Martin Holloway

Design Thinking 101: How You Can Solve any Design Challenge


Design thinking is an ideology and strategic process used to approach creative problem solving which helps to better understand the user of the product or service.

If you’ve ever examined a problem and started asking ‘why is it that way’ or ‘what purpose does it serve’  in search of a better solution, you were exposed to design thinking. Although called Design Thinking, it’s not an exclusive thinking method for designers. It’s been implemented by pioneers of literature, music, art, business, and engineering to have a more human-focused approach to the overall experience. In recent years Design Thinking has seen widespread adoption in the design field and beyond. You can see this as companies such as Google, Apple, and Amazon have adopted the approach – there has been tremendous growth in specialized roles such as UX (user experience) designer and UX architect.

So what in the world is design thinking then!? While some may think the process of creating a design is arbitrary to a single designer’s decision, Design Thinking aims to challenge that notion. Design thinking is an ideology and strategic process used to approach creative problem solving which helps to better understand the user of the product or service. Design Thinking provides a solution-based approach to problem-solving that focuses on humans first. As we seek to understand our users – Design Thinking uses an iterative process to identify new solutions that may not be obvious at our early levels of understanding. There are a few variations of design thinking in use today, some ranging from three to seven phases, although there are differences they still follow the key principles of: 

  1. Empathizing with a user to understand their perspectives. People all have different experiences that help bring us to a human-centric point of view.
  2. Experiment with different ideas to push the limits of your knowledge and identify patterns.
  3. Redesigning is crucial to innovate. Different iterations will meet different human needs.
  4. Having tangible prototypes helps with effective communication and identifying if results have been delivered. 

For this blog post, I’ll be referencing Andy Woynarowski’s Design Thinking Masterclass from Skillshare when talking about the Design Thinking principles and processes.

Design Thinking Process

Designers’ work processes have shown how to extract, teach, learn and apply these human-focused principles to solve problems creatively and innovatively – in our designs, in our businesses, in our countries, and in our lives. The process outlined can be broken into three simple categories of Understanding, Design, and Impact. Furthermore, within Understanding, we are looking to comprehend a business hypothesis, the customer perspective, and the design challenge. Design can be broken out into ideation, prototyping, and testing. The last category, Impact aims to examine the impact delivery to the business and customer once the project has been completed.

1. Business Hypothesis:
This is a strategic portion of the Understanding process and involves key stakeholders of the business like the Chief Executive team. This step is a huge building block to establish a business hypothesis map. These key stakeholders will be able to answer questions like, What are the activities and processes to assess and find current problems? Who is relevant to the problematic activities? Why do we have the activities and what is the underlying long-term motivation for the business? You can start to look at the different activities answered from the questions and see where they relate to our process of Understanding, Design, and Impact. Take these activities and categorize them by importance at each step of the process to get an idea of your business hypothesis and where to place your focus in the Design phase.

2. Customer Perspective:
Having a customer perspective outlined by real people will help validate your design decisions and business hypothesis as you move into the Design phase. If the resources allow you can partner with a professional recruitment agency to help find people that fit your specific user profile. This is now a new stakeholder group and will be able to look at the business hypothesis activities your executive stakeholders have outlined to relate it to their perspectives. You can also have them include their own needs for the product or service which may have not been outlined by the exec stakeholder group. Having customers rank the business activities by importance will help to synthesize the research from both perspectives and provide qualitative and quantitative answers.

3. Design Challenge:
The design challenge can be outlined as a single phrase or sentence that summarizes and helps you understand the root cause or problem that was identified in your analysis. It will be important to prioritize these to inform your decisions of importance when prototyping and testing start. This design challenge information is derived from the business hypothesis and customer perspective. To define the design challenge you must look at: 1) The Stakeholder, who is the main beneficiary of the resolved problem. 2) The Need, what is the specific need of that stakeholder that must be fulfilled, this can be different between different groups. 3) The Context, a little bit of information about why it’s important and what is the expected outcome.

4. Ideation:
This is the time to put on your creative hats! At this stage, it is still crucial to involve different team members from the stakeholder groups. This stage is all about generating solutions – we all have different experiences and knowledge that will lead to varying answers. It is also important to keep in mind how feasible a solution may be as it relates to budget or time constraints. Two methods for idea generation are the Transformation method and the Brainwriting method. For the transformation method, rather than focusing on the solution of the challenge you will eliminate aspects of the challenge to make it incomplete. You would then need to analyze what needs to happen to make it whole again. I.e. If you walked into a restaurant with no menus, how would you know the food to order? A possible solution would be to only show a list of ingredients at the front door. The imagination of the chef is left to create a meal. The Brainwriting method involves taking the design challenge and writing three ideas down on a sheet of paper. This paper is then circulated by stakeholders to build upon and create a large list of solutions.

5. Prototyping:
Now is the time to bring ideas to life and create prototypes that deliver the desired customer experience. This step is the beginning of providing a tangible idea of how a solution will work and why it matters. There are two main types of prototyping which include low-fidelity and high-fidelity prototypes. Low-fidelity involves basic models of interaction that may not be self-explanatory to the customer while high-fidelity involves more advanced tools and techniques to deliver an accurate design. These two methods of prototyping are important to synthesize all the research to this point and further identify new solutions. Getting into a prototyping mindset is all about failing sooner rather than later. It allows you to examine the amount of time, energy, and resources needed to validate the proposed solutions and determine if they will bring the expected return.

6. Testing:
This stage allows you to put your prototypes to the test in a business environment for real-time feedback. In an ideal testing environment, you will have a workshop and customer base that matches the customer perspective. There are a few testing methods that can be used to record data: observation, shadowing, and interviews. All of these methods are related in that you are giving the user full access to the prototype and observing from a distance. However, in shadowing the user may take the prototype with them rather than be in a controlled environment. Interviews are usually used in conjunction with observation or shadowing. At the end of this stage it is important to know that there is always still more that can be improved, but finishing the project is just as important. Whatever survives from this stage will be used in the final implementation.

7. Impact Delivery:
This stage is all about the final delivery of the product. Risk assessment is included in this portion of the process. It is important to discuss this with the stakeholders as their organization may not be ready to implement the new solutions. In addition to the implementation, a conversation should be had about what kind of maintenance will be needed and what key performance indicators (KPIs) will be used to measure success. While there are some logistical hurdles to address this step is so exciting because it brings everything together that has been worked on through the entire Design Thinking process.

We as humans rely on experiences and the knowledge learned from them to make decisions and inform our actions. We form patterns and become creatures of habit – while this is beneficial in some situations, it can limit your views when it comes to problem-solving. Especially in a commercial design environment. Effective design thinking revolves around a drive to better understand a user of the product or services we are designing for. Problem-solving using design thinking isn’t based solely on emotion and intuition, nor does it rely solely on analytics and data, it is a mixture of both.

I hope that reading this blog post has sparked some interest in the design thinking process. I’ve used a variation of this before when designing websites. During those projects having validation for my decisions was extremely helpful. On the other hand, this is only a theory and open to criticism. There are some that state this method tries to democratize design and fit it within a linear box. Long gone are the days of only print media, I think that as technology continues to evolve with VR and AR we’ll see this method used more.

If you’ve found these methods interesting I think it gives you a leg up to start using them in your everyday projects! Below you’ll find some resource links to the Skillshare class as well as real world case studies where design thinking has been implemented. Thanks for reading!

More Reading & References: