Christian Muller-Roterberg

Part of the design thinking process is making your ideas very clear and tangible. You can easily and quickly create a prototype of your idea on paper, on a whiteboard, or on an electronic device (laptop, smartphone, tablet) with drawings and photo collages. You can outline the product design; drawings of the functions and characteristics of your idea are also possible.

Creativity techniques used in design thinking can be divided into methods that are intuitive-creative or systematic-analytical. By applying the intuitive-creative techniques, usually in a group, you can stimulate spontaneous ideas, associations, and analogous conclusions in order to overcome mental blocks in the form of a much freer configuration.

The Personal method is one of the ways in which you can systematically collect information about the people and situations you’re interested in (your targets) and methodically evaluate that information. In design thinking, with the Persona method, you fictitiously assume the role of a customer or user who represents members of a real customer or user group.

An essential element in the design thinking approach is that you develop a thorough understanding of the task and situation before you look for creative ideas for products, services, procedures, or business models. Don’t rush into things and immediately search for solutions for something that you haven’t really worked through yet.

When targeting your customers in the design thinking process, you can use empathy to understand who your customer is and what they want. With an empathy map, you can holistically put yourself into the role of a person or a group faced by certain situations. Imagine a specific person in their natural environment.

When targeting potential customers during the design thinking process, it's important to figure out the customer journey. For the customer journey, imagine which steps a potential customer (preferably, in the form of a concrete persona) experiences before, during, and after using a product or service. Create a description of the target person using the Persona method, and supplement it with an empathy map.

In design thinking projects, a team has between five and nine members, gathered together in one place. A smaller group will lack the required amount of experience and the work capacity to master the tasks in a design thinking project. A team that has more than nine team members results in coordination problems that prevent fast and efficient action.

Sequence planning involves the scheduling of the work packages during design thinking. With sequence planning, you determine the logical succession of the work packages. A rough framework to follow here would mirror the phases of the design thinking process — such as understanding the task, searching for solutions, creating a prototype, and testing the proposed solution with the customer.