Design thinking: A 5 stage process
Phase 1: Emphasize Phase
Understanding the user is the goal of this phase. In this phase you sit with the user and understand there needs and point of view. This means observing and engaging with user in order to understand them on a psychological and emotional level. During this phase, the designer seeks to set aside their assumptions and gather real insights about the user.
Phase 2: Define
The second stage is dedicated to defining the problem. In this phase you gathered all the information from the emphasize phase. Essentially, you will analyze your data and put them in order to better concrete the problems that your team has defined to this point.
Phase 3: Ideate
In this phase, the designers start to use the information from the previous phase to generate the logical ideas. From here the team will start working on design benchmarks; they will create design guide and information architecture.
Phase 4: Prototype
After the ideation, they move to the prototype phase. During this phase the team will work on creating the wireframes, Sketch and model. Wireframing / Prototyping is the effective way to give life to what you’ve designed before it reaches the development stage. Once the wireframe is shared and approved by the client team will add some creatives, color and typography with the help of design guide.
Phase 5: Test
Testing the design prototype with group of users matching the persona of target audience validates the designs. This is also coupled with a full fledged usability testing. In usability testing we probe questions on a working prototype to see how easy it is for a user to answer them, example, can you find what kind of services this company offers?
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