Practical Approach to Design Thinking

Rebecca Adisa
2 min readFeb 20, 2021

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A company has reached out to you(your team) to create a solution to aid their users' ordering food online. Using the design thinking process, walk through how you intend to create the solution.

Empathize: The first stage of the design process which is empathy seeks to understand the pain points of the target users. You have to put aside your preconceived notions. To better empathize with users, you need to carry out research on users’ experiences with previous products. You get to know the user’s thoughts on ordering food online, their challenges when trying to order and the features they think would make their experience much better. You also get to know the type of food they like, their tastes, and the food they would likely order. All of this information can be gotten by carrying out a survey either by face-to-face interviews or questionnaires.

Define: This stage collates the result of the response gotten from the first stage. In this phase, the problems and needs of the users are defined. A user persona is created to better understand the needs, challenges, and everything you need to know about your users.

The information gathered from phase two is put into work which is called ideation. This stage requires several brainstorming sessions where we think of how to solve the users' problems. You need to be unconventional with your thinking and think outside the box so as to build an amazing product that would provide practical solutions. This stage dwells on the key elements to include in the food ordering app design to make the experience hassle-free. You can carry out a competitive analysis(SWCDUXO) and landscape analysis of competitors.

The next stage after ideation is prototyping. This stage concentrates on how to apply the key features to the overall aesthetics of the app. In other words, this phase's main focus is how the product will look. You can begin with a paper sketch which is low-fidelity wireframe to best explore several ideas after which you create high-fidelity wireframe with your design tools.

The final stage which is testing focuses on trying out the proposed solutions put into a prototype. This basically tests for bugs and any improvements that need to be added. After the test, the result you get will be used to ideate more and create better design solutions.

Thank you.

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Rebecca Adisa
Rebecca Adisa

Written by Rebecca Adisa

A product designer who is enthusiastic about designing user-friendly products through strategic research