What are the 5 stages of Design Thinking?

Design thinking can be defined as the process of finding relevant solutions to the problems that enable the companies and individuals to design their future course of the plan. It allows the user of the system to make more structured planning for adopting innovation-based techniques and to expand their business or company.

What are the 5 stages of design thinking?
The 5 stage process of design thinking was given by Hasso Plattner Institute of Design at Stanford and since then utilized by the companies to advance their technology. The five stages model involves:

• Empathize (to know about your audience for which designing is carried on)
• Define (frame a planning model on the basis of user needs and requirements)
• Ideate (to come up with innovative solutions)
• Prototype (make a presentation of your ideas to showcase them to others)
• Test (testing your ideas with the original users for genuine feedback)

Let us discuss them in detail;

Empathize
The first stage of design thinking is referred to as empathize. In this stage, the companies get a better insight into the problems of the users. The stage includes- consulting for product experts, bring out some facts related to the problem, a deeper understanding of the issue, and so on.
This stage involves the thinkers understanding the needs of the issue and made some personal assumptions regarding the same. A detailed amount of information is gathered during this stage to define the exact problem in the next step and to suggest some feasible options for it.

Define
Define is the second stage of design thinking. In this stage, all the information gathered in the above stage is put into action. Also, it involves the thorough analysis of the data collected and come up with some ready solutions to finally deal with the issue of the users.
In the define stage, the company better understands the problem and defines it accordingly. It results in gaining innovative ideas and ways to implement them effectively. Now let’s move to the third stage of design thinking- Ideate.

Ideate
As we have moved to the third stage of design thinking, the level of work has to be broadened now. While working on this stage, the design thinkers will start producing some logical ideas on the basis of information collected in the previous two stages. The team will represent the data and think of solutions that are probably ignored and create new ways of dealing with the problems. Your designing team will perhaps have the most number of ideas to solve the issue by the end of this stage.

Prototype
Now comes the fourth stage of design thinking popularly known as the prototype. The workload in this stage increases on creating cheap products with outstanding features. While preparing for this stage, the design thinkers try to find possible solutions to the issues recognized in the earlier stages of design thinking. With each passing step, the team works on building new aspects of the problem and how each prototype would help in solving the issue. Moreover, the thinkers get a detailed evaluation of the restraints that arise of the prototype. From here the team is ready to follow up the last stage of design thinking – the test.

Test
In the final stage, the design thinkers test all the prototypes that have been made in the earlier states. They test each prototype and its effectiveness in terms of acting as a remedy to a problem. During this stage only, the team is allowed to make necessary modifications and refinement of solutions. So in this stage, the team is able enough to continue with any prototype discussed with its positives and negatives to resolve the issue of the users of the system.