At its heart, Design Thinking is a customer-centered innovation process, that helps to identify and fix real customer pain points in a systematic manner. The process enables companies to uncover and create solutions for real user needs, quickly test whether those solutions really will generate business benefits – before investing time and money.

Training Goals and Benefits

Our Design Thinking workshop is designed to get your team thinking creatively about products and services from a customers’ perspective. It is a fun, fast-moving set of activities that take participants from problem definition to prototyping solutions.  Starting with a real-life case, participants will move through the 5 stages of the Design Thinking process and thereby get practically exposed to the most important techniques and tools used in the Design Thinking methodology.

In essence, participants will learn to

1. discover and understand user issues
2. find creative solutions to the biggest issues
3. build and test a prototype

Contents and Methodology 

Introduction to the Design Thinking concept and examples 

At the beginning of the workshop, we show a brief presentation of why Design Thinking has become one of the most popular innovation methods, combined with specific examples of Design Thinking solutions.

Problem understanding and definition 

The Design Thinking exercise starts off with in-person research (preferably on the street) to find out where customers’ issues lie. Once we have insights from customer interviews and observations, we can turn these pain points into a prioritized list of goals for what the new product or service should achieve and for whom specifically (Personas) we are going to create it (“How might we statement”).

Ideation phase 

Rather than just building the first solution that comes to mind, Design Thinking encourages your team to investigate options and build on multiple people’s ideas. Combined, those ideas are likely to generate a better overall solution than if any one individual just sat in a room and tried to fix things themselves. Ideation takes many forms but is at its core a variety of moderated brainstorming activities.

Prototyping and testing 

Paper prototype creation and usability testing are fast, cheap, incredibly easy ways to see whether we covered all the angles the problem statement. The prototype`s main purpose is to serve as a communications tool, that enables us to receive qualitative feedback. Based on the feedback, we understand what changes we need to make before the product is ready for development.