At the beginning of my design journey, I remember being quite overwhelmed by the multitude of notions and concepts.

Google was my best friend for a while.

Today, I decided to put the main concepts in one place, categorizing them by the stages of the typical design thinking process.

What is the Design thinking process?

Simply said, it’s a user-centered problem-solving approach that focuses on empathizing with users, defining their needs, ideating potential solutions, prototyping designs, and testing those solutions with the end users.

The goal is not only to find a solution to the problem but to challenge the problem itself, find the basic issue that needs to be resolved.

By applying the design thinking process, we try to identify and consider the wide range of solutions that might not be immediately apparent.

The process can be broken down into 5 main stages:

1. Discover: understand the needs and problems of the user.
2. Define: clearly articulate the user’s needs and problems based on your findings.
3. Ideate: brainstorm and come up with solutions.
4. Prototype: build tangible representations of your solutions.
5. Test: validate the effectiveness of your prototypes with real users, refining solutions as needed.

These stages are iterative and can be repeated as many times as you need.

Below, I provide short descriptions of the main activities for each stage of Design thinking process, as well as links to the sources where you can read more on the topic.

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