Design Thinking Process:

July 04, 2022

When doing a task or activity for the first time, it usually takes longer than on following iterations. The first couple of times you are still struggling to remember how you did it and why you did it that way. By the 100th time you don’t think about it anymore, you are a well oiled machine, but what if our process is not the best? 

For me there are moments of doubt and self assurance, but as time goes by, the latter becomes stronger and I believe that my way is the best. But if you are like me, that first, second, third, etc times that you had to think and decipher how to successfully achieve your goal, you never paused and thought “let’s analyze this”. 

Process building is an integral part of being successful and error free. Every process can be enhanced and until you have done it enough times, you will not fully understand how to make it better.

To keep our process from becoming stagnant we can use the design process, this process, often used for consumer centric issues,  is also really applicable to any other issue. It consists of 5 steps and executing them every time we are going through an activity.

  1. Empathize: Meant to understand your customers, but in our case is to understand why we want to do something and gather the necessary information to be able to answer this question.
  2. Define: Clearly define what needs to be done, still not thinking of how to do it, but having a clear understanding of this will be key to improve the methods you generate to complete your objective.
  3. Ideate: Think of possible ways to complete your process.
  4. Prototype: Select one idea that you think is a suitable solution and proceed to complete the task following that idea.
  5. Test: Check what could have been done better, differently or what other piece of data might help your process better.

 

Then, we repeat, but understanding that just because something achieved the goal originally set it does not mean that it is perfect, the objective here is to make things a bit better in each iteration and not settle with the current way.