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Design Thinking

What it is

Design thinking is a working loop for problems that are not yet understood: study the people involved, state the problem in their terms, generate many possible answers, then build the cheapest thing that can tell you whether an answer works. It is a process for reducing uncertainty, not a licence to skip analysis.

Why it matters

Teams usually fail early not because they build badly but because they build the wrong thing well. The loop spends a little time up front to make that mistake cheap: an afternoon of watching people use the current system costs far less than a quarter of engineering on a feature nobody adopts. It also gives a mixed group — designers, engineers, support, finance — a shared sequence to argue inside, so decisions rest on evidence gathered together rather than on whoever speaks last. The stages are not a gate to pass through once; a new question sends you back to an earlier one.

In this track

  1. Empathise, define, ideate (03-design-ux/02-design-thinking/01-empathise-define-ideate) — gathering what people actually do, turning it into one problem statement, and producing many candidate answers.
  2. Prototype and test (03-design-ux/02-design-thinking/02-prototype-and-test) — building the smallest artefact that answers the open question, then putting it in front of someone.

Prerequisites

None.

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