How to run a simple Design Thinking process?

5 min readApr 3, 2018

Right now, you hear about Design Thinking just everywhere! Business magazines such as “The Economist” or “Business Insider” are writing constantly about this state of the art innovation methodology and also at INNOVATION RADICALS we use a lot of Design Thinking in our workshops, projects and daily doing. Here you’ll learn how to structure a simple Design Thinking process. Viewed from the outside, Design Thinking appears to be the right solution for just everything. But let’s pause here a for second and take a look behind the hype! If you google the term Design Thinking, you will find processes with four to seven phases. This is why I like to think about the Design Thinking process as a cake. Some people like to get their cake cut into four big slices, other prefer to make five, six or even seven slices. Now, let’s jump into the individual phases!

Phase I — Problem Definition

A mayor focus in Design Thinking is exploring the challenge and every little bit that is connected to it — before jumping into conclusions and ideas. Phase I is about collecting what we know. Often, this phase includes desk research, expert interviews and structuring of accessible knowledge. Phase I usually results in one or more specific Problem Definitions giving us a clear direction for the following Need Finding. A good Problem Definition clearly defines the user (who are we trying to find a solution for), a well framed and actionable question (what’s the specific question, we want to tackle?) and important constraints in case there are some. Here is one example:

“How might we reward our companies internal innovation network ambassadors within our current budget restraints?”

Phase II — Need Finding

As I wrote before, Design Thinking is all about complex, human centered challenges. This means that the challenge is deeply connected with human behavior/emotions and neither is the complexity behind the challenge really understood nor do we have a convincing solution at hand when starting the process. That’s why Need Finding is one of the key elements of the methodology. In Need Finding, we become explorers of the user’s needs, worries, habits and feelings related to the topic/challenge that we are investigating. Methods used in this context are e.g. different types of interviews, user shadowing, jobs to be done, cultural probes, customer journey and persona building. A good Need Finding reveals the story behind the story and is key to a good solution.

Phase III — Ideation

Once the user’s perspective is well understood finding great solutions becomes easy. Nevertheless following a structured approach also helps during Ideation. At INNOVATION RADICALS, we like to start Ideation processes with some form of brainwriting (writing down ideas/solutions without interaction and dialogue). This way, everyone involved has the opportunity to contribute their thoughts and ideas and the entire team gains a full picture of potential directions. For brainwriting we use methods such as the 6–5–3, Kill-the-idea, solution sketches or just simple “write down your ideas on post-its and don’t talk”. Only then, we start start evaluating and brainstorming ideas to later elaborate on the most promising ones. If you jump into brainstorming right away, you don’t get the full picture and likely miss out on some really got ideas.

Note: if you are not able to develop promising ideas at this point, it is very likely that you need to spent more time or do a better job in Need Finding.

Phase IV — Prototyping

Most people really enjoy Prototyping as you can see your idea come to life. This joy, however, poses the treat to waste more time, money and energy on the prototype than necessary. The aim of a prototype is to test the key assumptions of a promising solution “assumptions 1 and 2 need to hold in order for this to be a good solution”. That’s why targeted action and careful planing plays a mayor role in this phase of the Design Thinking process. Usually, we start the Prototyping phase by working out the key assumptions behind the most promising ideas. Only then we design the prototype to test these specific assumptions. At this point, non critical aspects of our prototype are mere place-holders, non-functional or just not there. Of course, the first prototypes are designed to test user-desirability (see above: Principles of Design Thinking).

Besides testing and improving your solution you might want to build a prototype to communicate your idea. Especially, complex solutions can often be captured and explained via a simple prototype rather than a long document.

Phase V — Testing

Phase V of the Design Thinking process is a fluid transition into lean and agile methodology. At some point, you usually have a few prototypes and experiments going on. The Testing comprises the process of running experiments, evaluating them to gain new insights and adapting your prototype upon these. This process is pretty much the lean startup cycle by Eric Ries: build (or/adapt a prototype), measure (your tests results), learn (from them and derive new key insights). Once you have gained a sufficient level of trust that you are building the right thing, it’s all about building it right, wich is exactly where agile management comes into place. Check out this excellent article on the topic in more detail: https://hackernoon.com/understanding-how-design-thinking-lean-and-agile-work-together-fe65fd854407

Some books refer to the whole process of testing and improving your prototype(s) as the Design Thinking Macro Process. I personally prefer to go with Eric Ries and his Lean Startup framework.

Yeah, you made it till the end of this 3-story-series :) I hope you enjoyed the read and gained a few new insights on Design Thinking! If not, what would you like to add or what is missing here entirely? Feel free to leave me comment, remark or question! In case you want to re-read my other stories on Design Thinking, you’ll find them here…

Warm regards,
Sebastian