Rustam K. Lead Designer

What is design thinking?

This idea was formulated by Herbert Simon in 1969 in The Sciences of the Artificial.

"It is a method by which we try to understand the user, rethink the problem and find non-obvious alternative solutions."

Design thinking is not only applied to UX/UI design, it is applied everywhere.For example: renovating an apartment, a business, creating a coffee machine, making sneakers, and even just planning a trip to the store.

Stages of design thinking:

Empathy. The ability to experience other people's experiences, to understand what really bothers them. It is important to get to the heart of the problem, to detach from their subjective reflections and look at it through the eyes of the user.

Focus. All the information we have received through empathy should be systematized, analyzed and the key problems of the user should be pointed out. The purpose of this stage is to formulate the question that we will seek a solution to in the next stage.

Generation of ideas. So, we have identified the problem, now we need to come up with an out-of-the-box solution. We start writing down everything that comes to mind, even if the idea seems like nonsense.

Selection of ideas. Sifting all the ideas through the filter of the real world, all ideas may seem cool, but we need to select the most viable.

Prototyping. Now we need to create a budget product that solves the problem. This way we test the workability of the ideas in practice.

If your MVP (Minimum Viable Product) solves a problem, we analyze it, remove drawbacks, refine it and create a full-fledged product.

If the prototype doesn't work - we switch to another hypotype and try to find the problem again.

Testing. Testing the final product you developed during prototyping and analyzing the feedback from users, refining and improving the product during testing.

As you see, design thinking is not just something abstract, like a beautiful picture or a website design, it is a full-fledged process of problem solving that can be applied in all areas of our lives.