Understanding Design Thinking and Its Relation With UX

Design thinking is an eccentric part of any design course; be it UI/UX or a product design course. It aims to develop designs that give pleasant user experiences for businesses. 

The blog covers the understanding of design thinking, its principles and its relation with UX. So, let’s begin.

Design Thinking

Essentially, it is a way of solving creative problems practically. Although it has its roots in design, it is actually developed from a variety of disciplines, including business, technology, and engineering. Hence, it need not be specific to design; meaning its application is diversified. 

Often design thinking is confused with user-centric design. Although design thinking is user-centric, they are not the same. 

Designing thinking focuses on comprehending user needs and ideating relevant solutions for them. It is called solution-based thinking opposite to problem-based thinking. Students learn these subjects thoroughly in the best UX design courses in UK. However, let us understand briefly.

Solution-Based Vs Problem-Based Thinking

Solution-based thinking is centred on identifying solutions and creating something positive to address a specific issue. Problem-based thinking, which tends to dwell on constraints and difficulties, is the reverse of this.

Phases Of Design Thinking

Empathy: Through user research, you need to develop an empathic understanding of the issue.

Define: The data acquired during the first stage needs to be compiled now. Before moving on to ideation, you might develop personas to keep your efforts human-centric.

Ideate - You can explore ways to approach the problem, and discover unique workarounds to the problem statement you've created owing to the knowledge obtained from the first two phases.

Prototype - Finding the optimal answer for each situation is the objective. The design team creates some low-cost prototypes of the product to test the theories you've come up with.

Test - The prototypes are put to thorough evaluation in this phase. Design thinking is a recursive process even though this is the last stage.

Design Thinking and UX

Surely, you must have found design thinking similar to UX designing given the user-centricity and the common steps involved in each. However, there are certain distinctions. 

Design thinking, on one hand, focuses more on strategizing and problem solving by defining user needs, viability and more. UX designing pertains to actual designing of prototypes and solutions mentioned in design thinking. Hence, we can say UX is dependent on design thinking.

Although, we hope this guide gave you sufficient insights. for students willing to undertake a UI and UX design course may acquire some background knowledge on this subject to be able to proceed in their program swiftly.


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