Whether or not you are interested in a career in UX/UI design (which stands for user experience/user interface design), you may have heard of a little thing called design thinking. You could say it represents a new way of doing things,  different to the status quo, and a method of thinking outside the box!

 

 

Dublin CODING School’s new design lecturer Ryan O’Flynn, the lead UX designer at Hewlett Packard, puts design thinking this way:

“Design thinking is a vehicle that is used to break down problems in any complex system. Employing a design-thinking process makes it more likely a business will be innovative, creative, and ultimately more human. Pain points are often complicated, and design thinking draws insight from diverse sources and collaborative thinking.”

 

More specifically, the concept of Design Thinking constitutes a set of mental, strategic and practical processes. It is through these various processes that design concepts, such as proposals, templates, or interfaces are subsequently developed. There are 5 stages to the typical Design Thinking process:

 

What is Design Thinking?
Image: Interaction-design.org

 

  1. Empathise: Firstly, one must gain an empathetic understanding of the problem which needs to be solved. This first stage of the process may involve consulting experts in order to find out more about the areas of concern, while potentially also engaging and monitoring processes to gain a deeper understanding of the issues involved.
  2. Define: This stage involves putting together all of the information gathered through the empathise stage. All observations must ultimately be analysed and synthesised with the goal of defining the core problem as a problem statement in a human-centred manner.
  3. Ideate: Next, ideas are generated, thinking outside of the box to identify new solutions to the problem which we have defined.
  4. Prototype: The design team will now produce a number of mock-ups of the product or specific features found within the product, so they can investigate the problem solutions generated in the previous stage.
  5. Test: Lastly, designers or evaluators must rigorously test the complete product on end-users using the best solutions identified during the prototyping phase.

 

Dublin CODING School’s next UX/UI design course begins on September 27th. Download the brochure HERE to find out more about the course and learn about Design Thinking today.