Maeve Catherine

Creating products requires knowing and understand the impact the solution will have on the audience’s life.

According to Tim Brown, design thinking is “a discipline that uses the designer’s sensibility and methods to match people’s needs with what is technologically feasible and what a viable business strategy can convert into customer value and market opportunity”. Each and every person has different ideas about what are problems that need solutions and what solutions will be most effective for an audience. The best solutions begin to form through the five phases of design thinking.

What are the five phases?

Instead of thinking about what to build; building in order to think.
Tim Brown

Design is a human centered process. The process of design thinking is as follows:

1. Empathize: Learn about your target audience. Conduct interviews with members of your target audience. What have they experienced? What caused that feeling to occur?
2. Define: Identify where your audience needs to see change. What does the user need or wish for? How might we change the outcome of challenge the audience is facing?
3. Ideate: Research and draft solutions to your problem statements. Come up with more than two ideas, the more the better! Bring the ideas to the audience or become the audience and choose the best ones to move forward with.
4. Prototype: Create the solutions for your user based on draft feedback and bring the product to life. This can be done with the use of 2D and or 3D tools.
5. Test: Test your prototype with your user and make needed adjustments, and retest.

A prime example of design thinking process being used is at Tesla. Njeri Muciri published a case study on Green Finance Insights page about the Design Thinking behind the electric vehicle. Muciri explained, “Tesla’s commitment to innovation is a hallmark of their design thinking approach. They continuously push the boundaries of what is possible, developing new technologies and features to enhance their vehicles’ performance, efficiency, and safety”.

1. Empathize: Their customers expressed concerns about the limited distance, lack of charging stations, and the cars driving performance.
2. Define: After listening to their customers Tesla defined three overall goals for improving Electric Vehicles to address these concerns.
   • Range
   • Performance
   • Overall driving experience
3. Ideate: Longevity of charge, renewable energy, Safe human-less driving.
4. Prototype: Battery Technology advancements to the first EV called Tesla Roadster. Charging stations and network. Software updates focused on safety and efficiently travel.
5. Test: Tesla is transparent with customers about the range that their vehicles can go and is continuously adding charging stations. Users have the ability to efficiently plan rides based on charging station location and range capacities, which reduces anxiety that was observed in the empathizing stage of design thinking. In efforts to being a green and sustainable company there is are agreements within the industry that Tesla’s charging port will be the industry standard. As Tesla grows they will need to repeat the design thinking process so they can define ways to improve.

Something to keep in mind as you go through the process is that it is non-linear. There is a possibility that you will not go through the process the same way every time, you may need to repetitively bring your audience new solutions if the first do not satisfy their wants. Be open to suggestions and criticism throughout the design thinking process.