The Design Process

Empathize - "To create meaningful innovations, you need to know your users and care about their lives." Empathy is the centerpiece of a human-centered design process. This is the work you do to understand the people that may be facing a challenge. It is your effort to understand the way they do things and why, their needs, how they think about the world, and what is meaningful to them.

How to Empathize: Observe, Engage, Watch & Listen

Define - This is your chance to define the challenge you are taking on - identifying the problem you are trying to solve. The goal of the define stage is to create a meaningful and actionable problem statement. This statement will guide you through the process and give you focus.

How to Define: Think, Perspective, Patterns - User, Needs, Insights

Ideate - "It's not about coming up with the right idea, it's about generating the broadest range of possibilities." This is the stage where you concentrate on generating lots of ideas! You are transitioning from identifying problems to creating solutions. You will find the right solution later through testing and feedback. Another word for ideate is brainstorm.

How to Ideate - Combine your thoughts with your imagination, mindmapping, sketching, Be Creative! 

Prototype - "Build to think and test to learn." In this stage, you create low-resolution prototypes that are quick and cheap to make, but can help you get feedback from your audience. Prototypes help you test the possibilities.

How to Prototype - Start building, Don't Spend Too Long on One Prototype, Build with the User in Mind.

Test - "Testing is an opportunity to learn about your solution and your user." At this stage you gather feedback about the prototype you created and refine your solutions to make them better. After feedback and testing, you will likely return back to the ideate and prototype stages.

How to Test - Show Don't Tell, Create Experiences, Ask Users to Compare