design thinking is a human centered approach of problem solving

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What Is Design Thinking & Why Is It Important?

• 18 Jan 2022

In an age when innovation is key to business success and growth, you’ve likely come across the term “design thinking.” Perhaps you’ve heard it mentioned by a senior leader as something that needs to be utilized more, or maybe you’ve seen it on a prospective employee's resume.

While design thinking is an ideology based on designers’ workflows for mapping out stages of design, its purpose is to provide all professionals with a standardized innovation process to develop creative solutions to problems—design-related or not.

Why is design thinking needed? Innovation is defined as a product, process, service, or business model featuring two critical characteristics: novel and useful. Yet, there’s no use in creating something new and novel if people won’t use it. Design thinking offers innovation the upgrade it needs to inspire meaningful and impactful solutions.

But what is design thinking, and how does it benefit working professionals?

What Is Design Thinking?

Design thinking is a mindset and approach to problem-solving and innovation anchored around human-centered design . While it can be traced back centuries—and perhaps even longer—it gained traction in the modern business world after Tim Brown, CEO and president of design company IDEO, published an article about it in the Harvard Business Review .

Design thinking is different from other innovation and ideation processes in that it’s solution-based and user-centric rather than problem-based. This means it focuses on the solution to a problem instead of the problem itself.

For example, if a team is struggling with transitioning to remote work, the design thinking methodology encourages them to consider how to increase employee engagement rather than focus on the problem (decreasing productivity).

The essence of design thinking is human-centric and user-specific. It’s about the person behind the problem and solution, and requires asking questions such as “Who will be using this product?” and “How will this solution impact the user?”

The first, and arguably most important, step of design thinking is building empathy with users. By understanding the person affected by a problem, you can find a more impactful solution. On top of empathy, design thinking is centered on observing product interaction, drawing conclusions based on research, and ensuring the user remains the focus of the final implementation.

The Four Phases of Innovation

So, what does design thinking entail? There are many models of design thinking that range from three to seven steps.

In the online course Design Thinking and Innovation , Harvard Business School Dean Srikant Datar leverages a four-phase innovation framework. The phases venture from concrete to abstract thinking and back again as the process loops, reverses, and repeats. This is an important balance because abstract thinking increases the likelihood that an idea will be novel. It’s essential, however, to anchor abstract ideas in concrete thinking to ensure the solution is valid and useful.

Here are the four phases for effective innovation and, by extension, design thinking.

The first phase is about narrowing down the focus of the design thinking process. It involves identifying the problem statement to come up with the best outcome. This is done through observation and taking the time to determine the problem and the roadblocks that prevented a solution in the past.

Various tools and frameworks are available—and often needed—to make concrete observations about users and facts gathered through research. Regardless of which tools are implemented, the key is to observe without assumptions or biased expectations.

Once findings from your observations are collected, the next step is to shape insights by framing those observations. This is where you can venture into the abstract by reframing the problem in the form of a statement or question.

Once the problem statement or question has been solidified—not finalized—the next step is ideation. You can use a tool such as systematic inventive thinking (SIT) in this stage, which is useful for creating an innovative process that can be replicated in the future.

The goal is to ultimately overcome cognitive fixedness and devise new and innovative ideas that solve the problems you identified. Continue to actively avoid assumptions and keep the user at the forefront of your mind during ideation sessions.

The third phase involves developing concepts by critiquing a range of possible solutions. This includes multiple rounds of prototyping, testing, and experimenting to answer critical questions about a concept’s viability.

Remember: This step isn’t about perfection, but rather, experimenting with different ideas and seeing which parts work and which don’t.

4. Implement

The fourth and final phase, implementation, is when the entire process comes together. As an extension of the develop phase, implementation starts with testing, reflecting on results, reiterating, and testing again. This may require going back to a prior phase to iterate and refine until you find a successful solution. Such an approach is recommended because design thinking is often a nonlinear, iterative process.

In this phase, don’t forget to share results with stakeholders and reflect on the innovation management strategies implemented during the design thinking process. Learning from experience is an innovation process and design thinking project all its own.

Check out the video about the design thinking process below, and subscribe to our YouTube channel for more explainer content!

Why Design Thinking Skills Matter

The main value of design thinking is that it offers a defined process for innovation. While trial and error is a good way to test and experiment what works and what doesn’t, it’s often time-consuming, expensive, and ultimately ineffective. On the other hand, following the concrete steps of design thinking is an efficient way to develop new, innovative solutions.

On top of a clear, defined process that enables strategic innovation, design thinking can have immensely positive outcomes for your career—in terms of both advancement and salary.

As of December 2021, the most common occupations requiring design thinking skills were:

• Marketing managers
• Industrial engineers
• Graphic designers
• Software developers
• General and operations managers
• Management analysts
• Personal service managers
• Architectural and engineering managers
• Computer and information systems managers

In addition, jobs that require design thinking statistically have higher salaries. Take a marketing manager position, for example. The median annual salary is $107,900. Marketing manager job postings that require design thinking skills, however, have a median annual salary of $133,900—a 24 percent increase.

Overall, businesses are looking for talent with design thinking skills. As of November 2021, there were 29,648 job postings in the United States advertising design thinking as a necessary skill—a 153 percent increase from November 2020, and a 637 percent increase from November 2017.

As businesses continue to recognize the need for design thinking and innovation, they’ll likely create more demand for employees with those skills.

Learning Design Thinking

Design thinking is an extension of innovation that allows you to design solutions for end users with a single problem statement in mind. It not only imparts valuable skills but can help advance your career.

It’s also a collaborative endeavor that can only be mastered through practice with peers. As Datar says in the introduction to Design Thinking and Innovation : “Just as with learning how to swim, the best way to practice is to jump in and try.”

If you want to learn design thinking, take an active role in your education. Start polls, problem-solving exercises, and debates with peers to get a taste of the process. It’s also important to seek out diverse viewpoints to prepare yourself for the business world.

In addition, if you’re considering adding design thinking to your skill set, think about your goals and why you want to learn about it. What else might you need to be successful?

You might consider developing your communication, innovation, leadership, research, and management skills, as those are often listed alongside design thinking in job postings and professional profiles.

You may also notice skills like agile methodology, user experience, and prototyping in job postings, along with non-design skills, such as product management, strategic planning, and new product development.

Is Design Thinking Right for You?

There are many ways to approach problem-solving and innovation. Design thinking is just one of them. While it’s beneficial to learn how others have approached problems and evaluate if you have the same tools at your disposal, it can be more important to chart your own course to deliver what users and customers truly need.

You can also pursue an online course or workshop that dives deeper into design thinking methodology. This can be a practical path if you want to improve your design thinking skills or require a more collaborative environment.

Are you ready to develop your design thinking skills? Explore our online course Design Thinking and Innovation to discover how to leverage fundamental design thinking principles and innovative problem-solving tools to address business challenges.

About the Author

What is design thinking?

Design and conquer: in years past, the word “design” might have conjured images of expensive handbags or glossy coffee table books. Now, your mind might go straight to business. Design and design thinking are buzzing in the business community more than ever. Until now, design has focused largely on how something looks; these days, it’s a dynamic idea used to describe how organizations can adjust their problem-solving approaches to respond to rapidly changing environments—and create maximum impact and shareholder value. Design is a journey and a destination. Design thinking is a core way of starting the journey and arriving at the right destination at the right time.

Simply put, “design thinking is a methodology that we use to solve complex problems , and it’s a way of using systemic reasoning and intuition to explore ideal future states,” says McKinsey partner Jennifer Kilian. Design thinking, she continues, is “the single biggest competitive advantage that you can have, if your customers are loyal to you—because if you solve for their needs first, you’ll always win.”

Get to know and directly engage with senior McKinsey experts on design thinking

Tjark Freundt is a senior partner in McKinsey’s Hamburg office, Tomas Nauclér is a senior partner in the Stockholm office, Daniel Swan is a senior partner in the Stamford office, Warren Teichner is a senior partner in the New York office, Bill Wiseman is a senior partner in the Seattle office, and Kai Vollhardt is a senior partner in the Munich office.

And good design is good business. Kilian’s claim is backed up with data: McKinsey Design’s 2018 Business value of design report  found that the best design performers increase their revenues  and investor returns at nearly twice the rate of their industry competitors. What’s more, over a ten-year period, design-led companies outperformed  the S&P 500 by 219 percent.

As you may have guessed by now, design thinking goes way beyond just the way something looks. And incorporating design thinking into your business is more than just creating a design studio and hiring designers. Design thinking means fundamentally changing how you develop your products, services, and, indeed, your organization itself.

Read on for a deep dive into the theory and practice of design thinking.

Learn more about McKinsey’s Design Practice , and check out McKinsey’s latest Business value of design report here .

How do companies build a design-driven company culture?

There’s more to succeeding in business than developing a great product or service that generates a financial return. Empathy and purpose are core business needs. Design thinking means putting customers, employees, and the planet at the center of problem solving.

McKinsey’s Design Practice has learned that design-led organizations start with design-driven cultures. Here are four steps  to building success through the power of design:

Understand your audience. Design-driven companies go beyond asking what customers and employees want, to truly understanding why they want it. Frequently, design-driven companies will turn to cultural anthropologists and ethnographers to drill down into how their customers use and experience products, including what motivates them and what turns them away.

Makeup retailer Sephora provides an example. When marketing leaders actually watched  shoppers using the Sephora website, they realized customers would frequently go to YouTube to watch videos of people using products before making a purchase. Using this information, the cosmetics retailer developed its own line of demonstration videos, keeping shoppers on the site and therefore more likely to make a purchase.

• Bring design to the executive table. This leader can be a chief design officer, a chief digital officer, or a chief marketing officer. Overall, this executive should be the best advocate for the company’s customers and employees, bringing the point of view of the people, the planet, and the company’s purpose into strategic business decisions. The design lead should also build bridges between multiple functions and stakeholders, bringing various groups into the design iteration process.
• Design in real time. To understand how and why people—both customers and employees—use processes, products, or services, organizations should develop a three-pronged design-thinking model that combines design, business strategy, and technology. This approach allows business leaders to spot trends, cocreate using feedback and data, prototype, validate, and build governance models for ongoing investment.

Act quickly. Good design depends on agility. That means getting a product to users quickly, then iterating based on customer feedback. In a design-driven culture, companies aren’t afraid to release products that aren’t quite perfect. Designers know there is no end to the design process. The power of design, instead, lies in the ability to adopt and adapt as needs change. When designers are embedded within teams, they are uniquely positioned to gather and digest feedback, which can lead to unexpected revelations. Ultimately, this approach creates more impactful and profitable results than following a prescribed path.

Consider Instagram. Having launched an initial product in 2010, Instagram’s founders paid attention to what the most popular features were: image sharing, commenting, and liking. They relaunched with a stripped-down version a few months later, resulting in 100,000 downloads in less than a week and over two million users in under two months —all without any strategic promotion.

Learn more about McKinsey’s Design Practice .

What’s the relationship between user-centered design and design thinking?

Both processes are design led. And they both emphasize listening to and deeply understanding users and continually gathering and implementing feedback to develop, refine, and improve a service.

Where they are different is scale. User-centered design focuses on improving a specific product or service . Design thinking takes a broader view  as a way to creatively address complex problems—whether for a start-up, a large organization, or society as a whole.

User-centered design is great for developing a fantastic product or service. In the past, a company could coast on a superior process or product for years before competitors caught up. But now, as digitization drives more frequent and faster disruptions, users demand a dynamic mix of product and service. Emphasis has shifted firmly away  from features and functions toward purpose, lifestyle, and simplicity of use.

Introducing McKinsey Explainers : Direct answers to complex questions

McKinsey analysis has found that some industries—such as telecommunications, automotive, and consumer product companies— have already made strides toward combining product and service into a unified customer experience . Read on for concrete examples of how companies have applied design thinking to offer innovative—and lucrative—customer experiences.

Learn more about our Operations Practice .

What is the design-thinking process?

McKinsey analysis has shown that the design-thinking approach creates more value  than conventional approaches. The right design at the right price point spurs sustainability and resilience in a demonstrable way—a key driver of growth.

According to McKinsey’s Design  Practice, there are two key steps to the design-thinking process:

• Developing an understanding of behavior and needs that goes beyond what people are doing right now to what they will need in the future and how to deliver that. The best way to develop this understanding is to spend time with people.
• “Concepting,” iterating, and testing . First start with pen and paper, sketching out concepts. Then quickly put these into rough prototypes—with an emphasis on quickly. Get feedback, refine, and test again. As American chemist Linus Pauling said : “The way to get good ideas is to get lots of ideas and throw the bad ones away.”

What is D4VG versus DTV?

For more than a decade, manufacturers have used a design-to-value (DTV) model  to design and release products that have the features needed to be competitive at a low cost. During this time, DTV efforts were groundbreaking because they were based on data rather than experience. They also reached across functions, in contrast to the typical value-engineering approach.

The principles of DTV have evolved into design for value and growth (D4VG), a new way of creating products that provide exceptional customer experiences while driving both value and growth. Done right, D4VG efforts generate products with the features, form, and functionality that turn users into loyal fans .

D4VG products can cost more to build, but they can ultimately raise margins by delivering on a clear understanding of a product’s core brand attributes, insights into people’s motivations, and design thinking.

Learn more about our Consumer Packaged Goods Practice .

What is design for sustainability?

As consumers, companies, and regulators shift toward increased sustainability, design processes are coming under even more scrutiny. The challenge is that carbon-efficient production processes tend to be more complex and can require more carbon-intensive materials. The good news is that an increased focus on design for sustainability (DFS), especially at the research and development stage , can help mitigate some of these inefficiencies and ultimately create even more sustainable products.

For example, the transition from internal-combustion engines to electric-propulsion vehicles  has highlighted emissions-intensive automobile production processes. One study found that around 20 percent of the carbon generated by a diesel vehicle comes from its production . If the vehicle ran on only renewable energy, production emissions would account for 85 percent of the total. With more sustainable design, electric-vehicle (EV) manufacturers stand to reduce the lifetime emissions of their products significantly.

To achieve design for sustainability at scale, companies can address three interrelated elements at the R&D stage:

• rethinking the way their products use resources, adapting them to changing regulations, adopting principles of circularity, and making use of customer insights
• understanding and tracking emissions and cost impact of design decisions in support of sustainability goals
• fostering the right mindsets and capabilities to integrate sustainability into every product and design decision

What is ‘skinny design’?

Skinny design is a less theoretical aspect of design thinking. It’s a method whereby consumer goods companies reassess the overall box size of products by reducing the total cubic volume of the package. According to McKinsey analysis , this can improve overall business performance in the following ways:

• Top-line growth of 4 to 5 percent through improvements in shelf and warehouse holding power. The ability to fit more stock into warehouses ultimately translates to growth.
• Bottom-line growth of more than 10 percent . Packing more product into containers and trucks creates the largest savings. Other cost reductions can come from designing packaging to minimize the labor required and facilitate automation.
• Sustainability improvements associated with reductions in carbon emissions through less diesel fuel burned per unit. Material choices can also confer improvements to the overall footprint.

Read more about skinny design and how it can help maximize the volume of consumer products that make it onto shelves.

Learn more about McKinsey’s Operations Practice .

How can a company become a top design performer?

The average person’s standard for design is higher than ever. Good design is no longer just a nice-to-have for a company. Customers now have extremely high expectations for design, whether it’s customer service, instant access to information, or clever products that are also aesthetically relevant in the current culture.

McKinsey tracked the design practices of 300 publicly listed companies  over a five-year period in multiple countries. Advanced regression analysis of more than two million pieces of financial data and more than 100,000 design actions revealed 12 actions most correlated to improved financial performance. These were then clustered into the following four themes:

• Analytical leadership . For the best financial performers, design is a top management issue , and design performance is assessed with the same rigor these companies use to approach revenue and cost. The companies with the top financial returns have combined design and business leadership through bold, design-centric visions. These include a commitment to maintain a baseline level of customer understanding among all executives. The CEO of one of the world’s largest banks, for example, spends one day a month with the bank’s clients and encourages all members of the company’s C-suite to do the same.
• Cross-functional talent . Top-performing companies make user-centric design everyone’s responsibility, not a siloed function. Companies whose designers are embedded within cross-functional teams have better overall business performance . Further, the alignment of design metrics with functional business metrics (such as financial performance, user adoption rates, and satisfaction results) is also correlated to better business performance.
• Design with people, not for people . Design flourishes best, according to our research, in environments that encourage learning, testing, and iterating with users . These practices increase the odds of creating breakthrough products and services, while at the same time reducing the risk of costly missteps.
• User experience (UX) . Top-quartile companies embrace the full user experience  by taking a broad-based view of where design can make a difference. Design approaches like mapping customer journeys can lead to more inclusive and sustainable solutions.

What are some real-world examples of how design thinking can improve efficiency and user experience?

Understanding the theory of design thinking is one thing. Seeing it work in practice is something else. Here are some examples of how elegant design created value for customers, a company, and shareholders:

• Stockholm’s international airport, Arlanda, used design thinking to address its air-traffic-control problem. The goal was to create a system that would make air traffic safer and more effective. By understanding the tasks and challenges of the air-traffic controllers, then collaboratively working on prototypes and iterating based on feedback, a working group was able to design a new departure-sequencing tool  that helped air-traffic controllers do their jobs better. The new system greatly reduced the amount of time planes spent between leaving the terminal and being in the air, which in turn helped reduce fuel consumption.
• When Tesla creates its electric vehicles , the company closely considers not only aesthetics but also the overall driving experience .
• The consumer electronics industry has a long history of dramatic evolutions lead by design thinking. Since Apple debuted the iPhone in 2007, for example, each new generation has seen additional features, new customers, and lower costs—all driven by design-led value creation .

Learn more about our Consumer Packaged Goods  and Sustainability  Practices.

For a more in-depth exploration of these topics, see McKinsey’s Agile Organizations collection. Learn more about our Design Practice —and check out design-thinking-related job opportunities if you’re interested in working at McKinsey.

Articles referenced:

• “ Skinny design: Smaller is better ,” April 26, 2022, Dave Fedewa , Daniel Swan , Warren Teichner , and Bill Wiseman
• “ Product sustainability: Back to the drawing board ,” February 7, 2022, Stephan Fuchs, Stephan Mohr , Malin Orebäck, and Jan Rys
• “ Emerging from COVID-19: Australians embrace their values ,” May 11, 2020, Lloyd Colling, Rod Farmer , Jenny Child, Dan Feldman, and Jean-Baptiste Coumau
• “ The business value of design ,” McKinsey Quarterly , October 25, 2018, Benedict Sheppard , Hugo Sarrazin, Garen Kouyoumjian, and Fabricio Dore
• “ More than a feeling: Ten design practices to deliver business value ,” December 8, 2017, Benedict Sheppard , John Edson, and Garen Kouyoumjian
• “ Creating value through sustainable design ,” July 25, 2017, Sara Andersson, David Crafoord, and Tomas Nauclér
• “ The expanding role of design in creating an end-to-end customer experience ,” June 6, 2017, Raffaele Breschi, Tjark Freundt , Malin Orebäck, and Kai Vollhardt
• “ Design for value and growth in a new world ,” April 13, 2017, Ankur Agrawal , Mark Dziersk, Dave Subburaj, and Kieran West
• “ The power of design thinking ,” March 1, 2016, Jennifer Kilian , Hugo Sarrazin, and Barr Seitz
• “ Building a design-driven culture ,” September 1, 2015, Jennifer Kilian , Hugo Sarrazin, and Hyo Yeon

Want to know more about design thinking?

Related articles.

Skinny design: Smaller is better

The business value of design

More than a feeling: Ten design practices to deliver business value

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Ideas Made to Matter

Design thinking, explained

Rebecca Linke

Sep 14, 2017

What is design thinking?

Design thinking is an innovative problem-solving process rooted in a set of skills.The approach has been around for decades, but it only started gaining traction outside of the design community after the 2008 Harvard Business Review article [subscription required] titled “Design Thinking” by Tim Brown, CEO and president of design company IDEO.

Since then, the design thinking process has been applied to developing new products and services, and to a whole range of problems, from creating a business model for selling solar panels in Africa to the operation of Airbnb .

At a high level, the steps involved in the design thinking process are simple: first, fully understand the problem; second, explore a wide range of possible solutions; third, iterate extensively through prototyping and testing; and finally, implement through the customary deployment mechanisms. 

The skills associated with these steps help people apply creativity to effectively solve real-world problems better than they otherwise would. They can be readily learned, but take effort. For instance, when trying to understand a problem, setting aside your own preconceptions is vital, but it’s hard.

Creative brainstorming is necessary for developing possible solutions, but many people don’t do it particularly well. And throughout the process it is critical to engage in modeling, analysis, prototyping, and testing, and to really learn from these many iterations.

Once you master the skills central to the design thinking approach, they can be applied to solve problems in daily life and any industry.

Here’s what you need to know to get started.

Understand the problem 

The first step in design thinking is to understand the problem you are trying to solve before searching for solutions. Sometimes, the problem you need to address is not the one you originally set out to tackle.

“Most people don’t make much of an effort to explore the problem space before exploring the solution space,” said MIT Sloan professor Steve Eppinger. The mistake they make is to try and empathize, connecting the stated problem only to their own experiences. This falsely leads to the belief that you completely understand the situation. But the actual problem is always broader, more nuanced, or different than people originally assume.

Take the example of a meal delivery service in Holstebro, Denmark. When a team first began looking at the problem of poor nutrition and malnourishment among the elderly in the city, many of whom received meals from the service, it thought that simply updating the menu options would be a sufficient solution. But after closer observation, the team realized the scope of the problem was much larger , and that they would need to redesign the entire experience, not only for those receiving the meals, but for those preparing the meals as well. While the company changed almost everything about itself, including rebranding as The Good Kitchen, the most important change the company made when rethinking its business model was shifting how employees viewed themselves and their work. That, in turn, helped them create better meals (which were also drastically changed), yielding happier, better nourished customers.

Involve users

Imagine you are designing a new walker for rehabilitation patients and the elderly, but you have never used one. Could you fully understand what customers need? Certainly not, if you haven’t extensively observed and spoken with real customers. There is a reason that design thinking is often referred to as human-centered design.

“You have to immerse yourself in the problem,” Eppinger said.

How do you start to understand how to build a better walker? When a team from MIT’s Integrated Design and Management program together with the design firm Altitude took on that task, they met with walker users to interview them, observe them, and understand their experiences.  

“We center the design process on human beings by understanding their needs at the beginning, and then include them throughout the development and testing process,” Eppinger said.

Central to the design thinking process is prototyping and testing (more on that later) which allows designers to try, to fail, and to learn what works. Testing also involves customers, and that continued involvement provides essential user feedback on potential designs and use cases. If the MIT-Altitude team studying walkers had ended user involvement after its initial interviews, it would likely have ended up with a walker that didn’t work very well for customers. 

It is also important to interview and understand other stakeholders, like people selling the product, or those who are supporting the users throughout the product life cycle.

The second phase of design thinking is developing solutions to the problem (which you now fully understand). This begins with what most people know as brainstorming.

Hold nothing back during brainstorming sessions — except criticism. Infeasible ideas can generate useful solutions, but you’d never get there if you shoot down every impractical idea from the start.

“One of the key principles of brainstorming is to suspend judgment,” Eppinger said. “When we're exploring the solution space, we first broaden the search and generate lots of possibilities, including the wild and crazy ideas. Of course, the only way we're going to build on the wild and crazy ideas is if we consider them in the first place.”

That doesn’t mean you never judge the ideas, Eppinger said. That part comes later, in downselection. “But if we want 100 ideas to choose from, we can’t be very critical.”

In the case of The Good Kitchen, the kitchen employees were given new uniforms. Why? Uniforms don’t directly affect the competence of the cooks or the taste of the food.

But during interviews conducted with kitchen employees, designers realized that morale was low, in part because employees were bored preparing the same dishes over and over again, in part because they felt that others had a poor perception of them. The new, chef-style uniforms gave the cooks a greater sense of pride. It was only part of the solution, but if the idea had been rejected outright, or perhaps not even suggested, the company would have missed an important aspect of the solution.

Prototype and test. Repeat.

You’ve defined the problem. You’ve spoken to customers. You’ve brainstormed, come up with all sorts of ideas, and worked with your team to boil those ideas down to the ones you think may actually solve the problem you’ve defined.

“We don’t develop a good solution just by thinking about a list of ideas, bullet points and rough sketches,” Eppinger said. “We explore potential solutions through modeling and prototyping. We design, we build, we test, and repeat — this design iteration process is absolutely critical to effective design thinking.”

Repeating this loop of prototyping, testing, and gathering user feedback is crucial for making sure the design is right — that is, it works for customers, you can build it, and you can support it.

“After several iterations, we might get something that works, we validate it with real customers, and we often find that what we thought was a great solution is actually only just OK. But then we can make it a lot better through even just a few more iterations,” Eppinger said.

Implementation

The goal of all the steps that come before this is to have the best possible solution before you move into implementing the design. Your team will spend most of its time, its money, and its energy on this stage.

“Implementation involves detailed design, training, tooling, and ramping up. It is a huge amount of effort, so get it right before you expend that effort,” said Eppinger.

Design thinking isn’t just for “things.” If you are only applying the approach to physical products, you aren’t getting the most out of it. Design thinking can be applied to any problem that needs a creative solution. When Eppinger ran into a primary school educator who told him design thinking was big in his school, Eppinger thought he meant that they were teaching students the tenets of design thinking.

“It turns out they meant they were using design thinking in running their operations and improving the school programs. It’s being applied everywhere these days,” Eppinger said.

In another example from the education field, Peruvian entrepreneur Carlos Rodriguez-Pastor hired design consulting firm IDEO to redesign every aspect of the learning experience in a network of schools in Peru. The ultimate goal? To elevate Peru’s middle class.

As you’d expect, many large corporations have also adopted design thinking. IBM has adopted it at a company-wide level, training many of its nearly 400,000 employees in design thinking principles .

What can design thinking do for your business?

The impact of all the buzz around design thinking today is that people are realizing that “anybody who has a challenge that needs creative problem solving could benefit from this approach,” Eppinger said. That means that managers can use it, not only to design a new product or service, “but anytime they’ve got a challenge, a problem to solve.”

Applying design thinking techniques to business problems can help executives across industries rethink their product offerings, grow their markets, offer greater value to customers, or innovate and stay relevant. “I don’t know industries that can’t use design thinking,” said Eppinger.

Ready to go deeper?

Read “ The Designful Company ” by Marty Neumeier, a book that focuses on how businesses can benefit from design thinking, and “ Product Design and Development ,” co-authored by Eppinger, to better understand the detailed methods.

Register for an MIT Sloan Executive Education course:

Systematic Innovation of Products, Processes, and Services , a five-day course taught by Eppinger and other MIT professors.

• Leadership by Design: Innovation Process and Culture , a two-day course taught by MIT Integrated Design and Management director Matthew Kressy.
• Managing Complex Technical Projects , a two-day course taught by Eppinger.
• Apply for M astering Design Thinking , a 3-month online certificate course taught by Eppinger and MIT Sloan senior lecturers Renée Richardson Gosline and David Robertson.

Steve Eppinger is a professor of management science and innovation at MIT Sloan. He holds the General Motors Leaders for Global Operations Chair and has a PhD from MIT in engineering. He is the faculty co-director of MIT's System Design and Management program and Integrated Design and Management program, both master’s degrees joint between the MIT Sloan and Engineering schools. His research focuses on product development and technical project management, and has been applied to improving complex engineering processes in many industries.

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What is Design Thinking and Why Is It So Popular?

Design Thinking is not an exclusive property of designers—all great innovators in literature, art, music, science, engineering, and business have practiced it. So, why call it Design Thinking? What’s special about Design Thinking is that designers’ work processes can help us systematically extract, teach, learn and apply these human-centered techniques to solve problems in a creative and innovative way—in our designs, in our businesses, in our countries, in our lives.

Some of the world’s leading brands, such as Apple, Google and Samsung, rapidly adopted the design thinking approach, and leading universities around the world teach the related methodology—including Stanford, Harvard, Imperial College London and the Srishti Institute in India. Before you incorporate design thinking into your own workflows, you need to know what it is and why it’s so popular. Here, we’ll cut to the chase and tell you what design thinking is all about and why it’s so in demand.

What is Design Thinking?

Design thinking is an iterative and non-linear process that contains five phases: 1. Empathize , 2. Define, 3. Ideate, 4. Prototype and 5. Test.

Design thinking is an iterative process in which you seek to understand your users, challenge assumptions , redefine problems and create innovative solutions which you can prototype and test. The overall goal is to identify alternative strategies and solutions that are not instantly apparent with your initial level of understanding.

Design thinking is more than just a process; it opens up an entirely new way to think, and it offers a collection of hands-on methods to help you apply this new mindset.

In essence, design thinking:

Revolves around a deep interest to understand the people for whom we design products and services.

Helps us observe and develop empathy with the target users.

Enhances our ability to question: in design thinking you question the problem, the assumptions and the implications.

Proves extremely useful when you tackle problems that are ill-defined or unknown.

Involves ongoing experimentation through sketches , prototypes, testing and trials of new concepts and ideas.

• Transcript loading…

In this video, Don Norman , the Grandfather of Human-Centered Design , explains how the approach and flexibility of design thinking can help us tackle major global challenges.

What Are the 5 Phases of Design Thinking?

Hasso-Platner Institute Panorama

Ludwig Wilhelm Wall, CC BY-SA 3.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0>, via Wikimedia Commons

Design thinking is an iterative and non-linear process that contains five phases: 1. Empathize, 2. Define, 3. Ideate, 4. Prototype and 5. Test. You can carry these stages out in parallel, repeat them and circle back to a previous stage at any point in the process.

The core purpose of the process is to allow you to work in a dynamic way to develop and launch innovative ideas.

Design thinking is an iterative and non-linear process that contains five phases: 1. Empathize, 2. Define, 3. Ideate, 4. Prototype and 5. Test.

Design Thinking Makes You Think Outside the Box

Design thinking can help people do out-of-the-box or outside-the-box thinking. People who use this methodology:

Attempt to develop new ways of thinking —ways that do not abide by the dominant or more common problem-solving methods.

Have the intention to improve products, services and processes. They seek to analyze and understand how users interact with products to investigate the conditions in which they operate.

Ask significant questions and challenge assumptions. One element of outside-the-box / out-of-the-box thinking is to falsify previous assumptions—i.e., make it possible to prove whether they’re valid or not.

As you can see, design thinking offers us a means to think outside the box and also dig that bit deeper into problem-solving. It helps us carry out the right kind of research, create prototypes and test our products and services to uncover new ways to meet our users’ needs.

The Grand Old Man of User Experience , Don Norman, who also coined the very term User Experience , explains what Design Thinking is and what’s so special about it:

“…the more I pondered the nature of design and reflected on my recent encounters with engineers, business people and others who blindly solved the problems they thought they were facing without question or further study, I realized that these people could benefit from a good dose of design thinking. Designers have developed a number of techniques to avoid being captured by too facile a solution. They take the original problem as a suggestion, not as a final statement, then think broadly about what the real issues underlying this problem statement might really be (for example by using the " Five Whys " approach to get at root causes). Most important of all, is that the process is iterative and expansive. Designers resist the temptation to jump immediately to a solution to the stated problem. Instead, they first spend time determining what the basic, fundamental (root) issue is that needs to be addressed. They don't try to search for a solution until they have determined the real problem, and even then, instead of solving that problem, they stop to consider a wide range of potential solutions. Only then will they finally converge upon their proposal. This process is called "Design Thinking." — Don Norman, Rethinking Design Thinking

Design Thinking is for Everybody

How many people are involved in the design process when your organization decides to create a new product or service? Teams that build products are often composed of people from a variety of different departments. For this reason, it can be difficult to develop, categorize and organize ideas and solutions for the problems you try to solve. One way you can keep a project on track, and organize the core ideas, is to use a design thinking approach—and everybody can get involved in that!

Tim Brown, CEO of the celebrated innovation and design firm IDEO, emphasizes this in his successful book Change by Design when he says design thinking techniques and strategies belong at every level of a business.

Design thinking is not only for designers but also for creative employees, freelancers and leaders who seek to infuse it into every level of an organization. This widespread adoption of design thinking will drive the creation of alternative products and services for both business and society.

“Design thinking begins with skills designers have learned over many decades in their quest to match human needs with available technical resources within the practical constraints of business. By integrating what is desirable from a human point of view with what is technologically feasible and economically viable, designers have been able to create the products we enjoy today. Design thinking takes the next step, which is to put these tools into the hands of people who may have never thought of themselves as designers and apply them to a vastly greater range of problems.” — Tim Brown, Change by Design, Introduction

Design thinking techniques and strategies belong at every level of a business. You should involve colleagues from a wide range of departments to create a cross-functional team that can utilize knowledge and experience from different specialisms.

Tim Brown also shows how design thinking is not just for everybody—it’s about everybody, too. The process is firmly based on how you can generate a holistic and empathic understanding of the problems people face. Design thinking involves ambiguous, and inherently subjective, concepts such as emotions, needs, motivations and drivers of behavior .

In a solely scientific approach (for example, analyzing data), people are reduced to representative numbers, devoid of emotions. Design thinking, on the other hand, considers both quantitative as well as qualitative dimensions to gain a more complete understanding of user needs . For example, you might observe people performing a task such as shopping for groceries, and you might talk to a few shoppers who feel frustrated with the checkout process at the store (qualitative data). You can also ask them how many times a week they go shopping or feel a certain way at the checkout counter (quantitative data). You can then combine these data points to paint a holistic picture of user pain points, needs and problems.

Tim Brown sums up that design thinking provides a third way to look at problems. It’s essentially a problem-solving approach that has crystallized in the field of design to combine a holistic user-centered perspective with rational and analytical research—all with the goal to create innovative solutions.

“Design thinking taps into capacities we all have but that are overlooked by more conventional problem-solving practices. It is not only human-centered; it is deeply human in and of itself. Design thinking relies on our ability to be intuitive, to recognize patterns, to construct ideas that have emotional meaning as well as functionality, to express ourselves in media other than words or symbols. Nobody wants to run a business based on feeling, intuition, and inspiration, but an overreliance on the rational and the analytical can be just as dangerous. The integrated approach at the core of the design process suggests a ‘third way.’” — Tim Brown, Change by Design, Introduction

Design Thinking Has a Scientific Side

Design thinking is both an art and a science. It combines investigations into ambiguous elements of the problem with rational and analytical research —the scientific side in other words. This magical concoction reveals previously unknown parameters and helps to uncover alternative strategies which lead to truly innovative solutions.

The scientific activities analyze how users interact with products, and investigate the conditions in which they operate. They include tasks which:

Research users’ needs.

Pool experience from previous projects.

Consider present and future conditions specific to the product.

Test the parameters of the problem.

Test the practical application of alternative problem solutions.

Once you arrive at a number of potential solutions, the selection process is then underpinned by rationality. As a designer, you are encouraged to analyze and falsify these solutions to arrive at the best available option for each problem or obstacle identified during phases of the design process.

With this in mind, it may be more correct to say design thinking is not about thinking outside the box, but on its edge, its corner, its flap, and under its bar code—as Clint Runge put it.

Clint Runge is Founder and Managing Director of Archrival, a distinguished youth marketing agency, and adjunct Professor at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.

Resetting Our Mental Boxes and Developing a Fresh Mindset

Thinking outside of the box can provide an innovative solution to a sticky problem. However, thinking outside of the box can be a real challenge as we naturally develop patterns of thinking that are modeled on the repetitive activities and commonly accessed knowledge we surround ourselves with.

Some years ago, an incident occurred where a truck driver tried to pass under a low bridge. But he failed, and the truck was lodged firmly under the bridge. The driver was unable to continue driving through or reverse out.

The story goes that as the truck became stuck, it caused massive traffic problems, which resulted in emergency personnel, engineers, firefighters and truck drivers gathering to devise and negotiate various solutions for dislodging the trapped vehicle.

Emergency workers were debating whether to dismantle parts of the truck or chip away at parts of the bridge. Each spoke of a solution that fitted within his or her respective level of expertise.

A boy walking by and witnessing the intense debate looked at the truck, at the bridge, then looked at the road and said nonchalantly, “Why not just let the air out of the tires?” to the absolute amazement of all the specialists and experts trying to unpick the problem.

When the solution was tested, the truck was able to drive free with ease, having suffered only the damage caused by its initial attempt to pass underneath the bridge. The story symbolizes the struggles we face where oftentimes the most obvious solutions are the ones hardest to come by because of the self-imposed constraints we work within.

It’s often difficult for us humans to challenge our assumptions and everyday knowledge because we rely on building patterns of thinking in order to not have to learn everything from scratch every time. We rely on doing everyday processes more or less unconsciously—for example, when we get up in the morning, eat, walk, and read—but also when we assess challenges at work and in our private lives. In particular, experts and specialists rely on their solid thought patterns, and it can be very challenging and difficult for experts to start questioning their knowledge.

Stories Have the Power to Inspire

Why did we tell you this story about the truck and the bridge? Well, it’s because stories can help us inspire opportunities, ideas and solutions. Stories are framed around real people and their lives and are important because they’re accounts of specific events, not general statements. They provide us with concrete details which help us imagine solutions to particular problems.

Stories also help you develop the eye of a designer. As you walk around the world, you should try to look for the design stories that are all around you. Say to yourself “that’s an example of great design” or “that's an example of really bad design ” and try to figure out the reasons why.

When you come across something particularly significant, make sure you document it either through photos or video. This will prove beneficial not only to you and your design practice but also to others—your future clients, maybe.

The Take Away

Design Thinking is an iterative and non-linear process. This simply means that the design team continuously uses their results to review, question and improve their initial assumptions, understandings and results. Results from the final stage of the initial work process inform our understanding of the problem, help us determine the parameters of the problem, enable us to redefine the problem, and, perhaps most importantly, provide us with new insights so we can see any alternative solutions that might not have been available with our previous level of understanding.

Design thinking is a non-linear, iterative process that consists of 5 phases: 1. Empathize, 2. Define, 3. Ideate, 4. Prototype and 5. Test. You can carry out the stages in parallel, repeat them and circle back to a previous stage at any point in the process—you don’t have to follow them in order.

It’s a process that digs a bit deeper into problem-solving as you seek to understand your users, challenge assumptions and redefine problems. The design thinking process has both a scientific and artistic side to it, as it asks us to understand and challenge our natural, restrictive patterns of thinking and generate innovative solutions to the problems our users face.

Design thinking is essentially a problem-solving approach that has the intention to improve products. It helps you assess and analyze known aspects of a problem and identify the more ambiguous or peripheral factors that contribute to the conditions of a problem. This contrasts with a more scientific approach where the concrete and known aspects are tested in order to arrive at a solution.

The iterative and ideation -oriented nature of design thinking means we constantly question and acquire knowledge throughout the process. This helps us redefine a problem so we can identify alternative strategies and solutions that aren’t instantly apparent with our initial level of understanding.

Design thinking is often referred to as outside-the-box thinking, as designers attempt to develop new ways of thinking that do not abide by the dominant or more common problem-solving methods—just like artists do.

The design thinking process has become increasingly popular over the last few decades because it was key to the success of many high-profile, global organizations. This outside-the-box thinking is now taught at leading universities across the world and is encouraged at every level of business.

“The ‘Design Thinking’ label is not a myth. It is a description of the application of well-tried design process to new challenges and opportunities, used by people from both design and non-design backgrounds. I welcome the recognition of the term and hope that its use continues to expand and be more universally understood, so that eventually every leader knows how to use design and design thinking for innovation and better results.” — Bill Moggridge, co-founder of IDEO, in Design Thinking: Dear Don

References & Where to Learn More

Enroll in our engaging course, “Design Thinking: The Ultimate Guide”

Here are some examples of good and bad designs to inspire you to look for examples in your daily life.

Read this informative article “What Is Design Thinking, and How Can SMBs Accomplish It?” by Jackie Dove.

Read this insightful article “Rethinking Design Thinking” by Don Norman.

Check out Tim Brown’s book “Change by Design: How Design Thinking Transforms Organizations and Inspires Innovation Introduction,” 2009.

Learn more about Design Thinking in the article “Design Thinking: Dear Don” by Bill Moggridge.

© Interaction Design Foundation, CC BY-SA 3.0

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What is Design Thinking?

Design Thinking is a human centered approach to problem solving.

It requires a methodology, a general process and the development of skills in order to use it to solve problems. Understanding the methodology and developing the skills are by far the more important. Skills require practice, repetition and deep thinking in order to get good at them.

Design Thinking holds the promise of solving almost any problem, but practicing and becoming an expert in the craft of Design Thinking (sometimes referred to as Design Doing) and how you develop buy-in and execute the methodology within your firm or organization will determine how successful you are.

What’s the difference between human-centered design and design thinking?

These two terms are interlinked and it is worth stating the difference between them. From the IDEO website:

" Human-centered design  is a creative approach to problem solving. It’s the backbone of all our work at IDEO. It’s a process that starts with the people you’re designing for and ends with new solutions that are purpose-built to suit their needs. Human-centered design is about cultivating deep empathy with the people you’re designing for; generating ideas; building a bunch of prototypes; sharing what you’ve made with the people you’re designing for; and eventually, putting your innovative new solution out in the world.

Design thinking, as IDEO's Tim Brown explains, is a human-centered approach to innovation. It draws from the designer’s toolkit to integrate the needs of people, the possibilities of technology, and the requirements for business success. Successful innovations rely on some element of human-centered design research while balancing other elements. Design thinking helps achieve that balance. It lets people find the sweet spot of feasibility, viability and desirability while considering the real needs and desires of people."

The Design Thinking Association develops materials and programs to help practitioners raise their standards of practice. We create a global community through a web platform, events, networking and opportunities to share and discuss design thinking.

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Design Thinking

In the past, design has most often occurred fairly far downstream in the development process and has focused on making new products aesthetically attractive or enhancing brand perception through smart, evocative advertising. Today, as innovation’s terrain expands to encompass human-centered processes and services as well as products, companies are asking designers to create ideas rather than to simply dress them up.

Brown, the CEO and president of the innovation and design firm IDEO, is a leading proponent of design thinking—a method of meeting people’s needs and desires in a technologically feasible and strategically viable way. In this article he offers several intriguing examples of the discipline at work. One involves a collaboration between frontline employees from health care provider Kaiser Permanente and Brown’s firm to reengineer nursing-staff shift changes at four Kaiser hospitals. Close observation of actual shift changes, combined with brainstorming and rapid prototyping, produced new procedures and software that radically streamlined information exchange between shifts. The result was more time for nursing, better-informed patient care, and a happier nursing staff.

Another involves the Japanese bicycle components manufacturer Shimano, which worked with IDEO to learn why 90% of American adults don’t ride bikes. The interdisciplinary project team discovered that intimidating retail experiences, the complexity and cost of sophisticated bikes, and the danger of cycling on heavily trafficked roads had overshadowed people’s happy memories of childhood biking. So the team created a brand concept—“Coasting”—to describe a whole new category of biking and developed new in-store retailing strategies, a public relations campaign to identify safe places to cycle, and a reference design to inspire designers at the companies that went on to manufacture Coasting bikes.

Thinking like a designer can transform the way you develop products, services, processes—and even strategy.

Thomas Edison created the electric lightbulb and then wrapped an entire industry around it. The lightbulb is most often thought of as his signature invention, but Edison understood that the bulb was little more than a parlor trick without a system of electric power generation and transmission to make it truly useful. So he created that, too.

• TB Tim Brown is the CEO and president of the international design consulting firm IDEO and the author of Change by Design (HarperBusiness, 2009).

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What is design thinking and why does it matter?

Solving problems is a pivotal part of product development. But some issues that come up during product development are more complex than others, and it can be difficult to find the right solution—or even know where to start looking.

That's where the concept of design thinking comes in, keeping users at the center of every process by combining problem-solving with deep empathy.

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This guide gives you a comprehensive overview of design thinking as a problem-solving approach. In this first chapter, you'll gain a strong understanding of what design thinking is, why it’s relevant, and how it helps you design products that you’re proud to bring into the world—and that your users will love.

Design better products with empathy

Use Hotjar to understand your customer’s habits, behaviors, frustrations, needs, and wants—so you can design a frictionless, user-centric experience.

What is design thinking?

Design thinking is a problem-solving approach to product development that places an emphasis on the user to help teams identify issues, reframe them, and generate creative solutions.  

It’s a solution-based ideology, process, and collection of hands-on methods to solve complex problems in a user-centric way . Design thinking is most useful for addressing problems that are either ill-defined or unknown, by helping you:

Redefine the problem with a user-centric mindset

Identify the challenge worth solving

Develop ideas in brainstorming sessions

Adopt a hands-on approach in prototyping and testing

Who is design thinking for?

Despite its name, design thinking is not exclusively used by designers. Instead, it’s a human-centered approach to innovation practiced across science, art, engineering, and business.

In the world of product development, design thinking has been incredibly successful in showcasing relevant solutions for real problems. With it, teams can do better UX research, prototyping, and usability testing to uncover new ways to meet users’ needs.  

Design thinking helps you focus on achieving practical results and solutions that:

Meet and solve a real human need

Can be developed into functional products or processes

Are economically viable

It also aims to turn ideas into tangible, testable products as quickly as possible, and make changes and improvements before building the real thing.

💡 Pro tip: don’t base your entire product on assumptions. Use design thinking to go beyond what you already know about your users and product. 

Engage with your users as much as possible; run interviews, watch screen recordings to see what your users see and identify their pain points, and use Hotjar Surveys and Feedback widgets to send out a mix of full-scale surveys and quick questions.

Understand what users really think about your site with Feedback

5 things you need to know about design thinking

Design thinking has long been considered the holy grail of innovation. But before you incorporate it into your own workflows, you need to understand what it is and why it’s so popular. 

1. Design thinking came about as a way to teach engineers how to approach problems creatively—like designers do.

The concept of design thinking was fathered by John E. Arnold, a professor of mechanical engineering at Stanford University. From there, it began to evolve as a way of creative thinking and problem-solving, leading to IDEO’s iconic 90s run and Stanford University’s d.school design thinking course as an approach to technical and social innovation.

Today, design thinking gives us the opportunity to reimagine the world and the products, systems, or institutions that reinforce the ways people relate to each other. Some of the world’s leading brands are using design thinking to drive innovation and results—from Apple to Google, and from Samsung to IBM and GE. 

Dive into the Design Thinking Examples chapter of this guide to learn what actions your product team can take related to design thinking.

2. Design thinking means approaching a problem with a designer’s mindset, from the user’s perspective.

As a designer, you have this amazing power of wide-eyed curiosity. What does the world—or even just one person—need in terms of product, user experience, strategy, or complex systems? Can design help achieve it?

A designer is uniquely equipped to deal with these complex problems, with an inquisitive approach that embraces empathy, optimism, iteration, creativity, and ambiguity.

As a solution-based approach to innovation, design thinking draws techniques from the designer’s toolkit to solve problems in a creative and innovative way . The designer’s mindset helps you observe and develop empathy with the user—it asks about what they want and need from your product, and how you can use design to bring that to life.

💡 Pro tip: combine quantitative metrics with qualitative feedback to inform designs and keep users at the center of your work. 

Hotjar’s Feedback widget and Surveys give you clear voice of the customer (VoC) data to back up your discoveries, and Recordings and Heatmaps give you quantitative metrics on where customer issues lie with your current products.

Collect actionable product feedback so you can identify what needs to change—and how to change it

3. There are 5 principles that are pivotal to design thinking. 

The five principles of design thinking are reflected in the design thinking methodology; here they are in summary:

User-centricity and empathy: human-centered design thinking keeps people at the center of every process. A good designer knows that when you stay focused on the people you're designing for—and listen to them directly—you can arrive at optimal solutions that meet their needs.

Collaboration: design thinking techniques and strategies belong at every level of a business. Innovation comes from diverse perspectives and ideas, and should involve colleagues from various departments to create a cross-functional team.

Ideation: design thinking is a solution-based framework, so the focus is on coming up with as many ideas and potential solutions as possible. These are not necessarily new (or good) ideas, but they can become the foundations of new solutions to be tested with prototypes.

Experimentation and iteration: the early and frequent testing of your solutions is inherent to the design thinking process; this way, you can gather feedback and make any necessary changes long before the product is fully developed .  

A bias towards action : design thinking is an extremely hands-on approach to problem-solving. That means turning ideas into tangible prototypes and testing them in real-world contexts—an essential way to assess new ideas and identify the changes needed to make them work.

Learn more about these five principles in the Design Thinking Methodology chapter of this guide.

💡 Pro tip: in design thinking, prototyping is carried out on far-from-finished products, to understand users’ iterative experiences with a work in progress. 

Getting your product ideas in front of real users for feedback can be daunting, but the basis for prototyping early and often is intended to keep you from forming attachments to ideas that may or may not be worthwhile.

Sometimes the key to user empathy is sharing or co-creating a prototype with your users and getting their feedback. By testing your prototypes with real users in context, observing their reactions , and getting feedback , you can refine your point of view, learn more about your users, and make the next iteration of the product that much better.

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4. Design thinking is a solution-based framework, not a problem-focused approach. 

The way you look at a problem can dictate the way you solve it. Design thinking offers an alternative to problem-focused approaches by highlighting what is working (or could work), rather than emphasizing deficits, limitations, and weaknesses.

A problem-focused approach helps to identify the problem , why it exists, and when and where it becomes a pain point for your users. The approach lets you analyze a situation and figure out where the breakdown is occurring—but you still need to figure out what comes next.

A solution-focused approach, on the other hand, helps you solve the problem. Beyond identifying the problem, and when and where it occurs, this approach lets you identify strategies to resolve the issues that are causing the problem in the first place. 

In product development, solution-based approaches tend to yield more positive results and better products. A user-first approach like design thinking simplifies everything across product teams, marketing, sales, and client services, because customer goals and success metrics are the centerpiece.

A solutions-driven organization does everything from the users’ perspective first, allowing you to:

Gain empathy with users’ habits, behaviors, and needs: discover new opportunities to improve the user experience by empathizing with users and seeing an unbiased view of their experience

Design a frictionless user experience: identify pain points in the user experience and design a solution that balances both user and business needs

The focus is on coming up with as many ideas and potential solutions as possible, thinking ‘outside the box’, looking for alternative ways to view the problem, and identifying innovative solutions to the design thinking problem statements you’ve created.

For a closer look, read the Design Thinking Process and Framework chapter of this guide.

5. Design thinking is an iterative and non-linear process that encourages constant experimentation.

The design thinking process fosters creativity, innovation, and user-centricity, and helps you come up with actionable solutions. As noted above, the process outlines a series of principles, or stages, that bring this ideology to life: 

Empathize : getting to know your users and their challenges

Define : homing in on what problem needs to be solved

Ideate : outside-the-box thinking about solutions and angles

Prototype : creating something tangible that users can then try-out

Test : exposing your prototype to real users to determine if your solution is valid or needs some work.  

You can carry out these five-stages in parallel, repeat them, and circle back to a previous stage at any point in the process. 

For example, even once you’ve defined your problem statement, you should keep building empathy with users—use design thinking tools like surveys and feedback software to validate your problem statement and update your assumptions.

The purpose of the process is to allow you to work dynamically to develop and launch innovative ideas. Regardless of how you choose to implement the design thinking process, the goal remains the same: to approach complex problems from a human perspective.

💡 Pro tip: design thinking embraces the principles of continuous discovery to evolve, adapt, and refine ideas and turn them into valuable solutions for your users.

Don’t be afraid to hop back and forth between different stages of the design thinking process to start thinking out of the box. If the creative juices aren’t flowing, go back to your users. Teams can always benefit from building more user empathy with tools like Hotjar Feedback or Surveys .

Intuitive and simple Hotjar Surveys are perfect for capturing all types of feedback

How design thinking helps teams build better products

Design thinking is a tool for creativity, innovation, and problem-solving:

It helps designers gain an understanding of user habits, behaviors, frustrations, needs, and wants.

It allows managers to foster a culture of user-centricity at every level of business.

Most importantly, it helps teams create ground-breaking products that users actually want.

Design thinking empowers teams to get their ideas out and share them. It holds the space for you to be ambiguous and messy, knowing you're moving in the direction of the outcomes you're looking for. It’s a way to start , and be willing to have 100 sketches on the floor that won’t work, before finding the one that does—from ambiguity to clarity, refinement, and launch. 

Design thinking can impact and provide innovative solutions to issues product teams truly care about:

Tackling complex challenges

Design thinking encourages creative problem-solving. It pushes you further into the process of questioning: questioning the problem, the assumptions, and the implications. 

A good design thinking framework will give you new perspectives on the lives of your users—including the challenges they face in your product, and the moments that delight them. Having this empathy can give you the insights you need to solve hard, worthwhile problems.

This is especially useful in a product development context—whether it’s designing a competitive product, optimizing internal processes, or reinventing an entire business model.

Moving faster, with iterative speed

Design thinking stops you from falling into assumptions and designing patterns out of habit. Instead, it shifts the focus from your problem to the solution that works best for your users. 

Designing a product with insights from user observation is much more productive than starting from scratch. This shortens the development process by helping you design better products that your users actually want, from the get-go.

Design thinking also helps scale the design process through large organizations. It keeps the team and stakeholders on the same page and improves efficiency with an agile design thinking approach to early-stage feedback that stops you wasting resources on unpromising ideas. 

Meeting and exceeding customer expectations to ensure customer delight 

Empathy is at the heart of design. It connects you—the designer—to the people who will benefit from your work, empowering you to create products that ultimately meet real human needs.

Design thinking revolves around a deep interest to understand the people you're building for, creating the conditions for innovation to happen over and over again .

With design thinking, teams have the freedom to generate real solutions. It’s not just about coming up with ideas—it’s about turning them into prototypes, testing them, and making changes based on user feedback.

🔥 How we use the design thinking framework at Hotjar

At Hotjar , we ‘live and breathe’ design thinking and use this framework to deliver work in any part of our company—from Marketing to Product Teams.

Here are the four key product experience insights tools we use to produce granular insights that help our designers empathize with users:

Heatmaps : see where users click, navigate, and scroll to discover which elements attract attention and which get overlooked.

Feedback widgets : gather on-site user feedback to hear from customers in the wild.

Recordings : watch playbacks of users navigating your product to zero-in on issues, pain points, and bugs.

Surveys : gather VoC data both on- and off-site by sending out either short- or long-form surveys.

Minimizing uncertainty and improving confidence in design decisions

Product development can be fraught with obstacles. Your team either collects a lot of backward-looking data, which doesn’t tell you what current or future users really want, or you make risky bets based on instinct instead of evidence. 

Design thinking is a strategy-making tool that shifts the focus to human behavior. By using imaginative, human-centered problem solving, you can identify new strategies and unlock new markets. Design thinking also plays a key role in reducing assumptions for product teams, and ultimately enables you to better understand users and deliver products that delight them . 

Developing this type of deep empathy with your target users means you’ll be able to design products they really want, and will use and come back to.

Put users at the center of your designs, every time

Faqs about design thinking:.

Design thinking is a popular ideology and process that focuses on solving complex problems in a highly user-centric way. 

It’s a creative approach to innovation and problem-solving that takes design perspectives and processes and applies them to a variety of industries to help strengthen their services, products, policies, or design processes. 

The design thinking process outlines a series of steps that bring this ideology to life—starting with building empathy for the user, through to coming up with ideas and turning them into prototypes.

Why is design thinking important for product development?

Design thinking has become closely associated with innovation and the creation of ground-breaking products and services. It can be used to develop solutions for end-users, but can also help organizations boost creativity and innovation to implement new strategies across every business level.

Design thinking allows teams to understand users, challenge assumptions, redefine problems, and create innovative solutions to prototype and test.

The iterative and non-linear nature of the design thinking process allows product teams to work dynamically to develop and launch innovative ideas.

How can I practice design thinking?

The goal of the design thinking process is to come up with solutions, products, or services that are desirable for the user, economically viable from a business perspective, and technologically feasible. 

To do that, start by Empathizing with your users, being more open to the user experience and seeing things from their perspectives. This will help you Define your problem statement, which helps you reframe your point of view and see a problem from a different angle. 

Then, your team can start to Ideate , which may spur new approaches to your problem and bring you closer to an innovative solution that puts your users at the center. Based on this, you can start to build a Prototype to answer critical questions quickly.

When you Test your prototype, it opens you to both the many possible directions of your design and the ways it might address real human needs. Each step along the way affords the opportunity to rethink, relearn, and reboot as needed. The design process is rarely linear.

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What is human-centered design? Everything you need to know

A complete guide explaining what human-centered design is, why it matters, the process it follows, its core principles, and examples.

Free course: Introduction to UX Design

What is UX? Why has it become so important? Could it be a career for you? Learn the answers, and more, with a free 7-lesson video course.

Taking a successful product to market requires crafting a solution to an under-served user need. But how do you know what needs are under-served or what products need designing? Ask your customers! 

Using human-centred design principles, such as talking to your customers, will help you level up when designing products and solutions. 

In this guide, we’ll explore what human-centred design is and why it’s important. We’ll outline the principles and processes of human centered design, and then explore the differences—and similarities—between human-centred design and design thinking. Finally, we’ll look at some examples of human-centred design in action. 

What is human-centered design? A definition

Human-centered design (HCD) is an approach to design that places real people at the center of problem-solving. At every phase of the design process , consideration of your customers and their context comes first. This is a step above user-centered design, which tends to focus on the way people use things, not their psychological and emotional needs.

A brief history of human-centered design

HCD as an approach to creative problem-solving is often traced back to the beginning of the Stanford University design program in 1958. There, Professor John E. Arnold first proposed that engineering design should be human-centered. 

In the mid-1960s, design theorist Horst Rittel introduced the term “wicked problems” to describe problems that are difficult to solve, such as homelessness and social injustice, because they consist of requirements that are incomplete or contradictory. Also, solving one wicked problem often reveals another. 

Consequently, wicked problems require a problem-solving approach that is adaptable and centered on human behavior. Thus, HCD emerged to fulfill this need and took off from there.

HCD isn’t just a method; it’s a mindset with people at its center. The process champions new solutions that come from cultivating deep empathy and are built to suit human needs. 

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Why is human-centered design important?

When you cultivate empathy for your customers, as you do in HCD, you can think of products that will really improve people’s lives. Also, you can follow your customers’ needs as they evolve. This can open up new opportunities to diversify for you and to try new products for them.

In addition, HCD gives the people you’re designing for the sense that they’re understood. Not only can this increase customer loyalty, but because they’re part of the process that brought the product to market, they’re likely to feel more invested in using it.

What are the 4 principles of human-centered design?

HCD has four principles: 

1. Be people-centered

Whatever you create, focus on the people who use the product and their context. These are real human beings with real needs, and your product is a tool to help them reach their goals more efficiently. 

2. Find the right problem

Don Norman , a user experience expert and co-founder of the Nielsen-Norman Group, says that usually when people come to him with a problem, it’s not the right one. Instead, he’s approached with symptoms of the problem. But he wants to solve the fundamental problem, the one that will solve the root cause of all the other problems. Solving the fundamental problem is the real goal that companies come to designers with. Otherwise the symptoms will continue to come up. 

3. Think of everything as a system

Always keep the big picture of the user journey in mind, even if you’re only working on a small part of it. Don Norman observes that because optimization at the local level doesn’t mean optimization for the global level, we should keep the whole experience in mind for a smoother system. 

4. Small and simple interventions

Don’t rush into big design solutions. Instead, do iterative work with simple interventions that you can learn from. Slowly, your results will get better and bigger. Also, continuously prototype and test your solutions to make sure they meet the needs of the people you’re designing for.

What is the human-centered design process? The 6 phases of HCD

According to design firm IDEO, these are the six phases of the HCD process.

Phase 1: Observation

From the first phase we foster deep empathy with people. In this phase, our goal is to understand the people we’re designing for by observing and learning about them. We’ll put our assumptions aside and look at pain points and patterns of behaviour to understand how people feel about a given product.

Phase 2: Ideation

Here you and your team will come up with ideas based on what you learned in the previous phase. You’ll want to come up with as many ideas as you can. Even bad ideas can make it to the table as they can always have the root of a good idea in it. Eventually your team’s ideas will evolve in the right direction.

Phase 3: Rapid prototyping

In this phase, you’ll create a simple prototype that will give you something to test with your users. This shouldn’t be a high fidelity prototype but one that has just enough of the idea that people can understand and comment on it.

Phase 4: User feedback

Get your prototype in the hands of the people you’re designing for in this phase. This is the most critical phase of the design process because, without feedback from people, you won’t know if your solution needs to be adjusted and in which directions.

Learn more about how to incorporate user feedback in product design (and why it matters) here .

Phase 5: Iteration

In this phase, use the insights you’ve gained from users to fuel changes to your design. Iterate, test, and iterate some more until your solution is fine-tuned and ready to be used. 

Phase 6: Implementation

Here, your design is ready to be put into action and used in the real world. While the design seems finished, though, keep in mind that design is never truly done. Keep learning, keep iterating, and keep testing whenever possible to continue to improve the design.

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Human-centered design vs. design thinking—what’s the difference?

HCD and design thinking are similar concepts. Some people even think of them as synonymous. There are some key differences, though. 

While design thinking is at the root of HCD, it zooms out to look at the problem with a larger scope. That’s because design thinking involves designing solutions and products that are created to solve a problem. With design thinking, you’ll empathize with customers’ needs before coming up with solutions that can immediately be put into use. 

HCD, on the other hand, wants to ensure that the product will enhance consumers’ lives. With HCD, you’ll get to know the objectives of your customers to ensure you and your team are creating products that will improve their lives, not just interest or amuse them. 

Still the two methods do have their similarities. Empathy for people is at the heart of both HCD and design thinking. Both methods are iterative and, since your user base is constantly evolving, your designs will evolve too.

You can learn more about design thinking in this guide: What is design thinking? A definition and examples.

What are some examples of human-centered design?

Here are some examples of HCD:

1. Colgate Electric Toothbrush

Source: Hubspot

While Colgate’s electric toothbrush was innovative in the 1990s, it’s since been surpassed by other competitors, so Colgate hired HCD firm Altitude to design a new toothbrush for them. The team at Altitude extensively researched the audience, asking questions and seeing how people use toothbrushes in their daily lives. 

Then they developed the Motion, a slimmer toothbrush with oscillating heads and an arcing neck. The goal was to serve the user’s needs and, fortunately, this toothbrush solved a problem the industry hadn’t addressed yet: needing a slender electronic toothbrush that still delivered on performance.

2. Samsung FreeStyle Bluetooth Projector   

Source: UserGuiding

Samsung FreeStyle, a Bluetooth projector, isn’t designed for everyone. The company is very specific that it is designed specifically for Gen Z and Millenials. That’s because different generations want different things, and while older generations may not be so keen to have a projector that can project on any surface, no matter what the colour, Gen Z and Millenials express a much greater need for this portable device. 

Though Gen Z and Millenials won’t necessarily have thought of this product before, they’ll want it when they see it. Especially because people now work from home and are educated online more than ever today, these individuals will see the value of a tiny device that they can bring with them anywhere and can be used to project anything.

3. HelloFresh

When HelloFresh was founded in 2011 by Dominik Richter, Tobias Griesel, and Jessica Nilsson with the intention of providing healthy, fresh recipes to everyone, they were meeting a real need. The founders wondered what consumers were having trouble with and what they wanted to change about their own experience acquiring food.

What they found was that people had difficulty finding the time to shop for groceries and creating healthy and affordable meals. They came up with a solution that addressed those very needs—delivering boxes of ingredients that are already measured out, along with healthy recipes the user can follow— and have had a thriving business ever since.

Key takeaways

That’s human-centered design in a nutshell. To summarise: human-centered design (HCD) puts real people at the center of any design solution. It emerged as an approach to problem-solving, encouraging designers to cultivate empathy and define the root problem before seeking solutions. 

As a UX designer, there are many different tools and techniques you can use to step into your users’ shoes and make sure you’re designing with their needs in mind. Check out the following:

• A complete guide to storyboarding in UX
• How to design a customer journey map step-by-step
• How to design accessible and inclusive content (and why it matters)

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4 June 2024

Human centered design vs. Design thinking: an overview

Explore the differences and similarities between Design Thinking and Human Centered Design, then learn how you can apply them for better results.

Design is a critical component of many industries, from product design to software engineering and beyond. Human-centered design and design thinking are two approaches to problem solving that focus on the user — understanding their needs and creating meaningful solutions. 

In this article, we'll explore the differences and similarities between human-centered design and design thinking, as well as look at how they can be applied in various industries. We’ll also discuss how both approaches involve understanding the user experience, empathizing with them, and creating effective solutions.

Design thinking vs. human-centered design: What's the difference?

While not exactly the same, the concepts of design thinking and human-centered design have quite a bit of interplay. It's common for a design team to balance the two to end up with a product that's both useful and profitable.

Consider that they both inform product development, but each plays a distinct role in how the product comes about.

What is design thinking?

Design thinking is an iterative problem-solving process that balances consumer needs and usability with technical capabilities. It typically follows five distinct stages: empathize, define, ideate, prototype, and test. 

The goal of design thinking is to comprehend user preferences to resolve their issues. It encourages diverse thoughts to generate new ideas and challenge traditional assumptions in a creative manner.

A key characteristic of design thinking is that it’s an iterative process. That means product teams can rapidly move from idea formation through prototyping, feedback gathering, and refining until they solve the problem. Design teams use this iterative process as an instrument for establishing what works best for users before developing full products or services.

What is human-centered design?

Human-centered design is a product development methodology built to help create innovative solutions through empathy-driven design. To make it work, the focus should be on the human perspective: how they view the product, interact with it, find it useful or beautiful, or continue to engage with it over time. If possible, the way you design your product should support their goals, values, and motivations, too.

By maintaining this mission of deep empathy from ideation to launch, you have a better chance of creating something truly valuable for your end-user.

Understanding key differences

Let’s say you’re creating a time management app to help people manage their busy schedules — you might use design thinking to do market research, develop, and prototype. It may involve beta testing or real-user feedback, but it doesn't have to. 

Human-centered design may be present in your decision to add new features to your app (which would be based on the feedback you received from users about specific problems they face or their usage habits). It's done with the sole purpose of understanding your customer and meeting them where they are.

Goal: Direction vs. iteration

In the example of the app above, we mentioned that products and solutions are typically designed with customer needs in mind. Design thinking provides direction for new product development by establishing a framework for brainstorming solutions to user problems. A marketing team may sit and try to think of all the ways the app can help people, what issues they may run into, or what features could be added over time. Design thinking drives the car, so to speak.

Human-centered design, on the other hand, aims to improve the customer experience through updates. (Can we make this app faster or use less storage space?) Once the app is released or even while still in beta, new versions are released as needed. There's an acceptance of inevitable future iterations and knowing that design may truly never be completed as long as people's needs change.

Focus: Problem vs. feedback

There's another major difference in how design thinking and human-centered design works. While design thinking tries to anticipate what customers may want from their app (and then test user reception), it tends to be more problem-focused rather than user-focused. Designers put processes in place for when needs change or problems arise so that they can address these issues as they happen.

Human-centered design, however, takes the user experience into account at every angle. Practitioners continually seek out feedback from users to see how they interact with the app and if it's what they originally expected. Is the engagement seamless? Uplifting? Inspiring? Helpful? Just meeting a need isn't enough if it's not also a lovely experience. This is what human-centered design seeks to do from day one of the design meetings until the product is no longer offered for sale.

Related: Learn how to use co-design to design solutions with the end-user

Human-centered design and design thinking work together to improve the customer experience

If there seems like just enough overlap between these two ideas to not know which one you subscribe to, you don’t have to worry. Great designers try to incorporate both into their work, even if they don’t realize that’s what they’re doing.

Human-centered design can be used alongside design thinking, and it’s one that’s changing products (and people’s lives) for the better. By starting with a human-centered focus and testing solutions, HCD fits into every phase of the design thinking process. And, because it can be used to evaluate existing products, it continues the mission of human empathy, even after products are launched.

Design thinking tries to look at the big picture

When thinking back to the overall mission of a product, you’re likely embracing design thinking. Questions like “Who is this for?” and “What do we want to see?” fall in line with this overarching, thematic process for creating great products and services. Big and small design tweaks happen along the way, but form, function, and financial considerations may be held in equal esteem.

Related: Be sure to map your assumptions to evaluate the feasibility, viability, and desirability of your proposed solutions

If you’ve ever sat in a meeting where a stakeholder suggests, “Let’s make the buttons bigger!” or, “My mom would never use this without more pockets,” you’ve witnessed attempts to be more human-centric. Real people use your products and services. Putting yourself in their shoes and seeing how they interact with your designs every day means you’ll notice tiny opportunities to create better experiences — from good, to great. 

Human-centered design thinking in action

Whenever Apple makes a new update to deal with a security risk, it has likely involved design thinking. 

When it makes icons larger, more beautiful, and fun to tap, you are seeing the principles of human-centered design at work. 

Often, human-centered design doesn’t necessarily make the product functional, although it certainly can. The focus, however, is on what humans value, and whether your design is solving problems that support those values — even if they aren’t necessary to product function. 

Related: 4 great examples of human-centered design

Support human-centered design thinking with a visual platform

Whether you design a product, service, or internal framework, you'll be documenting your progress throughout the development process. 

Digital whiteboards and smart canvases offer a seamless way to jot down ideas and collaborate with others. That’s why they've become popular with people who value user-centered design within their larger design thinking mission.

The hardest part of any design can be getting started. That blank space can deter great ideas and make even confident designers a bit apprehensive. With Mural’s templates, you don't have to ever encounter a blank space. 

Templates can kickstart your creative process, help improve decision-making, and solve the problems your customers trust you to help them with faster (and better).

Get started with a Mural Free Forever account and check out Mural’s template library for every step of the design process. From ideation to incorporating customer feedback, Mural can get you started doing your best work in minutes.

About the authors

Bryan Kitch

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Back to FAQ

What’s the difference between human-centered design and design thinking .

Human-centered design is a creative approach to problem solving. It’s the backbone of all our work at IDEO. It’s a process that starts with the people you’re designing with and ends with new solutions that are purpose-built to suit their needs. Human-centered design is about cultivating deep empathy with the people you’re designing with; generating ideas; building a bunch of prototypes; sharing what you’ve made together; and eventually, putting your innovative new solution out in the world.

Design thinking, as IDEO's Tim Brown explains, is a human-centered approach to innovation. It draws from the designer’s toolkit to integrate the needs of people, the possibilities of technology, and the requirements for business success. Successful innovations rely on some element of human-centered design research while balancing other elements. Design thinking helps achieve that balance. It lets people find the sweet spot of feasibility, viability, and desirability while considering the real needs and desires of people.

Design Thinking Takes a Human-Centered Approach to Problem-Solving

Action-oriented approach tolerates risk, with the goal of improving human experiences..

Design thinking, a creative and innovative process that puts people at the center of problem solving, is a tool being readily used to encourage radiologists to focus on the patient experience from beginning to end.

“Humanizing the imaging process involves a lot of people and a lot of touch points,” said Achala Vagal, MD, vice chair of research and associate professor of radiology at the University of Cincinnati Medical Center. “Design thinking can help identify challenges and create solutions that result in a better experience for patients and staff.”

Dr. Vagal presented the human-centered design approach during RSNA 2018’s Fast Five session and will cover it again in an educational course at RSNA 2019.

Design thinking is a human-centered, problem-solving approach that at its core uses empathy to tackle complex problems. Instead of traditional problem solving, where a problem is identified and then various solutions are applied until one works, design thinking gathers multidisciplinary teams and asks them to understand the problem from the point of view of those who are most affected. The team typically also includes the people who are affected by the problem, who, in many cases, are patients and their families and caregivers.

This process of defining a problem can take upwards of several weeks or months. It can involve detailed observations of a process, surveys, interviews and focus groups with patients, caregivers or other health care delivery specialists, all designed to help better understand the pain points facing patients.

“As radiology shifts from volume to value, the value is all about the patient experience,” said Mary C. Mahoney, MD, the Benjamin Felson Endowed Chair and Professor of Radiology at the University of Cincinnati College of Medicine in Cincinnati, Ohio, and RSNA Board Chair. “Radiologists need to think about the discussions their patients are having in the car on the way to and following an imaging appointment. Is the patient confused about why they need this test and do they know what will happen next? Also, did they feel valued during every step of the process, from the scheduling to the interactions in the exam room? These are questions that design thinking can answer when tackling a specific problem.”

“In design thinking, we learn by doing and understand that failure is an opportunity to learn,” said Reed Omary, MD, the Carol D. & Henry P. Pendergrass Professor and chair of the Department of Radiology and Radiological Sciences and director, Medical Innovators Development Program, at Vanderbilt University Medical Center & School of Medicine, Nashville, TN. “Design thinking encourages us to try ideas, weed out the ones that don’t work and improve upon the ones with potential.”

Learn about the projects that the University of Cincinnati and Vanderbilt University addressed with design thinking in the June print issue of RSNA News. Check your mailbox now.

Watch Dr. Vagal’s RSNA 2018 Fast 5 presentation on design thinking. 

Watch Dr. Omary’s presentation, Designing for the Patient Experience.

Architecture & Design

Design thinking - a human-centered approach to problem-solving.

Design thinking is a way to solve problems that focuses on understanding the users and what they want, prototyping and testing solutions, and iterating based on what people say.

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Design thinking process.

The Design Thinking Process

Key Principles Of Design Thinking

Benefits of design thinking.

• User-centric solutions - Design thinking puts the users at the center of the problem-solving process, which leads to solutions that are relevant and meaningful to the users.
• Innovation - The ideation stage of design thinking encourages designers to think creatively and generate a wide range of ideas, which can lead to innovative solutions.
• Collaboration - Design thinking is a collaborative process that involves cross-functional teams working together to solve complex problems.
• Iterative approach - The prototyping and testing stages of design thinking allow designers to iterate quickly and refine the solution based on user feedback.

Applications Of Design Thinking

• Product design - Design thinking can help product designers develop user-centric products that meet the users' needs and preferences.
• Service design - Design thinking can be used to improve the customer experience and develop services that meet the users' needs.
• Organizational design - Design thinking can be applied to organizational design to improve employee experience and productivity.
• Social innovation - Design thinking can be used to develop innovative solutions to social problems, such as poverty, healthcare, and education.

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Design Thinking

September 28, 2017.

Design Thinking is a problem-solving approach and a human-centered innovation. It's a fivestep process: Observation, Ideation, Prototyping, Testing and Implementation. It puts people we design for at the center of the process and invites them to co-create solutions.

Adopting a human-centered approach is believing that all problems -as difficult to eradicate as they may seem- such as poverty, gender equality, and access to clean water, can still be solved. This is all the more compelling when the people who are primarily affected are the ones tackling the problems head-on.

Human-centered design is an effective approach whether for the creation of objects, experiences, services or social businesses because it puts human beings, their needs and desires at the center of priorities.  

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