Design thinking in Lucidspark (includes a free course!)

If you hear “design thinking” and disregard it, assuming it’s only something designers do, you’ll miss out on a powerful tool to better understand your customers. The design thinking process analyzes the problems your customers likely face, then walks you through designing a prototype of a possible solution. 

This framework is critical because it keeps the customer at the center of thinking throughout the entire development process. And that’s actually very difficult and very rare: it’s more common to see cost saving or time saving take precedence. Or worse, teams can develop solutions for the wrong problem.

In this article, we’ll give you a glimpse into the Design Thinking in Lucidspark course, but this is just a teaser—sign up for the course and get the full experience, from hands-on practice activities to video tutorials.

Empathy phase: Understand your customer

The first step of the design thinking process is empathizing with your customers so you can better understand their needs, pains, interests, and experiences.

Importance of creating a space for documentation upfront

It’s certainly faster to skip documentation. But bypassing this means losing valuable data, having an unorganized team, and wasting time and money. In this phase, you’ll also gain alignment on which research methods will be most effective for understanding your customers. 

Use Breakout Boards to keep track of all your living documents so you have a single source of truth. Then, duplicate Breakout Boards so there is one for each customer. This allows you to silo information by the customer without causing confusion in your main board. Individual Breakout Boards can be shared for easy collaboration.

Empathy maps

Empathy maps ensure everyone is on the same page before your team works together to define the main problem. Once you’ve completed your empathy map, it’s easier to gain alignment and work faster. While there are different formats for empathy maps, they all contain four main sections:

• Says: What did the customers say while being interviewed?

• Thinks: What was the customer thinking?

• Does: What actions does the customer take to complete a particular action?

• Feels: What were the customer’s emotions? What are they frustrated by? When are they excited? When do they feel friction?

Define phase: Fall in love with the problem

Most of us prefer answers to problems. In fact, we often spend far too little attention on the problem, but that’s really crucial to getting to the correct answers. The best solution to the problem won’t often be the first solution. Defining the actual problem is the hardest part of design thinking. Finding the real problem before moving on saves everyone’s sanity.

To define your problem, first, take your insights from the different Breakout Boards and move them into your main working space. Now look for patterns and thoughts that show connections. Tag and sort them to stay organized.

Develop a problem statement by brainstorming “How might we ___?” statements. Here’s how:

• How might we ___ : This is the actual problem to be solved.

• For ___: These are the real customers you’re building a solution for. This needs to be specific enough to be relevant without being too vague. 

• So that ___: This is the ultimate dream for your end user. Consider what you want the user to feel

Keeping the statements on sticky notes is helpful so each fill-in-the-blank can be dragged, dropped, saved, and edited. Then you can narrow your statement to a few options and select from those using the voting feature.

Does someone have a great idea for a solution? Great, but we’re not there yet. Park those in a separate container on the board to be tackled later.

Ideate phase: Exploring ideas and creating solutions

It’s time to start thinking of solutions to the problem you’ve identified, and you’ll do this by brainstorming. Everyone can brainstorm: It’s all about practice. To help come up with better ideas, follow our two major rules for brainstorming

1. Suspend judgment: No side-eyeing those solutions. All ideas are welcome. 

2. Aim for quantity first: More ideas means more choices. You can only be picky about ideas' quality once you’ve covered the quantity part. 

Tips for the brainstorming session:

• Utilize quick stickies: Since time is of the essence, Lucidspark will automatically produce more stickies. 

• Add a timer to your board: The timer adds urgency and competition to the brainstorm, and it’s great to see how many ideas can be produced under pressure. 

• Take advantage of reactions: These fly-by positive affirmations are a great way to keep everyone in a positive headspace. 

Ready to start the design thinking process? Just register for the course, and you’ll have instant access to all the quality content we’ve developed to help you keep your customers at the center of everything.