Design Thinking is a human-centered approach. In order to create desirable products and services, you need to understand who your users are and what they need. Thus it is imperative to understand what a person facing the problem is going through. In other words, understand the pain points of the person for whom you are designing a solution. Identify what matters to the person using techniques such as observation, interviews, discussions etc. Design Thinkers usually refer to the person facing the problem as the "user". Without the empathy stage, truly solving a user problem is nearly impossible.

Create a point of view based on the users need and insights. Understand all their needs and create a problem statement that will help you to focus on developing a solution. A good problem statement should clearly state a single pain point of the user and contain details of the user and their needs/ preferences. Sometimes there may be a correlation between 2 different pain points of the user.

Ideation is the process of generating ideas to solve the identified problem of the user. Ideation should follow after the problem statement is clearly defined. Use techniques such as Brainstorming, 6 hat thinking etc. Do not discourage any wild ideas while generating ideas. Evaluating ideas follows Idea Generation. Ideation has two stages, namely Idea Generation and Idea Evaluation.