For Marketers: A Need For Design Thinking and How to Use It

For marketers, it is often a task to find and implement effective solutions. Hence, comes the need for design thinking as a solution. In the past few years, the design has turned out to be an effective approach for problem-solving. Now, it wouldn't be a surprise if many of you are wondering - what’s design thinking? 

In case you don’t know, design thinking for marketing is basically a methodology used for the process of understanding customers and solving human-related problems. It is also used to redefine issues and design unique and innovative solutions to prototype and test. But, there is still a question that every person asks when he/she hears about design thinking; it’s “why do we need design thinking”?

Well, just to let you know, design thinking brings everyone and not just designers and developers into the design process. As a result, it helps the business organization to create a better user experience which is more human-centric. 

Different Stages of Design Thinking

In order to create an innovative outcome, there are several stages of design thinking that every designer must be aware of. We’ve explained all these 5 stages in this design thinking process guide. 

• Empathize

When it comes to following design thinking methodology, well, it starts with empathizing. This stage basically requires designers to have an empathetic understanding of users in different situations. In the process, you can consult experts to learn about the areas of concern by observing, engaging, and empathizing with users. Also, take yourself into the physical environment to have a deeper understanding of all the concerns. When you are looking to create a human-centered design, empathy becomes crucial as it allows designers to set aside all their assumptions. 

• Define

This step includes combining and analyzing research in order to know about the core problems. Rather than just focusing on business goals, it is important to ensure that the problem statement should be created in human-centered terms. This is also the stage where designers will be able to come up with great ideas to create amazing features, functions, as well as other aspects to help solve the problems. 

• Ideate

By this step, designers become ready to generate ideas. By effectively understanding your users in the first stage and analyzing them in the second stage, you can now start thinking out of the box to create new solutions. SCAMPER, Brainwrite, and Brainstorm are some popular Ideation techniques. At the beginning of the ideation phase, make sure to get as many problem solutions as possible. Even at the end of this phase, you should look to use several other ideation techniques in order to test the solutions. 

• Prototype 

The stage of prototyping is basically about making your ideas into physical form. This will help you get feedback from the target users. All you need to do is begin with the low accurate version of the solution with an aim to improve it on the basis of the feedback. It is always a wise thing if you work through the prototype internally in order to fill up any important gaps before even testing the prototype in the next phase. 

• Test

This is the final step that includes the complete testing of the complete product fix or rules out any possible issue. This step gives you an in-depth understanding of the problems users are experiencing. It is always a great move to put a prototype in front of the real users who can help you get feedback on whether or not a particular solution will work. The results generated in this stage can be used to redefine a number of problems, rather than just one. Along with that, it can also help you gather a better understanding of users, different conditions where users will use the product, the behavior of users, their thinking, feeling, and more. 

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With that, we come to the end of this design thinking process guide. Indeed, design thinking is a complicated methodology that can only be effectively implemented in your project by a professional website design and development company. Considering that, Auxesis Infotech is a leading web agency carrying a rich experience of working in the industry.