Design thinking in practice.

3 min readFeb 20, 2021

A Company has reached out for us to create a solution to aid their users who order food online. Using the design thinking approach, how can we create the solution.

Having previously stated the design thinking processes

Let’s get started with the first process.

Empathy

At this stage, we try to clearly identify our users, from the brief, we have identified that our users are the company’s consumers that order their food online. These consumers what is their age range?, what locations do they order food from?, type of work they do, what their time may look like and a lot of insight to gain through user survey questions.

Next, we are going to fit ourselves into their shoes(empathizing with them) by conducting a user research and interviews to actually understand and know what problems of the users that we are solving. This can mean actually ordering food online following the same process users go through.

Define

Yes!, we made it through the first process, we have identified our users, we now have a general overview of their problem.

It’s now time to clearly pinpoint these user challenges, define the goals we would like to achieve for this project, this also includes the user goals and business goals( for the company) to be achieved.

A goal properly set ( & problem properly defined) is halfway reached
-Zig ziglar

For the users, the goals might include

Defining and solving their problem
Offering them better user experience.

For the business(company) the goals might include

Reduced bounce rate
A checkout page that converts
increase in revenue as a result of increased orders.

with the users problems and goals clearly defined, it would help us in creating a persona that would also keep us keep our solution user-centric.

Ideation

This process is where we as a team would generate ideas and think of possible solutions, co-create lots of sketches, create rough interface samples, make suggestions about new features of the company’s existing product that would possible solve users problems, map possible user flows and journey, create low-fidelity wireframes. In summary this is where the work and magic happens.

Then after the whole drafting has been done, keeping users in mind we should also prioritize. This includes sorting through the array of ideas we have to give outmost importance to those ideas that most meet with the user and company’s goal.

Prototype

Keeping users and our goals in mind, we would decide upon the best solution, design, and develop preliminary versions of our creative solution.

This consist of detailed layouts, replacing our low fidelity wireframes with high fidelity wireframes often interactive. A more advanced prototype could involve (basic or advanced) coding. Our ultimate goal at this stage to roll out the first model of our solution.

Test

Now we got scaled through problem definitions, got our research done and prototyped our solution. Next, its time to test and gather feedback.

If we don’t test our product on the actual users and get their feedback how do we determine if we really solved their problems?

Here we would run a usability testing (which means the act of intentionally studying our ideal users as they interact with our product / product prototype.) to further gather feedback, clues or information on how to make our product even better.

Remember that we first defined design thinking as an iterative approach to solving problem, all the data we would gather from this testing stage would then have to go back into the cycle to help us refine our solution.

Thank you.