Generally, people are inherently self-focused when it comes to work, driven by questions like ‘What’s in it for me?’ and ‘How does this relate to my situation?’ As a learning designer, my aim is to create impactful and engaging learning experiences. Therefore, I prioritise understanding our users and their needs to ensure relevance and effectiveness from the outset. Organisations need to observe and engage with their customers constantly to truly understand their needs, attitudes, and aspirations.
Tim Brown, CEO of IDEO, is a key proponent of design thinking and has played a significant role in popularising the human-centred approach to innovation. His influential publications, including articles in the Harvard Business Review, have helped establish design thinking as a vital methodology in modern business and learning contexts. Harvard Business School has also contributed significantly by developing authoritative frameworks and models that underpin innovation and design thinking practices. Design thinking is less about designing and more about problem-solving, which can translate to many business contexts. Businesses use design thinking to better understand their customers and innovate effectively, leading to improved customer-centric solutions and strategic growth. Organisations also evaluate the solution impact of their design thinking initiatives, assessing how these solutions influence user experience and drive positive business outcomes.
Companies like IDEO, IBM, and Bank of America have successfully implemented design thinking strategies, resulting in enhanced innovation, profitability, and customer loyalty.
As we look ahead, the growing importance of design thinking will shape the future of innovation and problem-solving, making it increasingly essential for addressing new challenges and opportunities. Integrating design thinking into company practices leads to long-term business success and drives strategic innovation.
Design thinking can lead to massive improvements throughout the business landscape, such as a 75 per cent efficiency increase and a 300 per cent return on investment (ROI) increase. Adopting design thinking practices has helped companies achieve measurable business success.
What is design thinking?
Do you understand what motivates your users? What delights, challenges, or frustrates them? Applying design thinking during the design phase helps answer these questions, enabling you to tailor your learning solutions to your audience’s needs. Design thinking is a human-centred, iterative design process that focuses on understanding and solving complex, often ill-defined problems by developing a clear problem statement.
The process involves analysing observations to define core issues and then generating, testing, and refining concepts in a flexible, non-linear way. Design thinkers use empathy, creativity, and iteration to develop effective solutions. Professionals across industries apply design thinking whenever they need innovative problem-solving, making design thinking skills – alongside communication, leadership, and problem-solving abilities – essential for career growth.
Design thinking process
The diagram above shows the design thinking process, which involves researching by empathising with users and defining their problems, followed by ideating solutions, building prototypes, and testing to arrive at innovative, user-centric outcomes.
Redesigning processes through design thinking can lead to significant organisational efficiencies by streamlining workflows and enhancing problem-solving capabilities. It’s a collaborative approach that brings together multidisciplinary teams to work through each stage—drawing on diverse perspectives and skills to develop better solutions.
The first stage is Research, where teams seek to understand user needs through observation, interviews, and analysis. This involves empathising with the user and clearly defining the problem to be solved.
Next is the Ideate stage, where the team generates a wide range of creative ideas and possible solutions. This strategic, collaborative process encourages divergent thinking before narrowing down to the most promising options.
The Prototype stage follows, where low-cost, scaled-down versions of the proposed solutions are developed. These quick prototypes allow teams to explore how ideas might work in practice, refine their concepts, and prepare for real-world testing.
Finally, in the Test stage these prototypes are evaluated with users to gather feedback, identify improvements, and validate whether the solution truly addresses the user’s needs. This iterative process is key to refining the final outcome.
Throughout the design thinking process, strong project management and management skills are essential to coordinate the team, guide collaboration, and keep the project aligned with business goals. Product developers and instructional designers often play a crucial role in shaping and delivering these innovative solutions, particularly in new product development and social innovation contexts.
Research stage
Let’s focus on the first stage, the research stage, because I believe that getting to the heart of who the user is, creates the foundation for the design. Gathering customer insights is essential for effective design thinking, as it ensures your solutions are truly user-centric.
Researching involves empathy and defining the problem. It’s a discovery process, where you attempt to identify the explicit and implicit needs of your users and customers so that you can meet them through your design.
Place yourself in the users’ and customers’ shoes and focus on their emotional experience when facing a specific problem. This will also help you to define or reframe the problem you are trying to solve. Sometimes the perceived problem isn’t the actual problem. It is important to consider users’ past experiences, as historical context can reveal patterns and pain points that inform better solutions.
But what does this look like in practice? Think about who your solution is aimed at and how they will use it to solve their problem. I start by listing and categorising the different kinds of users. From this list, I then create personas using empathy mapping. It includes information about what the users’ and customers think and feel, such as their fears, their previous experiences, how they learn, and so forth.
For example, a company used empathy mapping to improve a learning solution by identifying that learners struggled with engagement in the past, leading them to redesign the content with interactive elements. These personas help to create examples of actual people – representing different types of customers and their needs – who will be using the solution.
When you start to collate information from the persona profiles, you will undoubtedly identify commonalities. Using a structured form to organise user data can make it easier to spot trends and ensure nothing is overlooked. Use these to guide your design as you move into the ideation phase. Feedback from customers at this stage is invaluable for refining your understanding and ensuring your solutions are relevant. Even if you’re only creating a single stand–alone learning module, you can use this knowledge within the module to tap into user motivations.
Inspiration from real customer stories and experiences can also drive creativity and innovation during the research stage. Education, such as formal learning or interactive activities like polls and debates, can further enhance your understanding of user needs and behaviours at this stage.
Ideate stage
The ideate stage in the design thinking process is where the creative energy flows freely, generating innovative ideas and creative solutions.
It’s characterised by unbridled brainstorming and idea generation, aimed at exploring a multitude of potential solutions to the defined problem. During this phase, diverse teams come together to pool their insights, experiences, and perspectives, including valuable input from industrial design professionals, creating a wide range of ideas.
The ideate stage encourages creative confidence and creativity among team members, motivating them to share both practical and abstract ideas. Quantity takes precedence over quality at this point, as the goal is to encourage wild and innovative thinking without immediate judgement. Developing new ideas, including abstract ideas, is essential for finding breakthrough solutions. These ideas can range from practical and feasible solutions to more radical concepts that push the boundaries. Ideation often leads to the development of new service concepts and improvements to existing services, driving innovation in both products and service offerings.
This stage primes the ground for the subsequent stages of prototyping and testing, helping teams to refine and select the most promising solutions that will genuinely address the identified challenge.
Prototyping stage
The prototyping stage is where a prototype is intentionally designed and created to address user needs. It involves transforming the selected concepts from the ideation phase into simple, scaled-down representations that can be tested and evaluated.
Prototypes are developed to enable iterative development and refinement, allowing teams to quickly adapt and improve solutions based on real-world insights. Prototypes can come in various forms, from paper sketches and wireframes to digital mock-ups and physical models, depending on the nature of the design challenge.
The primary purpose of prototyping is to allow designers and users to interact with a visualised version of the solution, facilitating a deeper understanding of its functionality and user experience.
Test stage
Gathering feedback during the test phase is crucial for evaluating the solution’s impact and guiding further development
This final phase of the design thinking process involves putting your prototypes into the hands of real users to observe how they interact with the solution in practical settings. It’s a hands-on, iterative stage where user responses, behaviours, and experiences are carefully monitored and analysed to uncover any unforeseen issues or challenges.
Testing allows you to validate whether the proposed solution effectively addresses the user’s needs and problem statement identified earlier in the process. It also provides invaluable insights into usability, functionality, and overall user satisfaction. Feedback collected
Effective learning design
An effective learning design is one that connects to and resonates with your users. This is best achieved through collaboration and empathy. You will gain a perspective of the problem, and bring ideas to life based on how real users think, feel, and behave. A human-centred designer knows that as long as you stay focused on the people you’re designing for, you can arrive at optimal solutions that meet their needs.
And remember to keep these two top tips in mind to drive design thinking:
- Collaborate: Two heads are better than one. Invite your users to co-create their personas. If possible, formulate the personas through focus groups and interviews.
- Delve deeper: Consider more than just the job role of the user. Explore their daily tasks, motivations, pains etc.
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