative magic happens! The purpose of the ideation stage is to generate as many ideas as possible whilst reserving judgement. Best results are from a mix of people across various roles (such as design, tech, users, and stakeholders) with collective voting on which ideas to progress to prototype.

Tools – Goal statements, ‘how might we’ problem reframing, brainstorming, SCAMPER, Crazy 8s.

Prototype

Purpose – Develop the most promising ideas into something that can be tested by users. By creating a minimum viable product (MVP), you can save time and money by testing low-fidelity prototypes where changes can be made quickly.

Tools – Paper sketching, storyboarding, low-fi interactive prototype.

Test

Purpose – By getting early prototypes to your learners, you can get early feedback and useful insight. This enables you to iterate on your ideas and prototypes to solve your learner problems.

Tools – Real-time testing, survey, interview, review.

Using Design Thinking – A non-linear approach

The design thinking model resembles a linear model going from the empathize to test phase. However, it is used effectively in a non-linear way and you can return to a previous step of the process.

A common loop taken is the iteration loop at the end of a test, where learner feedback is gathered and the information is used to improve the prototype. This leads to further ideation activities and prototype development.

Review

Rating: 5 out of 5

Pros: Creative thinking, learner-centric, tests your assumptions, cross-functional team collaboration.

Cons: While well suited to product-based development, for instructional design projects there are additional elements to consider that are not part of the model such as project initiation and implementation.

Related reading: ADDIE, SAM, Instructional Design

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