Comment by Centigonal | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Centigonal | Hacker News Reader

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I'm gonna take a stab at this because I don't think it's that complicated.

Design thinking is a methodology for designing things, often products. It has 5 steps:

1. Empathize. Find your intended user and try to understand them, their expectations, wants, needs, and fears.

2. Define. Based on understanding your user, what are you trying to actually do? What are the problem(s) you want to solve for the user?

3. Ideate. Get a bunch of people in a room and have a no-judgement brainstorming fest around solving the problem(s) you defined. Come up with a ton of ideas! Then look at them all critically and remove the less priomising ones.

4. Prototype. Make MVPs for a promising idea or ideas.

5. Test. Take your MVP to your target user. See how they react. Go back to prototype and adjust the idea based on feedback, or pick a different idea out of the ideation process if this one is a bust. Repeat until your prototype is good enough that you're confident to scale up.

Within each of these steps, there are a few tools/techniques you can learn to structure them more if you like. There are also no shortage of experts and consultants who will take your money to expound on the finer points of each part of the process. You can go as deep into the rabbit hole as is useful.

Isn't all that just the standard process of design/development? Have I been engaging in "Design Thinking" all these years without even knowing it?

The difference is Design Thinking requires extensive documentation for each step.

You don't just empathize, you create characters with backstory.

You don't just define, you create a story outline with plot, protagonists, and antagonists.

You don't just ideate, you write novellas of your greatest achievements: deciding on the right color for error messages, the perils of rounded corners, and how you overcame the adversity of outdated stereotypes to make buttons that are fair and equitable to all people.

And so on...

> The difference is Design Thinking requires extensive documentation for each step.

Design thinking is not a fixed process. If you make a lot of documentation on each step, that's on you.

The idea is just to define what you create from the point of view of the users. And yes, it's probably what the GP was doing all this time.

The magic sauce is the empathy part. Which is different than what was done back then in male-dominated, boomer-centric work places. It's equivalent of making a safe space before embarking on the rest of the standard design/dev processes.

How you feel about safe spaces will be analogous about how you feel of design thinking. A lot of consultants cashed in on this trend to sell all kinds of stupid things. That's also what he's talking about.

Now with new generation coming in, empathy is by default. Therefore, if you really think about it, design thinking is fizzling out because it's now the standard.

> Have I been engaging in "Design Thinking" all these years without even knowing it?

You've also been speaking prose all this time, too! Now you're the most obliged person in the world to me for telling you so.

Much obliged, my dear sir. :)

Could be a standard workflow to many designers.

At least for new products. But I think some of these steps can be forgotten in established products. Many teams find themselves building features stakeholders asked, and DT can help going back to discovering what users actually want

However this can also backfire and good independent ideas can be shut down because they weren't found in the first 2 steps of the Design Thinking process.

With DT thinking "solution first" is kind of forbidden.

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