Design thinking is becoming an increasingly popular trend within the IT industry. It enables product teams to create feasible and user-oriented solutions to your idea or problem. Design thinking is an extremely effective way to design better products faster, reduce costs and increase profits. It enables everyone involved in the process to look at a problem in a creative way and to make improvements.

Index:

1. What is Design Thinking
2. The Design Thinking process
3. What is a Design Thinking Workshop
4. The benefits of a Design Thinking workshop
5. Our workshops
6. Conclusion

 

What is Design Thinking?

Design Thinking is an iterative process in which you try to better understand your users and/or customers, question your assumptions, redefine problems and create innovative solutions. Following this process, it enables you to convert these solutions into working prototypes and test them with real users. The overall purpose of this is to identify and validate alternative strategies and solutions. Applying the Design Thinking method helps companies to quickly collect a lot of data, providing insight, which ultimately leads to saving time and costs.

 

Design thinking is more than just a process; it opens up a whole new way of thinking and it offers a collection of practical methods to help you apply this new way of thinking.

 

 

The Design Thinking Process Design Thinking is an iterative and not a linear process consisting of five phases:

1. Empathize - Creating Empathy for the End User
2. Define - Define the problem
3. Devising Solutions - Generating Ideas
4. Prototype - Create a prototype
5. Test - Test and optimize

 

 

Applying these five phases are essential to the Design Thinking process. These phases are the 3rd step in our app development process and area crucial part of prototyping.

 

What is a Design Thinking workshop?

A Design Thinking workshop is an activity-based session built around the Design Thinking process. Usually these workshops are conducted in person, but we also offer an online workshop that can be performed digitally.

 

Our workshops range from 4 hours, a day or even 4 days. That depends on the context and purpose of the project. These workshops are set up based on the 5 phases of the Design Thinking process mentioned above.

 

Design Thinking workshops are all about collaboration and problem solving. It enables us as a product team to create feasible and user-oriented solutions for your idea together with you. It gives a clear insight into the problems we are trying to solve and allows us to set the right goals.

 

 

The benefits of a Design Thinking workshop are:

• Create innovative solutions that better meet your customers' needs and deliver a competitive advantage
• Develops a culture of innovation that creates empathy for the end user
• Ensures involvement, collaboration and co-creation
• Reduce risks
• Saves costs
• Enables you to set clear goals and provides action points

 

Octopus IT’s workshops

Depending on the complexity of the project, we offer different Design Thinking Workshops to collect all this data in the best possible way. This is how we offer:  

 

Online workshop (4 hours)  

Digital workshop in which we empathize with the idea and set goals.  

 

Idea Validation (8 hours)  

A full day physical workshop where we validate assumptions, set goals and generate ideas.  

 

Design sprint (4 days)  

A workshop from problem to a working prototype that can be tested with users.  

 

Conclusion

Conducting a Design Thinking workshop ensures that as a customer, you are involved in the entire product development process. It creates innovative co-creation which results in finding problems, understanding user needs, generating ideas and experimenting with them.

 

In short, it ensures perfect collaboration and that is why the Design Thinking process has become an integral part of Octopus IT’s work process.