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What is design thinking?

Discover what is design thinking and why it’s important, including the five stages of design thinking. Deep dive into a few case studies and learn how to apply design thinking.

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Design thinking is a mindset that breeds innovation. While it’s based on the design process, anyone in any profession can use it when they’re trying to come up with creative solutions to a problem. 

In this guide, we’ll walk you through what design thinking is and why it’s important, including the five stages of design thinking. Then we’ll present a couple of design thinking case studies and wrap up with a primer on how to apply design thinking. And don’t worry, this guide is broken down into easily digestible chunks, as follows:

Let’s get started!

What is design thinking? A definition

Design thinking is an approach used for problem-solving. Both practical and creative, it’s anchored by human-centred design.

Design thinking is extremely user-centric in that it focuses on your users before it focuses on things like technology or business metrics. 

Design thinking is also solution-based, looking for effective solutions to problems, not problem-based, which looks at the problem itself and tends to focus on limitations. 

Design thinking is all about getting hands-on with solutions. The aim is to quickly turn your ideas into testable products so you can see what works and what doesn’t.

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Why is design thinking important? 

Design thinking is important because it challenges assumptions and fosters innovation. While many ways of thinking rely on the habits and experiences we’ve formed, they can limit us when it comes to thinking of design solutions. Design thinking, however, encourages us to explore new ideas. 

It’s an actionable technique that allows us to tackle “wicked problems,” or problems that are ill-defined. For example, achieving sustainable growth or maintaining your competitive edge in business count as wicked problems, and on a broader scale, poverty and climate change are wicked problems too. Design thinking uses empathy and human-centred thinking to tackle these kinds of problems.

Who uses design thinking?

The short answer? Everyone! Design thinking can help you in whatever your role or industry. People in business, government, entertainment, health care, and every other industry can benefit from using design thinking to come up with innovative solutions. 

The most important thing design thinking does is help people focus on their customers or end users. Instead of focusing on problems to fix, design thinking keeps things user-centric, which boosts customer engagement. 

What are the 5 stages of design thinking?

According to the Hasso Plattner Institute of Design at Stanford University (known as d-school), the five stages of design thinking are: 

Although these stages appear to be linear, following one after the other, design thinking isn’t a linear process. Stages are often run in parallel or out of order, or repeated when necessary.

Phase 1: Empathise 

Your goal here is to research your users’ needs to gain an empathic understanding of the problems they face. You’ll get to know your users and their wants and needs so you can make sure your solutions put them front and centre. This means setting aside your own assumptions and getting to know your users on a psychological and emotional level. You’ll observe, engage, watch and listen. 

Phase 2: Define

Here you state your users’ needs by compiling the information you gathered during the Empathise phase and then analysing it until you can define the core problem your team has identified. 

You do this by asking questions like: what patterns do you see in the data? What user issues need to be resolved? The conclusion of this phase comes when you’ve figured out a clear problem statement that is defined by the users’ needs. For example, “Bank customers in Glasgow need…”

You can learn more about how to write a problem statement in this guide.

Phase 3: Ideate

In this phase, you’ll generate ideas and solutions. You and your team will hold ideation sessions where you can come up with as many ideas as possible. No idea is too silly for this stage. The important thing is getting all ideas out on the table. There are a variety of techniques you can use, like brainstorming and mind mapping, to come up with solutions. This phase ends when you’ve managed to narrow down your ideas to just a few of the best ones.

Phase 4: Prototype

Your goal in this phase is to find the best solution to the problem by prototyping —that is, producing scaled down versions of the product or its features found in the previous phase. You’ll put each solution to the test by improving, redesigning, accepting, or rejecting it.

Phase 5: Test

Here you’ll try out the solutions you arrived at in the previous phases by user testing them. However, while this is the final stage of design thinking in theory, it’s rarely the final stage in reality. Design thinking often includes going back to previous phases to find other solutions or to further iterate or refine your existing solution.

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Design thinking examples and case studies

Now that you understand the theory and process of design thinking, let’s look at some examples in action where design thinking had a real-world impact.

Case Study 1: American Family Insurance’s Moonrise App

American Family Insurance, a company that offers life, business, auto, and home insurance, came to design company IDEO with the goal of innovating in a way that would help working families. 

Stages 1 & 2: Empathise and Define

While American Family thought their customers might benefit from budgeting tools, IDEO found from their research in the Empathise phase that, actually, people needed a way to build up their savings against unforeseen needs.

They noticed a lot of people had meticulously planned budgets, which made budgeting tools a moot point. But they were living just within their means and an extra expense, like a doctor’s visit or kid’s basketball uniform, could throw their budget off. These people didn’t want to take on debt though, they wanted extra work so they could have a cushion.

Stages 3 & 4: Ideate and Prototype

IDEO took that idea and ran with it, creating Moonrise, an app that matches people looking for work with extra hours and income. Today’s businesses depend on on-demand work but the temp agencies they work with tend to want permanent placements. Moonrise does things differently. It enables companies to find people who are already employed elsewhere for short-term work through a simple text message interface. The employers can list shifts on the platform and workers are paid as soon as they finish their shifts.

Stage 5: Test

To test the app, 11 Moonrisers, six employers, and a team of designers and programmers were assembled for a one week period to work out the kinks in the platform. 

Based on the test’s success, American Family Insurance now owns the startup Moonrise, which launched in Chicago in 2018 and has since expanded to additional states. In 2018, over 7,000 shifts have been fulfilled and over $500,000 has been earned by people on the app.

Case Study 2: GE Healthcare’s Scanning Tools

GE Healthcare has cutting-edge diagnostic imaging tools at its disposal, but for kids they’re an unpleasant experience. 

“The room itself is kind of dark and has those flickering fluorescent lights…. That machine that I had designed basically looked like a brick with a hole in it,” explained Doug Dietz , a designer who worked for GE. How could they make the experience better for kids?

The team at GE began by observing and gaining empathy for children at a daycare centre and talking to specialists who knew what paediatric patients went through. The team then recruited experts from a children’s museum and doctors from two hospitals. This gave them a lot of insight into what children went through when they had to sit for these procedures and what could be done to lessen the children’s stress.

Stages 3, 4 & 5: Ideate, Prototype, and Test

The first prototype of the new and improved “Adventure Series” scanner was invented. Through research and pilot programs, the redesign made imaging machines more child-friendly, making sure they have other things to focus on than the scary looks and sounds of the machine. For example, the Coral City Adventure in the emergency room gives children an underwater experience where they get into a yellow submarine and listen to the sound of harps while their procedure takes place.

Patient satisfaction scores increased to 90% and children no longer suffer such anxiety about their scans. The children hold still for their procedures more easily, making repeats of the scans unnecessary. There’s also less need for anesthesiologists, which improved the bottom line for those hospitals that used the scanning machines because more patients could get scanned each day.

How to apply design thinking 

If you want to apply design thinking in your own work, follow these steps and best practices:

• Improve design thinking skills. Use training to explain, improve, and practically implement the phases of design thinking. You can do this in several ways such as workshops, online courses, or case studies shared with your team.
• Identify the correct problem. Listen to users and ask them unbiased questions in order to understand their perspectives. Engage with everyone and stay open-minded, so you can identify the correct problem, not the problem you or your organisation thinks users are having. 
• Have more debriefs. Be open about what went right and what went wrong in your process. Openly discuss why things succeeded or failed and why. View failure as learning, not as an excuse to give up.
• Iterate and iterate some more. The goal of design thinking is finding the best answer possible—and that probably won’t come in the first round of iteration. You’ll need to test and iterate as much as possible with new ways to solve the problem.

Design thinking is so popular—and so effective—because it places the user’s needs front and centre. For more user-centric design tips, learn how to incorporate user feedback in product design , get to grips with user research ethics , and learn how to conduct effective user interviews .

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5 Examples of Design Thinking in Business

• 22 Feb 2022

Design thinking has become a business buzzword that’s changed how companies approach problem-solving . Countless brands, including GE Healthcare, Netflix, and UberEats, have utilized design thinking to develop effective solutions to challenges.

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What Is Design Thinking?

Design thinking is a user-centric, solutions-based approach to problem-solving that can be described in four stages :

• Clarify: This phase involves observing a situation without bias. It leans into design thinking’s user-centric element and requires empathizing with those affected by a problem, asking them questions about their pain points, and identifying what they solved. You can then use what you learn to create a problem statement or question that drives the rest of the design thinking process.
• Ideate: Begin brainstorming potential solutions. Take your problem statement or question and ideate based on patterns or observations collected in the clarify phase. This is the time to let your imagination and creativity run wild.
• Develop: Develop potential solutions using the ideas you generate, then test, experiment with, and reiterate to determine which are successful and which aren’t. Be ready to return to the ideation or clarification stage based on your results. Stepping back in the process is common—and encouraged—in design thinking.
• Implement: Finally, implement the solution you’ve developed. Again, it’s likely you’ll have to take a few steps back and reiterate your final solution, but that’s a central part of this phase. After several tests and edits, you’ll have a solution that can yield positive results.

Examples of Design Thinking

What does a properly executed design thinking process look like? Examining real-world examples is an effective way to answer that question. Here are five examples of well-known brands that have leveraged design thinking to solve business problems.

1. GE Healthcare

GE Healthcare is an example of a company that focused on user-centricity to improve a product that seemingly had no problems.

Diagnostic imaging has revolutionized healthcare, yet GE Healthcare saw a problem in how pediatric patients reacted to procedures. Many children were observed crying during long procedures in cold, dark rooms with flickering fluorescent lights. Considering this, GE Healthcare’s team observed children in various environments, spoke to experts, and interviewed hospital staff to gain more insight into their experiences.

After extensive user research, hospital pilots, and reiteration, GE Healthcare launched the “Adventure Series.” This redesign initiative focused on making magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) machines more child-friendly.

For example, the “Pirate Adventure” transforms MRI machines from dark, black holes to pirate ships with scenery of beaches, sandcastles, and the ocean. By empathizing with children’s pain points, GE Healthcare was able to craft a creative solution that was not only fun but increased patient satisfaction scores by 90 percent. This also yielded unexpected successes, including improved scan quality of pediatric patients, and ultimately saved customers time and resources.

Design thinking not only succeeds at finding effective solutions for companies but also at putting initiatives to the test before implementation.

When Oral B wanted to upgrade its electric toothbrush, it enlisted designers Kim Colin and Sam Hecht to help. The company’s request was to add more functions for electric toothbrush users, such as tracking brushing frequency, observing gum sensitivity, and playing music.

While clarifying the problem, however, Colin and Hecht pointed out that brushing teeth was a neurotic act for many people. Users didn’t want additional functionality and, in many cases, thought it could potentially cause more stress. Instead, they recommended two solutions that could improve user experience without adding gimmicks.

Their first recommendation was to make the toothbrush easier to charge, especially while users were on the road. Another was making it more convenient for users to order replacement heads by allowing toothbrushes to connect to phones and send reminder notifications. Both proposals were successful because they focused on what users wanted rather than what the company wanted to roll out.

Although many companies have successfully used design thinking, Netflix has repeatedly leveraged it to become an industry giant. During the company’s inception, its main competitor, Blockbuster, required customers to drive to brick-and-mortar stores to rent DVDs. The process was the same for returns, which was a major pain point for many. Netflix eliminated that inconvenience by delivering DVDs directly to customers’ homes with a subscription model.

While this revolutionized the movie industry, Netflix’s real success has been in its innovation over the years. For example, when the company realized DVDs were becoming outdated, it created an on-demand streaming service to stay ahead of the curve. This also inadvertently eliminated the inconvenience of having to wait for DVDs.

Subsequently, in 2011, Netflix took its design thinking one step further and responded to customers’ need for original, provocative content that wasn’t airing on traditional networks. Later, in 2016, it improved its user experience by adding short trailers to its interface. Each of Netflix’s major updates was in response to customers’ needs and driven by an effective design thinking process.

Another household name, Airbnb , started by only making around $200 a week. After some observation, its founders recognized that the advertising pictures hosts were posting online weren’t of a high enough quality, which often deterred customers from renting rooms.

To empathize with customers, the founders spent time traveling to each location, imagining what users look for in a temporary place to stay. Their solution? Invest in a high-quality camera and take pictures of what customers want to see, based on their travel observations. For example, showing every room rather than a select few, listing special features like a hot tub or pool in the description, and highlighting the neighborhood or areas in close proximity to the residence. The result? A week later, Airbnb’s revenue doubled.

Instead of focusing on reaching a bigger audience, Airbnb’s founders used design thinking to determine why their existing audience wasn’t utilizing their services. They realized that rather than focusing on traditional business values, like scalability, they needed to simply put themselves in users’ shoes to solve business problems.

5. UberEats

The go-to food delivery service app UberEats attributes its success to its ability to reiterate quickly and empathize with customers.

A prime example of this is UberEats’s Walkabout Program , where designers observe cities in which the company operates. Some elements they inspect are food culture, cuisine, infrastructure, delivery processes, and transportation. One of the innovations that came from their immersive research is the driver app, which focuses on delivery partners’ pain points around parking in highly populated urban areas. To address this, the driver app provides step-by-step directions from restaurant to customer to ensure smoother delivery processes.

Understanding that pain points vary between geographic locations helps UberEats implement effective upgrades to its service that solve problems in specific locations.

Practice Design Thinking

While these examples illustrate the kind of success design thinking can yield, you need to learn how to practice and use it before implementing it into your business model. Here are several ways to do so:

• Consider the Big Picture

In the examples above, it’s easy to say the solutions are obvious. Yet, try taking a step back to reflect on how each company thought about its customer base’s perspective and recognized where to employ empathy.

• Think Through Alternative Solutions

This is a useful exercise you can do with the examples above. Consider the problem each company faced and think through alternative solutions each could have tried. This can enable you to practice both empathy and ideation.

• Research Each Company’s Competitors

Another helpful exercise is to look at each company’s competitors. Did those competitors have similar problems? Did they find similar solutions? How would you compete? Remember to walk through the four design thinking phases.

Design thinking is a powerful tool you can use to solve difficult business problems. To use it successfully, however, you need to apply it to problems both big and small.

If you want to learn more about design thinking, explore our online course Design Thinking and Innovation —one of our online entrepreneurship and innovation courses —for more real-world case studies and opportunities to practice innovative problem-solving in your career.

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Why Design Thinking Works

• Jeanne Liedtka

While we know a lot about practices that stimulate new ideas, innovation teams often struggle to apply them. Why? Because people’s biases and entrenched behaviors get in the way. In this article a Darden professor explains how design thinking helps people overcome this problem and unleash their creativity.

Though ostensibly geared to understanding and molding the experiences of customers, design thinking also profoundly reshapes the experiences of the innovators themselves. For example, immersive customer research helps them set aside their own views and recognize needs customers haven’t expressed. Carefully planned dialogues help teams build on their diverse ideas, not just negotiate compromises when differences arise. And experiments with new solutions reduce all stakeholders’ fear of change.

At every phase—customer discovery, idea generation, and testing—a clear structure makes people more comfortable trying new things, and processes increase collaboration. Because it combines practical tools and human insight, design thinking is a social technology —one that the author predicts will have an impact as large as an earlier social technology: total quality management.

It addresses the biases and behaviors that hamper innovation.

Idea in Brief

The problem.

While we know a lot about what practices stimulate new ideas and creative solutions, most innovation teams struggle to realize their benefits.

People’s intrinsic biases and behavioral habits inhibit the exercise of the imagination and protect unspoken assumptions about what will or will not work.

The Solution

Design thinking provides a structured process that helps innovators break free of counterproductive tendencies that thwart innovation. Like TQM, it is a social technology that blends practical tools with insights into human nature.

Occasionally, a new way of organizing work leads to extraordinary improvements. Total quality management did that in manufacturing in the 1980s by combining a set of tools—kanban cards, quality circles, and so on—with the insight that people on the shop floor could do much higher level work than they usually were asked to. That blend of tools and insight, applied to a work process, can be thought of as a social technology.

• JL Jeanne Liedtka is a professor of business administration at the University of Virginia’s Darden School of Business.

Partner Center

What is design thinking?

Design and conquer: in years past, the word “design” might have conjured images of expensive handbags or glossy coffee table books. Now, your mind might go straight to business. Design and design thinking are buzzing in the business community more than ever. Until now, design has focused largely on how something looks; these days, it’s a dynamic idea used to describe how organizations can adjust their problem-solving approaches to respond to rapidly changing environments—and create maximum impact and shareholder value. Design is a journey and a destination. Design thinking is a core way of starting the journey and arriving at the right destination at the right time.

Simply put, “design thinking is a methodology that we use to solve complex problems , and it’s a way of using systemic reasoning and intuition to explore ideal future states,” says McKinsey partner Jennifer Kilian. Design thinking, she continues, is “the single biggest competitive advantage that you can have, if your customers are loyal to you—because if you solve for their needs first, you’ll always win.”

Get to know and directly engage with senior McKinsey experts on design thinking

Tjark Freundt is a senior partner in McKinsey’s Hamburg office, Tomas Nauclér is a senior partner in the Stockholm office, Daniel Swan is a senior partner in the Stamford office, Warren Teichner is a senior partner in the New York office, Bill Wiseman is a senior partner in the Seattle office, and Kai Vollhardt is a senior partner in the Munich office.

And good design is good business. Kilian’s claim is backed up with data: McKinsey Design’s 2018 Business value of design report  found that the best design performers increase their revenues  and investor returns at nearly twice the rate of their industry competitors. What’s more, over a ten-year period, design-led companies outperformed  the S&P 500 by 219 percent.

As you may have guessed by now, design thinking goes way beyond just the way something looks. And incorporating design thinking into your business is more than just creating a design studio and hiring designers. Design thinking means fundamentally changing how you develop your products, services, and, indeed, your organization itself.

Read on for a deep dive into the theory and practice of design thinking.

Learn more about McKinsey’s Design Practice , and check out McKinsey’s latest Business value of design report here .

How do companies build a design-driven company culture?

There’s more to succeeding in business than developing a great product or service that generates a financial return. Empathy and purpose are core business needs. Design thinking means putting customers, employees, and the planet at the center of problem solving.

McKinsey’s Design Practice has learned that design-led organizations start with design-driven cultures. Here are four steps  to building success through the power of design:

Understand your audience. Design-driven companies go beyond asking what customers and employees want, to truly understanding why they want it. Frequently, design-driven companies will turn to cultural anthropologists and ethnographers to drill down into how their customers use and experience products, including what motivates them and what turns them away.

Makeup retailer Sephora provides an example. When marketing leaders actually watched  shoppers using the Sephora website, they realized customers would frequently go to YouTube to watch videos of people using products before making a purchase. Using this information, the cosmetics retailer developed its own line of demonstration videos, keeping shoppers on the site and therefore more likely to make a purchase.

• Bring design to the executive table. This leader can be a chief design officer, a chief digital officer, or a chief marketing officer. Overall, this executive should be the best advocate for the company’s customers and employees, bringing the point of view of the people, the planet, and the company’s purpose into strategic business decisions. The design lead should also build bridges between multiple functions and stakeholders, bringing various groups into the design iteration process.
• Design in real time. To understand how and why people—both customers and employees—use processes, products, or services, organizations should develop a three-pronged design-thinking model that combines design, business strategy, and technology. This approach allows business leaders to spot trends, cocreate using feedback and data, prototype, validate, and build governance models for ongoing investment.

Act quickly. Good design depends on agility. That means getting a product to users quickly, then iterating based on customer feedback. In a design-driven culture, companies aren’t afraid to release products that aren’t quite perfect. Designers know there is no end to the design process. The power of design, instead, lies in the ability to adopt and adapt as needs change. When designers are embedded within teams, they are uniquely positioned to gather and digest feedback, which can lead to unexpected revelations. Ultimately, this approach creates more impactful and profitable results than following a prescribed path.

Consider Instagram. Having launched an initial product in 2010, Instagram’s founders paid attention to what the most popular features were: image sharing, commenting, and liking. They relaunched with a stripped-down version a few months later, resulting in 100,000 downloads in less than a week and over two million users in under two months —all without any strategic promotion.

Learn more about McKinsey’s Design Practice .

What’s the relationship between user-centered design and design thinking?

Both processes are design led. And they both emphasize listening to and deeply understanding users and continually gathering and implementing feedback to develop, refine, and improve a service.

Where they are different is scale. User-centered design focuses on improving a specific product or service . Design thinking takes a broader view  as a way to creatively address complex problems—whether for a start-up, a large organization, or society as a whole.

User-centered design is great for developing a fantastic product or service. In the past, a company could coast on a superior process or product for years before competitors caught up. But now, as digitization drives more frequent and faster disruptions, users demand a dynamic mix of product and service. Emphasis has shifted firmly away  from features and functions toward purpose, lifestyle, and simplicity of use.

Introducing McKinsey Explainers : Direct answers to complex questions

McKinsey analysis has found that some industries—such as telecommunications, automotive, and consumer product companies— have already made strides toward combining product and service into a unified customer experience . Read on for concrete examples of how companies have applied design thinking to offer innovative—and lucrative—customer experiences.

Learn more about our Operations Practice .

What is the design-thinking process?

McKinsey analysis has shown that the design-thinking approach creates more value  than conventional approaches. The right design at the right price point spurs sustainability and resilience in a demonstrable way—a key driver of growth.

According to McKinsey’s Design  Practice, there are two key steps to the design-thinking process:

• Developing an understanding of behavior and needs that goes beyond what people are doing right now to what they will need in the future and how to deliver that. The best way to develop this understanding is to spend time with people.
• “Concepting,” iterating, and testing . First start with pen and paper, sketching out concepts. Then quickly put these into rough prototypes—with an emphasis on quickly. Get feedback, refine, and test again. As American chemist Linus Pauling said : “The way to get good ideas is to get lots of ideas and throw the bad ones away.”

What is D4VG versus DTV?

For more than a decade, manufacturers have used a design-to-value (DTV) model  to design and release products that have the features needed to be competitive at a low cost. During this time, DTV efforts were groundbreaking because they were based on data rather than experience. They also reached across functions, in contrast to the typical value-engineering approach.

The principles of DTV have evolved into design for value and growth (D4VG), a new way of creating products that provide exceptional customer experiences while driving both value and growth. Done right, D4VG efforts generate products with the features, form, and functionality that turn users into loyal fans .

D4VG products can cost more to build, but they can ultimately raise margins by delivering on a clear understanding of a product’s core brand attributes, insights into people’s motivations, and design thinking.

Learn more about our Consumer Packaged Goods Practice .

What is design for sustainability?

As consumers, companies, and regulators shift toward increased sustainability, design processes are coming under even more scrutiny. The challenge is that carbon-efficient production processes tend to be more complex and can require more carbon-intensive materials. The good news is that an increased focus on design for sustainability (DFS), especially at the research and development stage , can help mitigate some of these inefficiencies and ultimately create even more sustainable products.

For example, the transition from internal-combustion engines to electric-propulsion vehicles  has highlighted emissions-intensive automobile production processes. One study found that around 20 percent of the carbon generated by a diesel vehicle comes from its production . If the vehicle ran on only renewable energy, production emissions would account for 85 percent of the total. With more sustainable design, electric-vehicle (EV) manufacturers stand to reduce the lifetime emissions of their products significantly.

To achieve design for sustainability at scale, companies can address three interrelated elements at the R&D stage:

• rethinking the way their products use resources, adapting them to changing regulations, adopting principles of circularity, and making use of customer insights
• understanding and tracking emissions and cost impact of design decisions in support of sustainability goals
• fostering the right mindsets and capabilities to integrate sustainability into every product and design decision

What is ‘skinny design’?

Skinny design is a less theoretical aspect of design thinking. It’s a method whereby consumer goods companies reassess the overall box size of products by reducing the total cubic volume of the package. According to McKinsey analysis , this can improve overall business performance in the following ways:

• Top-line growth of 4 to 5 percent through improvements in shelf and warehouse holding power. The ability to fit more stock into warehouses ultimately translates to growth.
• Bottom-line growth of more than 10 percent . Packing more product into containers and trucks creates the largest savings. Other cost reductions can come from designing packaging to minimize the labor required and facilitate automation.
• Sustainability improvements associated with reductions in carbon emissions through less diesel fuel burned per unit. Material choices can also confer improvements to the overall footprint.

Read more about skinny design and how it can help maximize the volume of consumer products that make it onto shelves.

Learn more about McKinsey’s Operations Practice .

How can a company become a top design performer?

The average person’s standard for design is higher than ever. Good design is no longer just a nice-to-have for a company. Customers now have extremely high expectations for design, whether it’s customer service, instant access to information, or clever products that are also aesthetically relevant in the current culture.

McKinsey tracked the design practices of 300 publicly listed companies  over a five-year period in multiple countries. Advanced regression analysis of more than two million pieces of financial data and more than 100,000 design actions revealed 12 actions most correlated to improved financial performance. These were then clustered into the following four themes:

• Analytical leadership . For the best financial performers, design is a top management issue , and design performance is assessed with the same rigor these companies use to approach revenue and cost. The companies with the top financial returns have combined design and business leadership through bold, design-centric visions. These include a commitment to maintain a baseline level of customer understanding among all executives. The CEO of one of the world’s largest banks, for example, spends one day a month with the bank’s clients and encourages all members of the company’s C-suite to do the same.
• Cross-functional talent . Top-performing companies make user-centric design everyone’s responsibility, not a siloed function. Companies whose designers are embedded within cross-functional teams have better overall business performance . Further, the alignment of design metrics with functional business metrics (such as financial performance, user adoption rates, and satisfaction results) is also correlated to better business performance.
• Design with people, not for people . Design flourishes best, according to our research, in environments that encourage learning, testing, and iterating with users . These practices increase the odds of creating breakthrough products and services, while at the same time reducing the risk of costly missteps.
• User experience (UX) . Top-quartile companies embrace the full user experience  by taking a broad-based view of where design can make a difference. Design approaches like mapping customer journeys can lead to more inclusive and sustainable solutions.

What are some real-world examples of how design thinking can improve efficiency and user experience?

Understanding the theory of design thinking is one thing. Seeing it work in practice is something else. Here are some examples of how elegant design created value for customers, a company, and shareholders:

• Stockholm’s international airport, Arlanda, used design thinking to address its air-traffic-control problem. The goal was to create a system that would make air traffic safer and more effective. By understanding the tasks and challenges of the air-traffic controllers, then collaboratively working on prototypes and iterating based on feedback, a working group was able to design a new departure-sequencing tool  that helped air-traffic controllers do their jobs better. The new system greatly reduced the amount of time planes spent between leaving the terminal and being in the air, which in turn helped reduce fuel consumption.
• When Tesla creates its electric vehicles , the company closely considers not only aesthetics but also the overall driving experience .
• The consumer electronics industry has a long history of dramatic evolutions lead by design thinking. Since Apple debuted the iPhone in 2007, for example, each new generation has seen additional features, new customers, and lower costs—all driven by design-led value creation .

Learn more about our Consumer Packaged Goods  and Sustainability  Practices.

For a more in-depth exploration of these topics, see McKinsey’s Agile Organizations collection. Learn more about our Design Practice —and check out design-thinking-related job opportunities if you’re interested in working at McKinsey.

Articles referenced:

• “ Skinny design: Smaller is better ,” April 26, 2022, Dave Fedewa , Daniel Swan , Warren Teichner , and Bill Wiseman
• “ Product sustainability: Back to the drawing board ,” February 7, 2022, Stephan Fuchs, Stephan Mohr , Malin Orebäck, and Jan Rys
• “ Emerging from COVID-19: Australians embrace their values ,” May 11, 2020, Lloyd Colling, Rod Farmer , Jenny Child, Dan Feldman, and Jean-Baptiste Coumau
• “ The business value of design ,” McKinsey Quarterly , October 25, 2018, Benedict Sheppard , Hugo Sarrazin, Garen Kouyoumjian, and Fabricio Dore
• “ More than a feeling: Ten design practices to deliver business value ,” December 8, 2017, Benedict Sheppard , John Edson, and Garen Kouyoumjian
• “ Creating value through sustainable design ,” July 25, 2017, Sara Andersson, David Crafoord, and Tomas Nauclér
• “ The expanding role of design in creating an end-to-end customer experience ,” June 6, 2017, Raffaele Breschi, Tjark Freundt , Malin Orebäck, and Kai Vollhardt
• “ Design for value and growth in a new world ,” April 13, 2017, Ankur Agrawal , Mark Dziersk, Dave Subburaj, and Kieran West
• “ The power of design thinking ,” March 1, 2016, Jennifer Kilian , Hugo Sarrazin, and Barr Seitz
• “ Building a design-driven culture ,” September 1, 2015, Jennifer Kilian , Hugo Sarrazin, and Hyo Yeon

Want to know more about design thinking?

Related articles.

Skinny design: Smaller is better

The business value of design

More than a feeling: Ten design practices to deliver business value

50+ Design Thinking Case Study Examples

Design Thinking Case Studies demonstrate the value of the Design Thinking methodology. They show how this Design Thinking methodology helps creatively solve problems and improve the success rate of innovation and increase collaboration in corporations, education, social impact work and the public sector by focusing on the needs of humans.

There are many Design Thinking Case Study examples on the web, but few meet the criteria for a robust case study: a clear description of the methodology, steps undertaken, experimentation through rapid prototypes and testing with people and finally documented results from the process. In this section, we have been selective about the design thinking case study examples that we highlight. We look for Design Thinking Case Studies that demonstrate how a problem was tackled and wherever possible the results or effect that the project produced. Our goal in curating this section of Design Thinking Case Study examples is quality over quantity.

Browse this page to view all Design Thinking Case Study examples, or if you are looking for Design Thinking Case Studies in a specific industry or marketing vertical, then rather start with the Design Thinking Case Studies Index .

If you have an interesting application of Design Thinking that you have a case study for, we would be happy to publish it.

Submit your Design Thinking Case Study for publication here.

Design Thinking Case Study Index

Welcome to the Design Thinking Case Study Index. There are many Design Thinking Case Studies on the internet. Many are retrofitted descriptions of what occurred, rather than evidence of the Design Thinking process in action. In order to bring a higher standard to the practice of Design Thinking, we require stronger evidence and rigor. Only members can post and must provide strong evidence in the Design Thinking Case Study that the Design Thinking process was used to create the original idea for the product or service solution. The criteria that needs to be proved to make your project a Design Thinking Case Study are:

The Guardian: Benefits of Design Thinking

Design thinking helped The Guardian newspaper and publishing group change their funding model, boost revenue and adapt their culture and engage on an emotional level with their readers. In this case study, Alex Breuer, Executive Creative Director and Tara Herman, Executive Editor, Design explain how design thinking was able to achieve these goals for The Guardian.

Read more...

Tackling the Opioid Crisis at the Human and Systems Levels

How the Lummi Tribal clinic used design to address opioid overdoses

Applying Design Thinking Internally

Applying Design Thinking internally, within a group, community or to ourselves. This is a new application of the Design Thinking Methodology.

An internal application in this sense can have two meanings. First, the internal application of design thinking tactics within a group, organization or community, and second, the internal application of design thinking to one’s own self and life.

Can Design Thinking help you solve your own problems?

The Use of Design Thinking in MNCH Programs, Ghana

Responding to growing interest among designers, global health practitioners, and funders in understanding the potential benefits of applying design thinking methods and tools to solving complex social problems, the Innovations for Maternal, Newborn, and Child Health (MNCH) Initiative (Innovations) developed and piloted innovative interventions to address common barriers to improving the effectiveness of basic MNCH health services in low-resource settings.

Société Générale's Time Tracking Nightmare Solved

In 2017, employees, managers, and partners of Société Générale Global Solution Centre agreed that invoices based on time tracking and project allocation were a chronic and painful challenge.

At SG-GSC, customers were billed for the time each assigned employee worked. The process of collecting the time worked by those employees (HCC) was a complicated and difficult ordeal. It consumed 21 days per month for senior employees. These employees had to navigate different systems, many types of contracts, high staff mobility, and a variety of processes between business lines.

How to Stimulate Innovation in Your Organization With Design Thinking

In this use case the cities of Aalborg and Rotterdam share their findings obtained from design thinking initiatives. This is based on empirical research as part of an evaluation. The use case is written for other professionals in the field of design in public organizations.

One of the main targets of the Interreg NSR project Like! is to create a digital innovative culture in which citizens are engaged, and more inclusive services are build. To reach this the municipalities started several initiatives with design thinking. In these initiatives one of the objectives was to find out how design thinking can help us to develop innovative and inclusive services. To research what design thinking contributed, we evaluated the pilots with participants.

The Impact of Design Thinking on Innovation: A Case Study at Scania IT

Organizational culture represents a crucial factor for the introduction of innovation throughout the organization via Design Thinking and agile way of working. Thus, the organization must establish a culture that encompasses a shared vision with values that create a commitment to learn, experiment and accept failure.

Oral B - Putting the User At the Center of Innovation

Oral B wanted to integrate digital technology into their electric toothbrush. The Brands first thoughts were to help users to track how well they were brushing their teeth. Future Facility, a product design firm in the UK suggested a different approach. Focus on the pain points of electric toothbrush users.

This case study discusses the importance of placing the user at the center of your innovation activities.

Design Thinking at Innogy

eCarSharing:   Energy Solutions for the New Generation

In 2015, Itai Ben-Jacob pitched his own ideas for a viable business model and developed the idea for innogy’s eCarSharing project in a design thinking workshop. His goal was to explore one of innogy’s innovation focus areas, ‘urban mobility.’

Together with fellow innovation hub members he organized a series of design thinking workshops to wade through the expansive topic of urban concepts – one of them focusing on mobility: “ We wanted to understand urban mobility – what does it actually entail? What type of business should we start? “

Building Cape Town’s Resilience Qualities Through Design Thinking.

This case study focuses on a Design Thinking Workshop for primary school learners. The aim of the workshops was to provide learners with a new set of skills which they can employ when problem solving for real world challenges.

Building resilience is essential for cities that face increasing uncertainty and new challenges that threaten the well-being of its citizens. This is especially important when looking at the diversity and complexity of potential shocks and stresses. 

Cape Town’s efforts to build skills in design thinking supports the creation of locally-relevant and innovative solutions that contribute to building resilient individuals and communities in Cape Town.

Designing Waste Out of the Food System

The average American  wastes  enough food each month to feed another person for 19 days. Through a number of projects with The Rockefeller Foundation and other organizations, IDEO designers from across the U.S. devised novel ways to tackle food waste.

B2B Design Thinking: Product Innovation when the User is a Network

When B2B companies talk about user experience, they are really considering the aggregated needs of multiple people and roles in a large ecosystem. But what happens when those objectives are vastly different for every individual?

“Humans don’t stop being humans just because they entered an office building.”

Self-Checkout: Improving Scan Accuracy Through Design

In this unique applied research study, academics and designers partnered with four of ECR’s Retailer members to immerse themselves in the self-checkout experience, understanding from the perspectives of the shopper and self-checkout supervisors, their journey from entry to exit, and their design challenges and frustrations.

Co-designing OTP Bank’s Strategic Plan for Growth

This is an example of accelerating a transformation through co-design. Eighty-two professionals gathered, representing OTP’s whole organization. Together, they were able to achieve months of work in just three days.

OTP Bank Romania (OTP) was at a key turning point in late 2018. The organization was undergoing changes in its leadership team. This new team helped them develop an ambitious goal:

OTP Bank will double its market share in 5 years.

They gathered for two Discovery sessions in December 2018. In these sessions, a carefully selected senior team chose three market segments to focus on. Then they built these segments into Personas.

IDEO: Journey to Mastery

While this is not a case study as such, it sits in our case study section as it is an important piece of information from a consultancy that played a large part in popularizing Design Thinking. In their Journey to Mastery section, IDEO discuss and shine a light on the shortcomings of the design thinking term and how it has been applied. I.e that it is not designing and that just knowing and using the practice does not in itself produce amazing solutions to problems.

It is worth a read to understand some of the nuance that is important to successful design thinking work.

Singapore Government: Building Service Platforms Around Moments in Life

In 2017, the product development team at Singapore’s Government Technology Agency (GovTech) was tasked to develop a tool to consolidate citizen-facing services previously delivered by different government agencies onto a single platform. The initiative, Moments of Life, sought to make it easier for citizens to discover and access relevant services during important changes in their lives by reducing fragmentation and being more anticipatory in the delivery of those services.

Organizing the delivery of services around a citizen’s journey, rather than fitting their delivery to existing processes, required extensive interagency collaboration beyond functional silos.

Mayo Clinic: Design Thinking in Health Care – Case Study

In the early 2000s, Mayo Clinic physician Nicholas LaRusso asked himself a question: if we can test new drugs in clinical trials, can we in a similarly rigorous way test new kinds of doctor-patient interactions?  

Consequently, the Mayo Clinic set up a skunkworks outpatient lab called SPARC. Within 6 years it had grown to an enterprise wide department called the Center for Innovation a dedicated research and design-oriented institute that studies the processes of health care provision, from the initial phone call, to the clinic visit, to the diagnosis and treatment of the problem, to follow-up and preventive care.

Design Thinking and Participation in Switzerland: Lessons Learned from Three Government Case Studies

Olivier Glassey, Jean-Henry Morin, Patrick Genoud, Giorgio Pauletto

This paper examines how design thinking and serious game approaches can be used to support participation.

In these case studies the authors discovered the following results.

Perceived usefulness. Based on informal discussions and debriefing sessions following all workshops, it is clear that the vast majority of workshop participants explicitly stated that both the actual outcome of the workshop and the methods used would significantly contribute to enhancing their performance in their work. Some workshops have actually led to follow up workshops or concrete actions based on the outcome.

Asili: Addressing an Entire Ecosystem of Need in a Rural Community

Design Thinking in HR at Deutche Telekom

Reza Moussavian, a senior HR and IT executive at Deutsch Telekom explains the company's journey and how important Design Thinking is as a business strategy for HR. Reza Moussavian's presentation provides great examples of issues tackled in HR and the results achieved. The presenter claims that there is not a singe issue that Deutche Telekom tackles in HR now that does not start with a Design Thinking methodology.

"Design Thinking solves 5% of our problems." says Reza Moussavian, "What we found out was that the magic was really in the implementation phase. We had to learn how to keep the momentum, the spirit and the fire from the co-creation workshops alive through the long implementation phase. Success is really about technology, transformation and leadership skills."

Design Thinking in Education: Perspectives, Opportunities and Challenges

This very informative article discusses design thinking as a process and mindset for collaboratively finding solutions for wicked problems in a variety of educational settings. Through a systematic literature review the article organizes case studies, reports, theoretical reflections, and other scholarly work to enhance our understanding of the purposes, contexts, benefits, limitations, affordances, constraints, effects and outcomes of design thinking in education.

Specifically, the review pursues four questions:

Design Thinking in the Classroom: What can we do about Bullying?

As children move from kindergarten, through middle school, and to high school, instruction shifts from stories to facts, from speculation to specifics, and imagination fades from focus. Design Thinking provides an alternative model to traditional ways of learning academic content by challenging students to find answers to complex, nuanced problems with multiple solutions and by fostering students’ ability to act as change agents.

Design Thinking is all about building creative confidence — a sense that “I can change the world.” In the Bullies & Bystanders Design Challenge, the students discovered that changing themselves might be even more important.

Following One School District's Approach to Innovation for the 21st Century

In her doctoral paper Loraine Rossi de Campos explores the use of Design Thinking in a school district for a 4-5 grade school.

India: Using ‘Design Thinking’ to Enhance Urban Redevelopment.

The discourse on urban planning and development has evolved over the last century with top-down methods of planning urban spaces giving way to bottom-up approaches that involve residents and other stakeholders in the design process. While the notion of participation and user involvement is considered critical to the design of appropriate and acceptable urban forms, there is no clear consensus in the literature on the methodology to be used to involve users and stakeholders in the design process. In this paper, we propose that the use of ‘Design-Thinking’ – a methodology for Human-Centred Design that is often used in product design and related industries – may be an effective methodology for engaging stakeholders in the urban design domain.

E*Trade: From Idea to Investment in 5 Minutes

Why the Financial Services Sector Should Embrace Design Thinking. Financial institutions need to evolve rapidly or risk disruption at the hands of nimble Fintech start-up companies.

In this article Kunal Vaed, The Street, describes how E*Trade used design thinking to enable the company to help investors get smarter by going from the idea of investing to an investment in 5 minutes.

E*Trade's Adaptive Portfolio service offering provides a good example of the work and results that E*Trade achieved with Design Thinking.

Fidelity Labs: Optimizing near-term savings goals

Thanks to providers like Fidelity, people can rely on easy, convenient systems to stay on track with their retirement savings. But when it comes to saving for important near-term goals (think: vacation, house, or wedding), people tend to be less organized. 

Fidelity Labs tackled this problem and defined the challenge as: "How might we improve the experience of saving for near-term goals? How might we make it easier, faster, and better?"

Design for Action: MassMutual and Intercorp Group

How to use design thinking to make great things actually happen by Tim Brown and Roger L. Martin. In this great HBR article, the authors look at design thinking in Finance with two case studies, one from MassMutual and the other from Intercorp. Group of Peru.

In this article highlighting the development of the acceptance of Design Thinking, they discuss how Design Thinking helps to create the artifact that creates the new solution as well as the intervention/s that brings the artifact to life.

How to Use Design Thinking to Make Great Things Actually Happen

Ever since it became clear that smart design led to the success of many products, companies have been employing it in other areas, from customer experiences, to strategy, to business ecosystems. But as design is used in increasingly complex contexts, a new hurdle has emerged: gaining acceptance (for the new solutions).

4 Design Thinking Case Studies in Healthcare: Nursing

The 4 case studies by Penn Nursing illustrate how nurses can be really powerful collaborators and generators of solutions within Healthcare. The videos describe the main attributes that nurses bring to the problem solving table

Philips: Improving the Patient Experience

Philips Ambient Experience service offers hospitals a way to radically improve the patient experience and results that they can achieve from their CT scanning suites. The best way to understand what it is is to watch this video  and this video  discussing the latest addition to the service. The white paper from Philips is also a good source of information on the Ambient Experience Service.

IBM: Design Thinking Adaptation and Adoption at Scale

How IBM made sense of ‘generic design thinking’ for tens of thousands of people. 

Generic design thinking often faces heavy resistance from influential skeptics, gets misunderstood or not understood at all, or less dire, it gets picked up with an unreflected euphoria and is applied as a “silver bullet” to all kinds of problems and projects (the famous “methodology misfit” we also see with Scrum for example). The big hangover often comes after the first experimentation budgets are expended and at worst a blame game starts.

Design Thinking in Public Engagement: Two Case Studies

Dave Robertson presents two case studies with the British Columbia Government (Canada). One with the Ministry of Transportation discussing their (public servant centered website), the other solving the problem of finding a solution to where to place a power substation.

Dave shows how he was stuck working in the public sector as a consultant and how creativity expressed through the Design Thinking methodology helped him to see a different, more effective way of creating solutions.

Bank of America Helps Customers Keep the Change

How do you encourage new customers to open bank accounts? In 2004, Bank of America used the Design Thinking methodology to look at the problem from a human centered perspective when they assigned design agency IDEO to boost their enrollment numbers: a problem that at the time, lacked any user perspective on why it was so hard for customers to save.

Redesigning The Employment Pass Application in Singapore

The Ministry of Manpower’s Work Pass Division (WPD) used design thinking as a tool to develop better ways to support foreigners who choose Singapore as a destination to live, work and set up businesses. The case reveals: Design thinking can potentially transform the perception and meaning of public service.

The team found out that the service redesign process required a better understanding of the decision points of both users and non-users. This involved taking a closer look at the opportunities and difficulties facing users, including those who had succeeded and failed within it, or had encountered problems or avoided it.

The US Tax Forms Simplification Project

This case concerns one of the earliest attempts by design thinkers at designing a large, complex system. It shows that design approaches in the public sector can look back at a long history. And it reveals how design thinking within the organization must include members of the whole organization in the design process.

Design has a long tradition and a rich history in the public sector. Nearly 40 years ago, when the US Congress passed the Paperwork Reduction Act into law, the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) turned to designers in an effort to implement the new policy and to improve its relationship with taxpayers. 

A Tough Crowd: Using Design Thinking to Help Traditional German Butchers

Between 2004 and 2014, more than 4000 butcher shops were forced to shut down in Germany. When last was the butcher shop redesigned? The process started in the 1990s, as supermarkets became the favored spot for meat-shopping. As if a dramatic loss of market share was not enough, the industry as a whole started suffering from a serious image crisis. It was time to apply design Thinking to the traditional German Butcher Shop.

The initial problem statement read “Create the meat shop 2.0, an up-to-date version of the classic butcher business”. 

IDEO: Using Design Thinking to Create a Better Car

The challenge.

Remove roadblocks that can compromise the in-car experience for the Lincoln car company.

The final product, the Lincoln MKC luxury crossover, is credited with helping the Lincoln brand outpace growth in the luxury segment by more than two-to-one over competitors.

THE OUTCOME

A pop-up studio where IDEO designers helped departments communicate and collaborate more effectively.

Transforming Constructivist Learning into Action: Design Thinking in Education

In an ever changing society of the 21st century, there is a demand to equip students with meta competences going beyond cognitive knowledge. Education, therefore, needs a transition from transferring knowledge to developing individual potentials with the help of constructivist learning. A Scheer, C Noweski,  C Meinel , University of Potsdam, Germany.

Design Thinking is the most effective method of teaching constructivist learning.

Scaling Design Thinking in the Enterprise, a 5 Year Study

During Julie Baher's five years at  Citrix  between 2010 to 2015, she was fortunate to gain first-hand experience leading a transformation in product strategy to a customer-centered approach. It began when several senior executives attended the  design thinking boot camp  at Stanford’s d-school, returning with a new vision for the product development processes. Julie goes into detail about how they scaled up the customer centric methodology across the organizations 8,000 employees.

Developing Environmental Sustainability Strategies

Developing environmental sustainability strategies, the Double Diamond method of LCA and design thinking: a case study from aged care. Journal of Cleaner Production, 85, 67-82. Stephen J. Clune*, Simon Lockrey.

Developing an App for Type II Diabetes

Development and testing of a mobile application to support diabetes self-management for people with newly diagnosed type 2 diabetes: a design thinking case study. Numerous mobile applications have been developed to support diabetes-self-management. However, the majority of these applications lack a theoretical foundation and the involvement of people with diabetes during development. The aim of this study was to develop and test a mobile application (app) supporting diabetes self-management among people with newly diagnosed type 2 diabetes using design thinking. The article was written by Mira Petersen and Nana F. Hempler.

Improving UX in Public Transportation

In this case study the project leaders goal was to  improve the experience of bus users  on Madrid's EMT system by offering a technological solution to  increase the users’ satisfaction with regard to accessibility  during the bus trip as well as when waiting for the bus to arrive.

Transforming Life Insurance through Design Thinking

To some fintechs, non-insurance incumbents, and venture capitalists, the industry’s challenges suggest opportunity. The life insurance value chain is increasingly losing share to these players, who are chipping away at the profit pool. 

How might incumbent life insurers keep pace in today’s fast-moving competitive environment and meet customers’ changing needs?

Deploying the Design Thinking methodology in the insurance sector could be the key to helping save insurance from itself. Here's what McKinsey has to say about design thinking in insurance in their article "Transforming Life Insurance through Design Thinking".

"Better addressing the evolving needs of consumers can help incumbents win their loyalty—and protect against new competitors. 

Bringing Design Thinking to the Insurance World

Pancentric helped  Jelf kick-off a several-year digital transformation journey by getting to know not just their customers better, but their own staff, too. Jelf has dozens of offices around the UK, all with specialties in insuring different kinds of commercial businesses. For our project team trying to determine a roadmap of new developments, there was no easy overview of how each office operated or what the entire customer experience looked like.

The Features of Design Thinking in Fast Moving Consumer Goods Brand Development

This paper investigates what features of design thinking are employed in FMCG brand development via stakeholder interviews in three domains: agencies, companies, and retailers. This paper concludes with suggestions of how design thinking can be embraced in FMCG brand development.

A Chain of Innovation The Creation of Swiffer

This is a great case study that underlines the complexity of bringing game changing products to market. It helps to provide an understanding of just how much more is needed that a simple five step process of idea generation.

Read more from Continuum , the Design Firm responsible for the Swiffer

The Guardian: Using Design to Reaffirm Values

The Guardian's redesign, which launched in January 2018, illustrated the business impact when design is valued. The Guardian has a strong culture of design and increasingly, how design thinking can contribute to organizational change and development.

Smart. Open. Grounded. Inventive. Read our Ideas Made to Matter.

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Ideas Made to Matter

Design thinking, explained

Rebecca Linke

Sep 14, 2017

What is design thinking?

Design thinking is an innovative problem-solving process rooted in a set of skills.The approach has been around for decades, but it only started gaining traction outside of the design community after the 2008 Harvard Business Review article [subscription required] titled “Design Thinking” by Tim Brown, CEO and president of design company IDEO.

Since then, the design thinking process has been applied to developing new products and services, and to a whole range of problems, from creating a business model for selling solar panels in Africa to the operation of Airbnb .

At a high level, the steps involved in the design thinking process are simple: first, fully understand the problem; second, explore a wide range of possible solutions; third, iterate extensively through prototyping and testing; and finally, implement through the customary deployment mechanisms. 

The skills associated with these steps help people apply creativity to effectively solve real-world problems better than they otherwise would. They can be readily learned, but take effort. For instance, when trying to understand a problem, setting aside your own preconceptions is vital, but it’s hard.

Creative brainstorming is necessary for developing possible solutions, but many people don’t do it particularly well. And throughout the process it is critical to engage in modeling, analysis, prototyping, and testing, and to really learn from these many iterations.

Once you master the skills central to the design thinking approach, they can be applied to solve problems in daily life and any industry.

Here’s what you need to know to get started.

Understand the problem 

The first step in design thinking is to understand the problem you are trying to solve before searching for solutions. Sometimes, the problem you need to address is not the one you originally set out to tackle.

“Most people don’t make much of an effort to explore the problem space before exploring the solution space,” said MIT Sloan professor Steve Eppinger. The mistake they make is to try and empathize, connecting the stated problem only to their own experiences. This falsely leads to the belief that you completely understand the situation. But the actual problem is always broader, more nuanced, or different than people originally assume.

Take the example of a meal delivery service in Holstebro, Denmark. When a team first began looking at the problem of poor nutrition and malnourishment among the elderly in the city, many of whom received meals from the service, it thought that simply updating the menu options would be a sufficient solution. But after closer observation, the team realized the scope of the problem was much larger , and that they would need to redesign the entire experience, not only for those receiving the meals, but for those preparing the meals as well. While the company changed almost everything about itself, including rebranding as The Good Kitchen, the most important change the company made when rethinking its business model was shifting how employees viewed themselves and their work. That, in turn, helped them create better meals (which were also drastically changed), yielding happier, better nourished customers.

Involve users

Imagine you are designing a new walker for rehabilitation patients and the elderly, but you have never used one. Could you fully understand what customers need? Certainly not, if you haven’t extensively observed and spoken with real customers. There is a reason that design thinking is often referred to as human-centered design.

“You have to immerse yourself in the problem,” Eppinger said.

How do you start to understand how to build a better walker? When a team from MIT’s Integrated Design and Management program together with the design firm Altitude took on that task, they met with walker users to interview them, observe them, and understand their experiences.  

“We center the design process on human beings by understanding their needs at the beginning, and then include them throughout the development and testing process,” Eppinger said.

Central to the design thinking process is prototyping and testing (more on that later) which allows designers to try, to fail, and to learn what works. Testing also involves customers, and that continued involvement provides essential user feedback on potential designs and use cases. If the MIT-Altitude team studying walkers had ended user involvement after its initial interviews, it would likely have ended up with a walker that didn’t work very well for customers. 

It is also important to interview and understand other stakeholders, like people selling the product, or those who are supporting the users throughout the product life cycle.

The second phase of design thinking is developing solutions to the problem (which you now fully understand). This begins with what most people know as brainstorming.

Hold nothing back during brainstorming sessions — except criticism. Infeasible ideas can generate useful solutions, but you’d never get there if you shoot down every impractical idea from the start.

“One of the key principles of brainstorming is to suspend judgment,” Eppinger said. “When we're exploring the solution space, we first broaden the search and generate lots of possibilities, including the wild and crazy ideas. Of course, the only way we're going to build on the wild and crazy ideas is if we consider them in the first place.”

That doesn’t mean you never judge the ideas, Eppinger said. That part comes later, in downselection. “But if we want 100 ideas to choose from, we can’t be very critical.”

In the case of The Good Kitchen, the kitchen employees were given new uniforms. Why? Uniforms don’t directly affect the competence of the cooks or the taste of the food.

But during interviews conducted with kitchen employees, designers realized that morale was low, in part because employees were bored preparing the same dishes over and over again, in part because they felt that others had a poor perception of them. The new, chef-style uniforms gave the cooks a greater sense of pride. It was only part of the solution, but if the idea had been rejected outright, or perhaps not even suggested, the company would have missed an important aspect of the solution.

Prototype and test. Repeat.

You’ve defined the problem. You’ve spoken to customers. You’ve brainstormed, come up with all sorts of ideas, and worked with your team to boil those ideas down to the ones you think may actually solve the problem you’ve defined.

“We don’t develop a good solution just by thinking about a list of ideas, bullet points and rough sketches,” Eppinger said. “We explore potential solutions through modeling and prototyping. We design, we build, we test, and repeat — this design iteration process is absolutely critical to effective design thinking.”

Repeating this loop of prototyping, testing, and gathering user feedback is crucial for making sure the design is right — that is, it works for customers, you can build it, and you can support it.

“After several iterations, we might get something that works, we validate it with real customers, and we often find that what we thought was a great solution is actually only just OK. But then we can make it a lot better through even just a few more iterations,” Eppinger said.

Implementation

The goal of all the steps that come before this is to have the best possible solution before you move into implementing the design. Your team will spend most of its time, its money, and its energy on this stage.

“Implementation involves detailed design, training, tooling, and ramping up. It is a huge amount of effort, so get it right before you expend that effort,” said Eppinger.

Design thinking isn’t just for “things.” If you are only applying the approach to physical products, you aren’t getting the most out of it. Design thinking can be applied to any problem that needs a creative solution. When Eppinger ran into a primary school educator who told him design thinking was big in his school, Eppinger thought he meant that they were teaching students the tenets of design thinking.

“It turns out they meant they were using design thinking in running their operations and improving the school programs. It’s being applied everywhere these days,” Eppinger said.

In another example from the education field, Peruvian entrepreneur Carlos Rodriguez-Pastor hired design consulting firm IDEO to redesign every aspect of the learning experience in a network of schools in Peru. The ultimate goal? To elevate Peru’s middle class.

As you’d expect, many large corporations have also adopted design thinking. IBM has adopted it at a company-wide level, training many of its nearly 400,000 employees in design thinking principles .

What can design thinking do for your business?

The impact of all the buzz around design thinking today is that people are realizing that “anybody who has a challenge that needs creative problem solving could benefit from this approach,” Eppinger said. That means that managers can use it, not only to design a new product or service, “but anytime they’ve got a challenge, a problem to solve.”

Applying design thinking techniques to business problems can help executives across industries rethink their product offerings, grow their markets, offer greater value to customers, or innovate and stay relevant. “I don’t know industries that can’t use design thinking,” said Eppinger.

Ready to go deeper?

Read “ The Designful Company ” by Marty Neumeier, a book that focuses on how businesses can benefit from design thinking, and “ Product Design and Development ,” co-authored by Eppinger, to better understand the detailed methods.

Register for an MIT Sloan Executive Education course:

Systematic Innovation of Products, Processes, and Services , a five-day course taught by Eppinger and other MIT professors.

• Leadership by Design: Innovation Process and Culture , a two-day course taught by MIT Integrated Design and Management director Matthew Kressy.
• Managing Complex Technical Projects , a two-day course taught by Eppinger.
• Apply for M astering Design Thinking , a 3-month online certificate course taught by Eppinger and MIT Sloan senior lecturers Renée Richardson Gosline and David Robertson.

Steve Eppinger is a professor of management science and innovation at MIT Sloan. He holds the General Motors Leaders for Global Operations Chair and has a PhD from MIT in engineering. He is the faculty co-director of MIT's System Design and Management program and Integrated Design and Management program, both master’s degrees joint between the MIT Sloan and Engineering schools. His research focuses on product development and technical project management, and has been applied to improving complex engineering processes in many industries.

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Design Thinking 101

July 31, 2016 2016-07-31

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In This Article:

Definition of design thinking, why — the advantage, flexibility — adapt to fit your needs, scalability — think bigger, history of design thinking.

Design thinking is an ideology supported by an accompanying process . A complete definition requires an understanding of both.

Definition: The design thinking ideology asserts that a hands-on, user-centric approach to problem solving can lead to innovation, and innovation can lead to differentiation and a competitive advantage. This hands-on, user-centric approach is defined by the design thinking process and comprises 6 distinct phases, as defined and illustrated below.

The design-thinking framework follows an overall flow of 1) understand, 2) explore, and 3) materialize. Within these larger buckets fall the 6 phases: empathize, define, ideate, prototype, test, and implement.

Conduct research in order to develop knowledge about what your users do, say, think, and feel .

Imagine your goal is to improve an onboarding experience for new users. In this phase, you talk to a range of actual users.  Directly observe what they do, how they think, and what they want, asking yourself things like ‘what motivates or discourages users?’ or ‘where do they experience frustration?’ The goal is to gather enough observations that you can truly begin to empathize with your users and their perspectives.

Combine all your research and observe where your users’ problems exist. While pinpointing your users’ needs , begin to highlight opportunities for innovation.

Consider the onboarding example again. In the define phase, use the data gathered in the empathize phase to glean insights. Organize all your observations and draw parallels across your users’ current experiences. Is there a common pain point across many different users? Identify unmet user needs.

Brainstorm a range of crazy, creative ideas that address the unmet user needs identified in the define phase. Give yourself and your team total freedom; no idea is too farfetched and quantity supersedes quality.

At this phase, bring your team members together and sketch out many different ideas. Then, have them share ideas with one another, mixing and remixing, building on others' ideas.

Build real, tactile representations for a subset of your ideas. The goal of this phase is to understand what components of your ideas work, and which do not. In this phase you begin to weigh the impact vs. feasibility of your ideas through feedback on your prototypes.

Make your ideas tactile. If it is a new landing page, draw out a wireframe and get feedback internally.  Change it based on feedback, then prototype it again in quick and dirty code. Then, share it with another group of people.

Return to your users for feedback. Ask yourself ‘Does this solution meet users’ needs?’ and ‘Has it improved how they feel, think, or do their tasks?’

Put your prototype in front of real customers and verify that it achieves your goals. Has the users’ perspective during onboarding improved? Does the new landing page increase time or money spent on your site? As you are executing your vision, continue to test along the way.

Put the vision into effect. Ensure that your solution is materialized and touches the lives of your end users.

This is the most important part of design thinking, but it is the one most often forgotten. As Don Norman preaches, “we need more design doing.” Design thinking does not free you from the actual design doing. It’s not magic.

“There’s no such thing as a creative type. As if creativity is a verb, a very time-consuming verb. It’s about taking an idea in your head, and transforming that idea into something real. And that’s always going to be a long and difficult process. If you’re doing it right, it’s going to feel like work.”  - Milton Glaser

As impactful as design thinking can be for an organization, it only leads to true innovation if the vision is executed. The success of design thinking lies in its ability to transform an aspect of the end user’s life. This sixth step — implement — is crucial.

Why should we introduce a new way to think about product development? There are numerous reasons to engage in design thinking, enough to merit a standalone article, but in summary, design thinking achieves all these advantages at the same time.

Design thinking:

• Is a user-centered process that starts with user data, creates design artifacts that address real and not imaginary user needs, and then tests those artifacts with real users
• Leverages collective expertise and establishes a shared language, as well as buy-in amongst your team
• Encourages innovation by exploring multiple avenues for the same problem

Jakob Nielsen says “ a wonderful interface solving the wrong problem will fail ." Design thinking unfetters creative energies and focuses them on the right problem. 

The above process will feel abstruse at first. Don’t think of it as if it were a prescribed step-by-step recipe for success. Instead, use it as scaffolding to support you when and where you need it. Be a master chef, not a line cook: take the recipe as a framework, then tweak as needed.

Each phase is meant to be iterative and cyclical as opposed to a strictly linear process, as depicted below. It is common to return to the two understanding phases, empathize and define, after an initial prototype is built and tested. This is because it is not until wireframes are prototyped and your ideas come to life that you are able to get a true representation of your design. For the first time, you can accurately assess if your solution really works. At this point, looping back to your user research is immensely helpful. What else do you need to know about the user in order to make decisions or to prioritize development order? What new use cases have arisen from the prototype that you didn’t previously research?

You can also repeat phases. It’s often necessary to do an exercise within a phase multiple times in order to arrive at the outcome needed to move forward. For example, in the define phase, different team members will have different backgrounds and expertise, and thus different approaches to problem identification. It’s common to spend an extended amount of time in the define phase, aligning a team to the same focus. Repetition is necessary if there are obstacles in establishing buy-in. The outcome of each phase should be sound enough to serve as a guiding principle throughout the rest of the process and to ensure that you never stray too far from your focus.

The packaged and accessible nature of design thinking makes it scalable. Organizations previously unable to shift their way of thinking now have a guide that can be comprehended regardless of expertise, mitigating the range of design talent while increasing the probability of success. This doesn’t just apply to traditional “designery” topics such as product design, but to a variety of societal, environmental, and economical issues. Design thinking is simple enough to be practiced at a range of scopes; even tough, undefined problems that might otherwise be overwhelming. While it can be applied over time to improve small functions like search, it can also be applied to design disruptive and transformative solutions, such as restructuring the career ladder for teachers in order to retain more talent. 

It is a common misconception that design thinking is new. Design has been practiced for ages : monuments, bridges, automobiles, subway systems are all end-products of design processes. Throughout history, good designers have applied a human-centric creative process to build meaningful and effective solutions.

In the early 1900's husband and wife designers Charles and Ray Eames practiced “learning by doing,” exploring a range of needs and constraints before designing their Eames chairs, which continue to be in production even now, seventy years later. 1960's dressmaker Jean Muir was well known for her “common sense” approach to clothing design, placing as much emphasis on how her clothes felt to wear as they looked to others. These designers were innovators of their time. Their approaches can be viewed as early examples of design thinking — as they each developed a deep understanding of their users’ lives and unmet needs. Milton Glaser, the designer behind the famous I ♥ NY logo, describes this notion well: “We’re always looking, but we never really see…it’s the act of attention that allows you to really grasp something, to become fully conscious of it.”

Despite these (and other) early examples of human-centric products, design has historically been an afterthought in the business world, applied only to touch up a product’s aesthetics. This topical design application has resulted in corporations creating solutions which fail to meet their customers’ real needs. Consequently, some of these companies moved their designers from the end of the product-development process, where their contribution is limited, to the beginning. Their human-centric design approach proved to be a differentiator: those companies that used it have reaped the financial benefits of creating products shaped by human needs.

In order for this approach to be adopted across large organizations, it needed to be standardized. Cue design thinking, a formalized framework of applying the creative design process to traditional business problems.

The specific term "design thinking" was coined in the 1990's by David Kelley and Tim Brown of IDEO, with Roger Martin, and encapsulated methods and ideas that have been brewing for years into a single unified concept.

We live in an era of experiences , be they services or products, and we’ve come to have high expectations for these experiences. They are becoming more complex in nature as information and technology continues to evolve. With each evolution comes a new set of unmet needs. While design thinking is simply an approach to problem solving, it increases the probability of success and breakthrough innovation.

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10 Insightful Design Thinking Frameworks: A Quick Overview

If you’ve just started to embark on your journey into the field of design thinking , you may have noticed different frameworks cropping up here and there. This is nothing to worry about—it’s simply the result of different people’s perceptions of the design thinking process. To help you get your head around these interpretations, we’ve prepared a useful summary of the most popular design thinking frameworks used by global design firms and national design agencies .

Design thinking means many things to many people—not only in its definition, but also in its practical implementation. A wide variety of design thinking frameworks and visualizations exist in the world today , and each typically contains between three and seven stages. Before we dive into these different frameworks, let’s look at a quick overview of the fundamental principles which form the basis behind all variations of the design thinking process.

Traits that are common across design thinking processes:

Starts with empathy . A deep focus on the humans involved will ensure you stay on track and follow the course of action most likely to bring about preferred solutions for individuals, business and society.

Reframes the problem or challenge at hand. This helps you gain new perspectives and explore different ways to think about the problem, and allows a more holistic approach towards reaching a preferred solution.

Initially employs divergent styles of thinking. This allows participants to generate and explore as many solutions as possible in an open , judgment-free ideation space.

Later employs convergent styles of thinking. This will allow your team to isolate, combine and refine potential solution streams out of your more mature ideas.

Creates and tests prototypes. Solutions which make it through the previous stages get tested further to remove any potential issues.

Iterates. You will revisit empathic frames of mind as you progress through the various stages and may redefine the challenge as new knowledge is gathered.

The process is all done in a collaborative, multidisciplinary team that leverages the experience and thinking styles of many folks to solve complex problems. It can feel quite chaotic at first, if you’re not used to it—however, if done correctly, it can result in emergent solutions that are desirable, feasible and viable.

Different implementation frameworks or models have different names and numbers of stages, but they all consist of the same principles and all involve points at which you will empathize , reframe, ideate, prototype and test. Let’s now take a quick look at 10 popular frameworks to further understand this innovative and revolutionary process.

1. The 5-Stage Design Thinking Process—d.school

First, let’s look at the 5-stage model that we will be following in this course.

The Stanford Design School (d.school), now known as the Hasso Plattner Institute of Design, initially taught design thinking via a simple but powerful 3-step process: Understand, Improve, Apply.

They have since built upon this, to formulate and openly share a famous 5-stage process which is widely used around the world, including here at the Interaction Design Foundation. The process they outlined is as follows:

The d.school also represents this 5-stage process through their hexagonal design thinking visualization. This ensures the stages are seen more as enablers or modes of thinking, rather than concrete linear steps.

The d.school’s model of design thinking consists of five iterative, non-linear phases: Empathize, Define, Ideate, Prototype and Test.

© Stanford d.School web, Public License. Source.

2. The Early Traditional Design Process—Herbert Simon

The earliest versions of the design thinking process still reflected the traditional design process . As design thinking evolved, however, deeper empathy, more collaboration and a multidisciplinary approach were thrown into the mix.

As Herbert Simon states in his 1969 seminal work The Sciences of the Artificial , the design process consists of the following seven stages: define , research , ideate , prototype , choose , implement and learn —and this has been the cornerstone of design processes ever since.

© Daniel Skrok and the Interaction Design Foundation, CC BY-NC-SA 3.0.

3. Head, Heart and Hand—AIGA

The American Institution of Graphic Arts (AIGA) states the value of modern design practice comes from designers’ unique blend of head, heart and hand. For example, design thinking participants wear many hats during the process and rely on their heads to solve complex problems. In the early stages, they also use their hearts to empathize and understand human needs and emotions . The particular gift of designers, however, is their ability to dive into practical creation by hand. The three combined create a holistic process which utilizes input from all of our faculties to be successful.

Designers have a unique blend of head, heart, and hand skills which combine to create holistic problem-solving abilities.

4. DeepDive™ Methodology—IDEO

The DeepDive™ technique was developed by IDEO as a way to rapidly immerse a group into a situation where they can effectively problem-solve and generate ideas. They expressed this variant of the design thinking process live on ABC Nightline back in the late ’90s.

An abridged version from the report about IDEO's DeepDive™ Methodology that was aired on ABC Nightline in the late '90s.

IDEO's DeepDive™ comprised the following steps:

© Daniel Skrok and Interaction Design Foundation, CC BY-NC-SA 3.0.

The DeepDive™ methodology was further documented and enhanced by Andy Boynton and Bill Fischer of the International Institute for Management Development (IMD) business school, and Deloitte Consulting then acquired the rights in 2006.

5. The 3-Stage Design Thinking Process—IDEO

IDEO uses a different process and, while it only has three stages, it covers pretty much the same ground as the other processes in this compilation.

IDEO’s 3-Stage Design Thinking Process consists of inspiration, ideation and implementation.

© IDEO, Public License.

The three stages are:

Inspire : The problem or opportunity inspires and motivates the search for a solution.

Ideate : A process of synthesis distills insights which can lead to solutions or opportunities for change.

Implement : The best ideas are turned into a concrete, fully conceived action plan.

IDEO also released a deck of IDEO Method Cards which cover the modes Learn , Look , Ask and Try —each with their own collection of methods for an entire innovation cycle.

6. Design Kit: The Human-Centered Design Toolkit—IDEO

IDEO has also developed contextualized toolkits, which repackage the design thinking process. One such iteration focuses on the social innovation setting in developing countries. For this context, the terminology needs to be simplified, made memorable and restructured for the typical challenges faced in those environments. The Human-Centered Design (HCD) Toolkit they developed for this purpose was re-interpreted as an acronym to mean hear , create and deliver.

IDEO’s 3-Stage Design Thinking Process was reinterpreted as Hear, Create, Deliver to coincide with the “HCD” acronym for Human-Centered Design.

Hear : Similar to early phases in other design thinking processes , the hear stage develops an empathic understanding of users, and defines the problem the team is trying to solve. It helps participants gain a solid foundation in the context of the problem and sufficiently reframe it to take on new perspectives.

Create : The create stage is concerned with exploration, experimentation and learning through making—similar to the ideate and prototype phases in d.school’s 5-stage approach. Potential areas of exploration are pinpointed, and those closest to the problem will be engaged with further to co-create solutions. This allows design teams to maintain the highest levels of empathy during early design phases and weed out any potential problematic assumptions made by designers who do not sufficiently understand the context.

Deliver : The deliver phase of the HCD process is centered around logistical implementation. It also aims to help overcome any obstacles which may exist when rolling out a solution within the required context. It is essential that solutions integrate into communities and bypass other roadblocks during implementation, and this stage will help participants achieve that.

7. The “Double Diamond” Design Process Model—Design Council

In the mid-2000s the British Design Council popularized the Double Diamond diagram, based on Béla H. Bánáthy’s 1996 “divergence-convergence” model. The Double Diamond diagram graphically represents a design thinking process. It highlights the divergent and convergent styles of thinking involved, and is broken down into four distinct phases:

Discover : The start of the project is based around an initial idea or inspiration, often gained from the identification of user needs .

Define : These user needs are interpreted and aligned with business objectives.

Develop : Design-led solutions are developed, iterated and tested.

Deliver : The end product or service is finalized and launched into the market.

The Double Diamond diagram from the Design Council helps to visualize the divergent and convergent stages of the design thinking process, and highlights the different modes of thinking that designers use.

8. Collective Action Toolkit (CAT) — Frog Design

Frog Design is an organization committed to social impact. They developed the Collective Action Toolkit (CAT) as a way to make the design process accessible to communities around the world—with the hope it will help them organize, collaborate and create solutions for the specific problems which affect their local area.

Frog’s Collective Action Toolkit process.

© Frog, Public License.

Frog’s CAT breaks the process down into six stages:

Clarify your goal : Agree on the problem you want to try and solve, as well as what goals you want to achieve.

Build your group : Bring people together in your community, identify their strengths and map out their commitment to your goals.

Seek new understanding : Ask questions, explore how people live and discover unmet needs to inform and inspire your group, and gain others’ perspectives.

Imagine new ideas : Come up with new solutions and decide what makes some of them more achievable than others.

Make something real : Test and experiment your better ideas and see what you discover.

Plan for action : Organize what each group member should do to reach your shared goals.

Frog make it clear these stages form a non-linear process, and you might have to revisit stages multiple times during a project—particularly the clarification stage.

9. Designing for Growth—Jeanne Liedtka & Tim Ogilvie

Jeanne Liedtka is a professor at the University of Virginia’s Darden School of Business, and Tim Ogilvie is CEO of innovation strategy consultancy firm Peer Insight. Both are experts in design thinking and strategic thinking, and their book, Designing for Growth , puts forward a unique spin on the design thinking journey. It reframes the terminology into a more inquisitive and intuitive set of four what questions:

What is ? Explore the current reality.

What if ? Envision alternative futures.

What wow s? Get users to help you make some tough choices.

What works ? Make the solution work in-market, and as a business.

“What if...?”—one of the most powerful phrases in the English language, and for good reason.

© Christine Prefontaine, CC BY-SA 2.0.

10. The LUMA System of Innovation—LUMA Institute

The LUMA System of Innovation process consists of looking, understanding and making.

© LUMA Institute, Public License.

The LUMA Institute is a global firm that teaches innovation and human-centered design. The team at LUMA have developed their own expression of the design thinking process which they have distilled into three key design skills: Looking , Understanding and Making.

They claim their system is flexible and versatile so it can be used for any type of problem, in any type of setting. The process unfolds through either a single set of activities or a combination of multiple methods—the latter being required for more complex challenges.

The Take Away

You could spend weeks exploring the many versions of the design thinking process which exist in the world today. Their differences and similarities are, in fact, celebrations of variety and non-conformity.

Now you’ve read the 10 most popular frameworks above, maybe you’ve decided on a favorite. Regardless of which approach you like the most, it’s important you peel away the steps and terminology and focus instead on its principles. At first sight, the design thinking process can seem mysterious, chaotic and, at times, complex. However, it's a discipline which will mature in you with direct practice. You will learn things in a practical manner and grow in confidence with each new experience of it. You may even be tempted to develop your own expression of these steps, modes and phases to suit a completely new context—that's part of the beauty of design thinking!

References & Where to Learn More

Herbert Simon, The Sciences of the Artificial , 1969.

Mike Morrison, Deep-Dive Brainstorming Technique – IDEO , 2018.

d.school, An Introduction to Design Thinking PROCESS GUIDE , 2010: https://web.stanford.edu/~mshanks/MichaelShanks/files/509554.pdf

David Clifford, Equity-Centered Design Framework .

IDEO, Design Kit: The Human-Centered Design Toolkit .

Jeanne Liedtka and Tim Ogilvie, Designing for Growth: A Design Thinking Tool Kit for Managers , 2011.

LUMA Institute, Our System .

Hero Image: © Teo Yu Siang and the Interaction Design Foundation, CC BY-NC-SA 3.0.

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4 inspiring design thinking examples and the valuable lessons they teach

Design thinking is a powerful tool for product teams, but what does it look like in practice? How have successful companies applied it—and why does it work?

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From tech products, healthcare, travel, and even non-profit community programs, design thinking has proven to be a useful problem-solving tool for innovators and entrepreneurs alike.

We’ve rounded up four design thinking examples that show the incredible effects this methodology can have on a company’s success. In these examples, we examine how each organization used the design thinking process to improve their product—and what you can learn from their experience.

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Why design thinking works

Design thinking has made its way into various industries in the past decade. As a creative approach to innovation and problem-solving that focuses on users , the practice of design thinking covers everything from physical consumer products like smartphones and laptops, to digital systems built by SaaS brands, and even community-oriented projects in wellness, banking, and self-improvement.

Today, probably every tech company you can think of is using design thinking in one way or another. Some of the world’s leading brands—think Apple, Google, IBM, and Samsung—have adopted the design thinking approach, and the methodology is being taught at leading universities around the world, including Stanford d.school, Harvard, and MIT. 

Why does it work for every one of them? The answer is pretty straightforward: design thinking helps product teams understand not only what will make a great product, but also how and if they should do it. It can (and has) transformed the way businesses across industries solve problems and meet customer needs.

The power of this methodology is to quickly test whether an idea, solution, or enhancement can bring real results to customers. This creative and experimental approach helps teams better understand how to create products that are not only usable, but above all, useful.

☝️ Fact: design-led companies consistently outperform their competitors

This user-first approach, coupled with early and frequent testing, helps minimize risk, drive customer engagement, and ultimately boost the bottom line. In fact, design thinking offers a proven competitive advantage .

According to a recent five-year study by McKinsey & Company, companies that consistently followed design thinking practices generated roughly 32% more revenue and 56% higher returns for shareholders than those that did not. This higher success rate was true across banking, consumer goods, and med tech industries. 

4 examples of design thinking to inspire you

Right now, you may think: “This is great, but how will it help bring my product to life faster?” To make your vision more tangible, let’s look at four exceptional examples of design thinking done right. 

Remember: at one point, these companies were standing exactly where you are. The more you know about successful design processes, the more you can take some of their best aspects and use them to enhance your own products.

Airbnb knows a thing or two about design—as they should, considering two of the company’s founders are designers. In 2008, they teamed up with an engineer to solve one essential travel problem: where to stay.

How Airbnb uses design thinking

To do that, they knew they had to get into the heads of the people who were going to use Airbnb and see what they were actually looking for. Their solution involved traveling to New York, renting a camera, and spending time with customers in their homes to take good pictures of the houses. It wasn’t scalable or very technical, and they did it with no preliminary study—they were only guided by intuition.

The team took a chance, skipped what they had learned at school about how a business should work, and followed the steps of the design thinking methodology: empathize, define, design, prototype, and test. Then, they doubled their income overnight.

Today, design thinking is still part of Airbnb’s DNA and is embedded in everything they do: it’s how they foster creative culture, iterate on their product, and make meaningful connections with a global community of travelers— all by putting the human experience at the center . Here are a few design-led projects that have happened over the years at Airbnb:

The “Snow White” project : a user journey visualization that illustrates the critical moments of truth within the host, guest, and hiring processes in three stories.

Empathy travel : a program that immerses team members into the customer experience. Every new employee has to take a trip in their first or second week at Airbnb and document it.

Design Language System : design teams often struggle to reach a cadence that balances the creative process and cycles of continuous innovation. This process led to the development of Airbnb’s new Design Language System, a collection of components defined by shared principles and patterns, as well as a suite of internal and third-party tools that allow their teams to work smarter and with more alignment.

Design is fundamentally about making decisions through the lens of what will be useful and engaging to people.

What Airbnb has achieved through design thinking 

Their unusual and more creative approach paid off. By implementing design thinking principles, Airbnb has singlehandedly defined the experience economy and set themselves apart as an industry leader. 

From a program that listens and responds to hosts' feedback, to encouraging gestures that create customer delight at moments where the product experience might break, Airbnb has used design thinking to solve incredibly complex and interesting challenges , including:

Dealing with a unique global inventory of homes and experiences

Understanding how people get inspired and plan travel

Creating tremendous freedom for bold, creative thinking and making for employees

As for revenue, the company has gone from $200 a week to revolutionizing tourism and achieving a valuation of $110 billion . Guests have booked over 1 billion stays, and there are 5.6 million global listings in 100,000 cities and over 200,000 regions.

 What you can learn from Airbnb  

Put the human experience at the center: product teams at Airbnb know that their work is about building a software-enabled trust system, so people can safely share their homes, their passions, and their time with travelers. Trust is what brings together what is desirable from a human point of view, with what is technologically feasible and economically viable . Alex Schleifer, Chief Design Officer at Airbnb, shared that their teams always ground themselves in real human behaviors and needs through research, whether they’re dealing with machine learning or a new emerging interface.

Never stop experimenting and iterating : while Airbnb is data-driven, they don’t let data push them around. Instead of developing reactively to metrics, the team works proactively, often starting with a creative hypothesis, implementing a change, reviewing how it impacts the business, and then repeating that process.

Take measured, productive risks : individual team members at Airbnb make small bets on new features, and then measure if there’s a meaningful return on the bet. If there’s a payoff, they send more resources in that direction. If not, there’s a lot to learn from failure .

💡Pro tip: combine quantitative metrics with qualitative feedback to inform designs and keep users at the center of your work. 

Airbnb doesn’t rely on (big) data analytics and A/B testing alone. Instead, they combine quantitative insights with people’s ability to synthesize and make sense of data from all sources .

Sasha Lubomirsky, former Head of User Research at Airbnb, said that “a lot of design thinking is about being creative [but it is also] about looking at what we know, triangulating information that we have, and having that inspire creativity.”

You don’t have to collect, analyze, and distribute UX research data manually. Use Hotjar ’s product experience insights tools to collect and analyze different kinds of information, then use what you learn to enhance the user experience.

Hotjar’s tools combine behavioral and attitudinal research methods through a blend of quantitative and qualitative data. Use Hotjar Surveys and Feedback widgets to collect voice-of-customer (VoC) feedback, and Heatmaps and Session Recordings to round out the picture with behavioral insights.

 2. UberEats

UberEats’ use of design thinking is nothing short of inspiring. Their evolution shows that creating the future of an industry takes empathy, innovation, and an appetite for complex logistical challenges —elements that make design thinking a successful problem-solving approach.

How UberEats uses design thinking

The design team at UberEats constantly uses design thinking principles to fuse modern, state-of-the-art technology with the fundamental act of enjoying a meal. And it’s safe to say they've had a successful implementation.

Immersion, iteration, and innovation power the UberEats design team on their mission to make eating effortless. Their approach allows them to solve complex logistical challenges with new technology that complements people’s deep connection to food. Let’s take a closer look at some actionable design thinking projects:

→ Immersion 

The Walkabout Program : UberEats designers are routinely sent to a city to learn about its transportation infrastructure, delivery and restaurant industry, and overall food culture.

Fireside Chats : they invite delivery partners, restaurant workers, and customers to gain feedback on the app.

Order Shadowing : they test their prototypes by watching their customers’ real world experiences while using it.

To understand all our different markets and how our products fit into the physical conditions of each city, we constantly immerse ourselves in the places where our customers live, work, and eat.

→ Iteration 

Swift iteration : UberEats product teams know they need to rapidly build products so their customer base can grow quickly. Swift iteration allows them to move fast and ensure they get the design just right.

Rapid field testing : researchers and designers take mock-ups and prototypes into restaurants, inside delivery vehicles, and into people’s homes to test products in the places they’ll be used.

Multivariate testing : the team simultaneously tests multiple versions of a feature to quickly determine which performs the best. Shipping multiple options at once, rather than sequentially iterating on one version, helps them find the best-performing design faster.

Operations team experiments : they test concepts and designs in a single city to quickly gauge opportunity. For example, the first version of the “Most Popular Items” category in UberEats menus started as an operations team experiment in Toronto before later iterations were released to all users in all cities.

→ Innovation

Innovating on experiences: the UberEats product team always takes the opportunity to innovate on user experience and evolve from the traditional model of food delivery. This includes providing drivers with the option to do both rides and deliveries so they can stay busier and earn more money while online with Uber, designing a restaurant sales dashboard to let chefs monitor the demand of individual dishes and tweak recipes to improve their menus, and creating the “Under 30 Minutes” menu for people who want to leverage the speed of Uber to get food fast.

Workshops, conferences, meetups, and talks: they routinely gather representatives and use the design thinking methodology to look at challenges in new ways. They share experiences from similar services to generate insights and inspiration, then run creative exercises to generate a wide range of ideas. These same designers also attend numerous out-of-office conferences, meetups, and talks related to the restaurant industry, cuisine trends, and food technology.

Insights from other food innovators: the team stays inspired by observing how other companies are shaping the future of food. Seeing how others innovate in similar problem spaces helps their product teams think differently and generate new ideas about their products and services.

What UberEats has achieved through design thinking

Today, UberEats is the fastest growing delivery service, with a $2.8 trillion addressable market, making up 22% of the company’s total bookings in 2019. They’ve already:

Expanded to over 80 cities worldwide 

Provided restaurants with new ways to reach customers and build their businesses

Created another, often easier option for delivery partners to earn money with Uber

Invented new ways for hungry people to find and enjoy the food they love

Now focused on growth into new markets and growing from 3% to nearly 25% of Uber's revenue, the UberEats design team hasn't had time to slow down. 

What you can learn from UberEats 

The UberEats design thinking experience is a valuable lesson for a brand’s ability to move quickly, build empathy with customers, and make complex services run smoothly . Here’s how you can apply these lessons to your own product:

Empathize with the user experience: UberEats designers are constantly interviewing and prototyping with the people who will be using the product the most: restaurant workers, delivery drivers, and meal recipients. Once you find your target, you can observe, create design thinking problem statement examples, and iterate as soon as you identify opportunities to reduce assumptions and improve your design. 

Observe the design in use: UberEats takes every opportunity to hear from users directly. They follow partners on deliveries, visit restaurants during the rush, and sit in people’s homes while they order dinner. Watching how your product is used in the wild helps you better understand the needs of your customers, how well your designs address those needs, and what challenges exist in the real world that you can’t replicate in the office.

Iterate quickly and innovate constantly: the UberEats team uses design thinking to stimulate novel solutions to the problems and opportunities their product addresses. If you’re in your own ideation phase, take note of the UberEats innovation workshops, where team members from many disciplines gather to brainstorm possible improvements. These structured brainstorms shake up the mindset of the team, push their creativity, and spawn innovative ideas.

💡Pro tip: you don’t need to travel to your customers’ homes to get their feedback. Use Hotjar to talk directly to them or watch them interact with your product. 

Heatmaps help you identify click and scroll patterns, and Session Recordings let you track the entire user journey within your product. Deploy Feedback widgets to learn what users think while browsing, and understand blocks in navigation. 

These tools help your design team see what your customers see, which is crucial at the testing stage, when you’re often too close to the design to understand the experience from the outside.

An example of a Hotjar Session Recording

Design thinking can do (and has done) wonders for tech products and their users. But that’s not all it can do. For Citrix, a cloud company that enables mobile work styles, the change was felt more on an internal level, by building a culture of design thinking.

How Citrix uses design thinking 

Reweaving the Citrix corporate DNA meant harnessing the creative capability of their employees by developing design thinking leaders . 

It began when several senior executives attended the design thinking boot camp at Stanford’s d.school . They returned from the boot camp with a new vision for product development processes. One complete overhaul of internal processes later—and rethinking how the company innovated and built products—and Citrix had become a leader of design-driven excellence and innovation.

Since then, Citrix has developed an internal team that works to empower all divisions of the company—from executives to individual contributors—to make innovation and customer focus central to their thinking. Often referred to as a ‘center of excellence’ for design-driven innovation, this new organization brings design thinking and doing to the highest levels of executive leadership.

Through several programs, the customer became the center of our focus, from how we set the product roadmap to how we tuned the existing product set. We challenged ourselves to push beyond the status quo. 

The new Business Design team started to infuse design thinking into the organization from multiple directions: 

Top-down : by continuing to enlist VPs and key employees in the Stanford programs, which helps key stakeholders understand the language and tools of design thinking, gain an external perspective on their work, and be motivated to support design thinking initiatives.

Sideways : by holding design thinking workshops for mid-level managers and individual contributors, empowering them with a means of tackling key challenges.

Bottom-up : by leveraging various employee touch-points—such as global meetings, the company intranet, and new-hire training—to disseminate key messages about what it means to have a design thinking approach.

What Citrix has achieved through design thinking

Citrix teams have already run more than 50 projects using the design thinking methodology, focusing both on the employee experience and the customer experience. The customer has become the center of their focus, from how they set the product roadmap to how they tune the existing product set. 

At a company level, this has meant almost 4000 employees who have participated in a form of hands-on design training, an improved learning experience for customers, better use of product data to improve customers' support experience, and a successful legal compliance training workshop redesign.

Across the industry, results include:

Return on investment: on the compliance training project alone, Citrix calculated a conservative estimate of $3 million savings over the first four years. By streamlining the course rollout process, reminders, and curricula, they estimated savings of 3,600 hours of employee time in 2013, and over 9,000 hours in 2014.

Respect and recognition: Citrix products have won more than 20 awards since they adopted a design-focused approach. The organization has been recognized as one of Forbes’ Most Innovative Companies. Stanford’s Hasso Plattner Institute has also selected Citrix as a partner in cutting edge research on evaluation tools for innovation.

What you can learn from Citrix 

Design thinking beyond buzzwords : while Citrix teams practice design thinking every day, those outside of this methodology might see it as some form of magical thinking. To make others care about the practice behind the buzzword, relate it back to the business and highlight relevant examples of design thinking’s business impact. Then, make the connection between examples from other companies and the challenges facing your organization.

Highlighting the value of design thinking to your team: often, as companies scale, many employees have limited or no contact with the user, especially for people in non-design or leadership roles. Luckily, through structured activities, you can teach people to focus on the problems that matter to customers and improve the bottom line. As employees evaluate and explore ideas earlier, you’ll waste less money on the wrong issues.

Pitching to (and getting buy-in from) leadership : leaders need to know two things—what design thinking is and how it meets business goals. At Citrix, the strategy for obtaining executive buy-in was to get a few senior leaders on board, first. Once they bought in, other leaders started showing up, wanting to learn more and engage their teams. Following this example, draw up a list of the key leaders and influencers in your organization. Ask yourself: where do you see seeds of innovation popping up? Who is looking to engage more with your customers?

No list of exceptional design thinking examples would be complete without mentioning Apple's approach to innovation, management, and design. 

Today, the company may be most known for its physical products—like the iconic iPhone, iPad, and MacBook—but it was their iOS platform strategy that started their journey as an industry innovator .

They designed the initial product as a platform, with an architecture that could accommodate the development and production of the derivative products. Decades later, this decision allowed for innovations that put the user’s needs at the center —like facial recognition software, an intuitive user experience, a transformed music-listening experience, and more.

How Apple uses design thinking

From its product designs to Apple stores, everything is founded on design thinking principles. 

After Steve Jobs returned to Apple in 1997, he started to apply the design thinking characteristics that reflected his vision for Apple products:

Focusing on real people’s needs and desires, rather than only the needs of the business

Building empathy by helping people learn to love Apple products

Prioritizing the design, rather than the engineering work, by having designers consider both the form and function of the product

Building simple yet user-friendly products, rather than complex hard-to-use ones

Apple makes no secret of what drives everything that happens inside its massive compound in Cupertino, California: its users. From the smallest detail of Apple packaging to what the company calls its ''largest product'' (Apple stores), the user experience is never far from Apple employees' minds .

Their operating system was built by focusing on what consumers wanted, and then figuring out how to achieve it on the technical side. Apple’s products start with design, based on what people need and want, and are not limited by technology. The engineers are then pushed to use the same kind of creativity and innovation to make it happen.

The company puts a premium on design thinking in all its products, from digital to physical. That starts with figuring out what customers really want , developing products based on identified needs , and then creating prototypes and testing them to see how successful they are.

Our products are all about the people who use them. What drives us is making products that give people the ability to do things they couldn't do before.

What Apple has achieved through design thinking

Apple’s entire product development process may be one of the most successful design thinking examples ever implemented. With a valuation exceeding $2 trillion , there’s a lot that designers can learn from Apple and introduce into their own design environments.

Their dedication to continuous discovery and innovation has produced a series of user-centered technological hardware, operating systems, software, and services that set an industry standard. Examples include tools you (probably) use everyday—like the Apple TV, iMac, iPad, iPhone, MacBook, Apple Watch, AirPods, Bridge OS, iOS, App Store, FaceTime, iTunes, and iCloud.

What you can learn from Apple 

Apple’s history with innovation provides a clear lesson about how design and innovation can turn company failure into market success and a leading position in a competitive market. Here are a few actions you can apply to your own design thinking strategy:

Integrating customer experience into the product: customer experience has always been integrated into Apple’s product design and development. A lot of it empirically drives with iterative customer involvement into the design and development stages, through a constant testing and feedback process. Usability testing and improvement through user feedback should become an important step in your product development process.

Constant iteration of the product: the defining trait of an Apple product is that it continually evolves. Apple understands and promotes the importance of design as a motivation for continued innovation, rather than a static approach that assumes a single conclusion.

💡Pro tip: stay on the continuous discovery track by integrating Hotjar into your routine.

Continuous discovery allows your product team to question assumptions, learn how users really think, and constantly improve the products you deliver.  

Using tools like Hotjar gives you a constant stream of information on what your customers are feeling, how they're experiencing your product, and what their specific needs are.

Integrating Hotjar product experience tools into your routine can help you:

Discover opportunities to optimize by watching recordings of users during the sign up flow or after a feature launch

Spot unforeseen problems by creating a routine where you check feedback regularly

Gather new product ideas on an ongoing basis by using surveys

3 key takeaways to implement design thinking into your workflow

There’s a lot more that can be said about design thinking, but it’s actually a very straightforward concept. Implementing this methodology into your workflow becomes easier when you follow these core tenets:

1. Focus on customer problems first

It can be tempting to focus on creating a flashy, high-tech product. Instead, focus on what your users are asking for . Run user interviews and use Hotjar Surveys and Feedback widgets to send out a mix of full-scale surveys and quick questions on the fly. Watch Recordings to see what your users see and identify their pain points.

Whether it’s a new app, a community service, or a physical product, the best thing you can do to innovate successfully is keep your user in mind at every step in the design process. 

2. Generate and iterate on ideas 

When you understand the problem, the ideas will follow, and the way to a solution is more straightforward. It’s your job to refine these ideas through rapid prototypes and iterations that can lead to breakthrough outcomes.

As you interact closely with your customers and start to have great ideas for products, don’t be afraid to put together a round of product experimentation to prove the value. Run usability , A/B , and split testing with dedicated focus groups of target users. Use surveys and carefully-placed widgets to gather opinions on design elements and the overall product experience (PX).

Remember that design thinking is not a formal step-by-step process, but a framework and mindset. It’s focused on a bias towards action, a human-centered viewpoint, and continual experimentation. The core idea is that by deeply understanding customer needs, opportunities for innovation will emerge.  

3. Use feedback to focus and refine ideas

Listening to and working with customers can help you move quickly from ideas to useful solutions.

As a designer, it’s easy to disconnect from your users. Don’t be afraid to take risks and immerse yourself in the experience of those who will actually interact with your product . Then, implement their feedback and test your results. Eventually, you’ll land on that final iteration with the potential to change the world around you.

For a full picture of the product experience, collect voice-of-customer (VoC) insights to learn what users think in their own words. Complement this qualitative data with neutral observations of user behavior.

Start by using tools like Hotjar’s Heatmaps to observe users' scroll and click patterns. Then, watch Session Recordings to follow the entire user journey across your site or product, and use Feedback tools to ask users what’s behind their decisions.

FAQs about design thinking examples

What can you learn from design thinking examples.

The value of examples lies in the ways they show how design thinking can transform products and services. Analyzing stories of success will help you understand:

How design thinking impacts businesses in various industries, and

How to craft your change strategy from idea to results.

As a product designer, highlighting relatable examples of design thinking’s business impact can also help you get peer and executive buy-in. Then, make the connection between examples from other companies and the challenges facing your organization, and demonstrate how similar companies or industries used design thinking to solve that problem (include numbers to prove results).

How can you start with design thinking?

To successfully implement design thinking across your own organization, start by aligning with or creating a design thinking process for execution and collection of results. Then, quantify those results. These key questions help guide the discussion towards actionable insights:

Why do you think this challenge is worth tackling? Why now?

Who are your target users? Who might benefit inside the company?

What constraints (technology, timing, budget) will the team face? 

How will you measure success?

How does design thinking work for product teams?

By focusing on user insights, product teams gain invaluable feedback to proactively improve their products—feedback that can be cultivated during every stage of the design thinking process.

The core tenets of design thinking are simple: focus on customer problems, iterate on ideas, ask for feedback to refine those ideas, and re-start the process all over again, from the beginning.

By leveraging the design thinking framework, product teams can more quickly and efficiently:

Discover the truly unmet needs of customers

Reduce risk associated with launching new products

Generate solutions that are disruptive, rather than incremental

Align teams across the organization

Design thinking methodology

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Princeton Correspondents on Undergraduate Research

Design Thinking in Research

I remember it like it was just yesterday. The steps to the scientific method: Question. Research. Hypothesis. Experiment. Analysis. Conclusion. I can actually still hear the monotonous voices of my classmates reciting the six steps to the content of the middle school science fair judges.

For our middle school science fair, I had created a web-based calculator that could output the carbon footprint of an individual based on a variety of overlooked environmental factors like food consumption and public transportation usage. Having worked on the project for several months, I was quite content when I walked into our gym and stood proudly next to my display board. Moments later the first judge approached my table. Without even introducing himself, he glanced at my board and asked me, W here’s your hypothesis? Given the fact that my project involved creating a new tool rather than exploring a scientific cause-effect relationship, I told him that I didn’t think a hypothesis would make sense for my project. To my dismay, he told me that a lack of hypothesis was a clear violation of the scientific method, and consequently my project would not be considered.

This was quite disheartening to me, especially because I was a sixth grader taking on my very first attempt at scientific research. But at the same time, I was confident that the scientific method wasn’t this unadaptable set of principles that all of scientific research aligned to. A few years later, my suspicions were justified when my dad recommended I read a book called Design Thinking  by Peter Rowe. While the novel pertains primarily to building design, the ideas presented in the book are very applicable in the field of engineering research, where researchers don’t necessarily have hypotheses but rather have envisioned final products. Formally, design thinking is a 5-7 step process:

• Empathize – observing the world, understanding the need for research in one’s field
• Define – defining one particular way in which people’s lives could be improved by research
• Ideate – relentless brainstorming of ideas without judgment or overanalysis
• Prototype – sketching, modeling, and outlining the implementation of potential solutions
• Choose – choosing the solutions that provide the highest level of impact without jeopardizing feasibility
• Implement – creating reality out of an idea
• Learn – reflecting on the results and rethinking the process for endless improvement

But more generally, advocates of design thinking call it a “method of creative action”. In design thinking, researchers are not concerned about solving a particular problem, but are looking more broadly at a general solution. In fact, design thinkers don’t even necessarily identify a problem or question (as outlined in the scientific method); they are more concerned about reaching a particular goal that improves society.

This view of research is particularly insightful especially in disciplines beyond the scientific realm. One aspect that particularly appeals to me is the relative importance placed on the solution’s impact. In design thinking, researchers empathize. They understand at a personal level the limitations of current solutions. And once they implement their solutions, they learn from the results and dive right back into the entire process. Societal impact is their overall goal – an idea that carries over into humanities and social science research.

The most important aspect, in my opinion, is the freedom of design thinking. In design thinking, the ‘brainstorming’ process and the solution are given the most attention. Design thinkers are primarily concerned with the overall effectiveness of potential solutions, worrying about the individual details afterwards. This inherently promotes a creative and entrepreneurial research process. Combined with the methodology and analysis components of the scientific method, the principles of design thinking help research ideas blossom into realities. In a sense, design thinking repackages the scientific method to create a general research process in non-scientific fields. Artists, fashion designers, and novelists all use design thinking when creating their products.

So while I certainly didn’t impress the judges that day at the science fair, I did learn something far more resourceful than a display board could teach. In order to complete a satisfying research project, one doesn’t need to rigorously follow a well-outlined protocol. Often, all one needs is the drive to design creative and impactful solutions.

— Kavi Jain, Engineering Correspondent

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11 products & services made using design thinking.

From health to technology, design thinking has inspired human-centered products across a wide range of fields and industries. Now more than ever, startups, nonprofits, and large corporations are going out into the real world to understand their users’ needs and uncover insights that lead to innovative ideas. Here are some of our favorite examples of products and services created using design thinking.

PillPack, a prescription home-delivery system

For many older adults, keeping track of when to take medications can be challenging and time-consuming. PillPack , an online pharmacy and a former startup-in-residence at IDEO that was acquired by Amazon, has sought to make the experience easier. The company created a prescription home-delivery system that organizes medications into presorted, easy-to-open packets labeled by date and time—and sends them straight to your door.

Instead of having medications in five different prescription bottles (in addition to vitamins, supplements, and over-the-counter medicine) and having to remember when and how often to take them, you receive them all in packets with clearly marked time stamps that you tear open at specific times. By understanding customers’ needs and pain points, PillPack was able to design a more seamless and convenient prescription experience.

Airbnb, the online platform that lets you stay anywhere

Image Source: Google Design

When Airbnb was founded in 2008, homestays weren’t as common as they are today. In the company’s early days, people weren’t booking rooms, and revenue wasn’t increasing beyond $200 per week. Airbnb is now a multibillion dollar online platform for lodging and accomodations, but it was a moment of learning about their users that the founders saw as a turning point in getting the company to where it is today. 

The early Airbnb team believed that people were hesitant to book through the platform because photos of listings were low resolution and didn’t effectively show users where they would be staying. As a result, they traveled to New York to spend time with hosts and help them take high quality photos, and revenue doubled. According to Joe Gebbia, the designer of the group, that instance of meeting their users changed the trajectory of the business. Today, Airbnb continues to encourage its employees to test ideas and understand the people who use their platform.

Willow, the first wearable breast pump

For new moms, breast pumping is a very personal part of motherhood; yet, it’s often an inconvenient process that involves many unwieldy tubes and bottles. To address this, Willow teamed up with researchers, designers, and engineers at Function Engineering and IDEO to reimagine the breast pumping experience . The team designed a product that empowers mothers to be both mobile and discreet with a simple, cordless pump that fits into a bra.

Willow followed a human-centered approach, interviewing dozens of mothers with a wide range of experiences and using insights on their breast pumping routines to build more than 60 prototypes. They found that women wanted a product that felt more like an accessory than a mechanical device, would allow them to pump anywhere, and was easy to assemble and clean. These learnings led Willow to a final pump design that makes breast pumping easy and convenient.

Uber Eats, an app that’s redefining food delivery

Image Source: Uber Eats

Food delivery apps have changed how we eat. Uber Eats connects people to restaurants in cities all over the world, and each place has its own individual food culture and ecosystem. Uber realized that to create a product that would address the unique needs of each city , it needed to immerse and learn about the varied experiences of restaurant workers, delivery partners, and customers.

While developing Uber Eats, the team’s designers regularly traveled to different markets to interview users and observe their product out in the world, from shadowing delivery drivers to visiting local restaurant owners. Based on their insights, the team has run experiments and built prototypes to create features—such as the “Most Popular Items” category. Through research and iteration, the app has continued to evolve and transform the experience of food delivery.

Pay It Plan It from American Express, a feature to manage your money

Unexpected health issues, car repairs, and other larger credit card purchases can lead to interest when not paid off on time. As a result, American Express worked with IDEO to start Pay It Plan It , a feature that gives cardmembers more flexibility and control over their money. Pay It allows you to make payments on small purchases that are less than $100 throughout the month while still earning rewards. While Plan It makes it possible to split large purchases of more than $100 into equal monthly payments with a fixed fee and no interest.

The research team found that many young adults were anxious about larger purchases, and they missed out on rewards when using debit cards or cash for small purchases. The two options of Pay It and Plan It were started in conjunction with each other to respond to both of these insights, and give people the tools to anticipate upcoming payments and take control of their spending. Today, almost all American Express consumer card members have access to Pay It Plan It.

Project Bloks, a Google project that helps kids learn to code

Learning to code empowers kids to build new things, interact with their environment, and use their imaginations. Project Bloks is an interactive learning experience that teaches children how to experiment with code through physical blocks. It makes computer science educational, fun, and perhaps most importantly, tangible.

To create Project Bloks, Google Creative Lab collaborated with IDEO to discover how kids physically play and learn. They used materials like foam core, paper, Play-Doh, and 3D-printed models to find out what made children engaged and curious. The team’s kid-centered approach led them to realize that many kids gain skills through physical building. As a result, they ultimately decided to create a set of blocks with various functions and shapes, which kids could combine and arrange into different commands and patterns.

Bedsider, a birth control support network for women

In the US, 70% of pregnancies amongst 18- to 29-year-olds are unplanned. Bedsider is a multi-touchpoint birth control support system that provides comprehensive education to young women across the country. The website shares information on birth control methods through a sex-positive brand, as well as reminder services and personal stories from women. 

To create Bedsider, the nonprofit Power to Decide (formerly The National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy) partnered with IDEO to identify the real needs of women. They interviewed young women to better understand how they view sex and pregnancy, and spoke with doctors, counselors, and experts to get broader context on reproductive health. Their insights informed the design of Bedsider to make it a more effective resource for birth control education.

Braun / Oral-B electric toothbrush, a better brushing experience

Image Source: Fast Company

As Braun and Oral-B were designing their new electric toothbrush , they originally wanted to create a high-tech device that could provide in-depth data on people’s brushing performance. After consulting with designers Kim Colin and Sam Hecht of Future Facility , the team instead decided to include different features that better met their customers’ needs—and developed a toothbrush that can both charge through a USB port and connect with an app to easily order new brush heads.

The team’s research with their users allowed them to discover that people were typically already nervous about not brushing properly, and that such detailed data on hygiene habits would increase their anxiety. A key insight was that people were looking for ways to make brushing less stressful—for example, making it simple to charge their toothbrushes and get brush head replacements. The result is a product that removes barriers rather than adding additional ones.

Moonrise, a platform that connects people with on-demand work

In the US, more than half of people don’t have cash to cover emergency expenses. Moonrise is a digital platform that matches workers looking for extra shifts with potential employers. It allows people to easily sign up for short-term, on-demand work with a partner organization via phone and get paid as soon as they finish, so they can earn extra money to pay for unexpected bills and other expenses. Additionally, they are labeled as W-2 employees of Moonrise rather than contractors, which means that they don’t pay self-employment taxes.

Before starting Moonrise as a new business venture , American Family Insurance worked with IDEO to uncover the needs of working families. Initially, they thought that people needed a budgeting tool, but their research began to show that people instead wanted a way to create a financial cushion from extra income. The team then tested a pilot with 11 Moonrisers, 6 employers, and a group of designers and programmers to create an efficient service. Since Moonrise launched in 2018, more than 7,000 people have applied to become Moonrisers, and they have earned more than $500,000.

LA County Voting System, an intuitive and accessible voting device

Los Angeles County, with a diverse population of almost 5 million registered voters, is the largest voting jurisdiction in the US. When its voting system, designed in the 1960s, started to become outdated and not serve the needs of the present, the county collaborated with Digital Foundry, Cambridge Consultants, and IDEO to prototype a new voting device that would be intuitive and accessible to residents of all backgrounds, including people who are low vision or hard of hearing, use wheelchairs, have learning disabilities, or speak different languages.

The team focused on creating a voting system that would be customizable for different user experiences . Touch screens navigate voters through the process, then provide a printed paper ballot that is placed into an integrated ballot box. There are 11 languages supported, and for those who are low vision, audio provides clear instructions. The result is a voting experience that supports equal access, meets the needs of today’s voters, and can be adaptable over time.

Bendable, a community learning program for South Bend

In today’s economy, people without higher-level degrees often have a difficult time accessing education and career support. The city of South Bend, Indiana partnered with The Drucker Institute and IDEO to build a lifelong learning program that helps communities stay resilient through change. Managed by South Bend’s St. Joseph County Public Library, Bendable serves as a community-powered platform that gives residents opportunities to learn from one another.

Before designing Bendable, the team interviewed more than 75 residents, librarians, and business owners to understand the needs of South Bend. Their on-the-ground research led them to realize that many South Bend residents wanted to learn from community members, yet at the same time were under-connected. The team created a repository of learning based on the skills of residents, and coordinated community connectors to share prototypes throughout South Bend. The result was a learning program centered around local knowledge and human connection.

Want to learn how to apply the skills and mindsets of design thinking to your work, new business venture, or next big project challenge? Learn more about our Foundations in Design Thinking Certificate .

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5 Game-Changing Examples of Design Thinking (and What We Can Learn from Them)

Design thinking is a powerful framework with the capacity to revolutionize your approach to just about anything.

Over the last decade, the practice of design thinking has made its way into a variety of other disciplines and industries. In the past, employers may have thought of design as something only for artists or other creative professionals. Nowadays, CEO’s and hiring managers across many disciplines are calling on designers to improve their products or services.

From consumer products, healthcare, travel, non-profit community programs, and even self-improvement, design thinking has proven a useful problem-solving tool for innovators and entrepreneurs alike.

We’ve rounded up five examples of how design thinking can have incredible effects on a company’s success as well as a huge impact on the world around us. For each example, we’ll go over how each organization used the design process to improve their services and what we can learn from their experience. Here’s what we’ll cover:

• What is design thinking?

Braun/Oral B Electric Toothbrush

The good kitchen, bernard roth’s “the achievement habit”.

• Key takeaways

1. What is design thinking?

A designer’s biggest task is to identify and solve existing problems with a product and leave users happier than they were before. At times this task can seem overwhelming and hard to grasp. The process of design thinking consists of five steps that designers use to organize their information and find meaningful and successful solutions to a problem. The design thinking steps go like this:

• Empathize: Understanding the user and the problems they face through conducting user interviews, creating empathy maps, and listening to user stories.
• Define: Organizing and analyzing the research information to produce a concise problem statement and possible solution or hypothesis.
• Ideate: The brainstorming phase. Designers think of a wide variety of possible solutions and evaluate each one.
• Prototype: Turning ideas into a physical representation of the product that will solve the user’s needs, slowly adding greater detail and complexity as designers move between testing and iteration.
• Test: Putting the prototype in the hands of the user and determining whether the product has solved the problem at hand and reduced friction or frustration.

The idea behind design thinking is to keep the user in mind from beginning to end. With the user at the forefront, designers can move between these five design thinking steps to create problem solving products with the potential to change industry standards and even lives.

2. Five awesome examples of design thinking

In 2016, Braun and Oral B recruited the expertise of designers Kim Colin and Sam Hecht, founders of the London-based design studio Industrial Facility, to create a smarter electric toothbrush.

When they initially partnered with Braun and Oral B, the manufacturers suggested Colin and Hecht design an electric toothbrush with a variety of sophisticated data-tracking features including a music player, ways to sense how well the users were brushing every single tooth, and even how sensitive their gums were.

However, Hecht and Colin quickly advised them to think more about the customer’s experience as opposed to their own vision for the product. They suggested how a few simple additions to the brush could solve many of the frictions their users were reporting. Hecht and Colin added on-the-go, USB charging and made it easier for users to order replacement brush heads, both problems that Braun and Oral B consumers had already expressed.

The result was an exceptional product that took user feedback into consideration to boost sales and increase customer loyalty.

Using the design thinking process to find better ways to serve a community can have profound effects on the lives of its members. Take Danish design agency Hatch and Bloom’s creation of The Good Kitchen as an example.

In 2007, Denmark had over 125,000 elderly citizens relying on government-sponsored meals. Hatch and Bloom were called upon by the Municipality of Holstebro to design a new and improved meal delivery service for these citizens. What came to fruition was a service with greater quality, more freedom of meal choice, and more flexibility for not only the elderly citizens receiving the meals but also the chefs and other employees responsible for cooking and delivering them.

How did they create such a superior service? One of the most notable actions Hatch and Bloom took was the decision to interview and prototype with both consumers and chefs. They found the things that meal recipients were desiring were similar to what the chefs requested as well—a more dignified service with a greater variety of food options.

By listening to their concerns, hearing their pain points, and testing out new options, Hatch and Bloom found ways to keep both their customers and employees happy and healthy.

It’s hard to believe that the ever-successful start-up Airbnb was once making less than $200 per week. What grew their revenue and transformed Airbnb into a billion-dollar business? Lots of experimentation, risk, and thinking outside of the norm.

Joe Gebbia and Paul Graham, co-founders of Airbnb, remember going over numerous charts, graphs, and codes with their design team trying to find some clue as to why their growth was nearly zero.

It wasn’t until Gebbia began moving through the app like a user that he realized why no one was wanting to book a stay—the pictures looked terrible! Without any data to back their next decision, Graham and Gebbia decided to rent a camera, travel to New York, and spend some time with their customers to replace the amateur photos with more professional-looking ones.

A week later, their revenue nearly doubled. By taking a risk on a non-scalable solution, Graham and Gebbia witnessed their dwindling start-up transform into a thriving enterprise that revolutionized the travel industry.

The design team at UberEats is constantly accessing design thinking principles to fuse modern, state-of-art technology with the antiquated and fundamental act of enjoying a meal.  And it’s safe to say that they’ve had a pretty successful project.

One thing that really stands out about the UberEats design team is their adherence to the design thinking process. They seek to empathize with their user’s experience so much that they’ve implemented The Walkabout Program—a quarterly event where UberEats designers are sent to a city to learn about it’s transportation infrastructure, delivery and restaurant industry, and it’s overall food culture.

In addition to this immersive design technique, UberEats designers iterate quickly and innovate constantly. They participate in rapid field testing, where designers are interviewing and prototyping with the people who will be using the product the most: restaurant workers, delivery drivers, and meal recipients.

The UberEats team also holds innovation workshops where team members from many disciplines gather to brainstorm possible improvements. These same designers also attend numerous out-of-office conferences, meetups, and talks related to the restaurant industry, cuisine trends, and food technology.

You can even apply design thinking to your own personal development!

In this book by Bernard Roth, academic director and professor of Engineering at the Hasso Plattner Institute Design at Stanford University, the design thinking process is used to encourage individuals to accomplish the things they’ve always wanted to but never could.

Whether you need help breaking bad habits or creating positive ones, Roth says the design process can help people make meaningful changes in their lives. Many individuals have attested to this method with their success stories using the design thinking process to lose weight, battle anxiety, or even start a new business.

Roth encourages people wanting to make a change in their lives to first empathize with themselves and ask questions like, “How would I feel if I solved this problem? What would it do for me?” He then says to use the answers to these questions to define the problem at hand, much like the second step in the design thinking process.

Next, Roth urges people to brainstorm solutions to their problem and not to be shy when trying them out. Instead of just thinking about your problem and how it could be solved, Roth encourages the use of the design thinking process to turn your ideas into actions and enter into an iterative cycle within your own life—tweaking and testing solutions until you find what works for you.

3. Key takeaways

These examples of design thinking show just how impactful this methodology can be when solving problems.

Whether it’s a new app, a community service, or a physical product, the best thing you can do to innovate successfully is to keep your user in mind at every step in the design process. It can be tempting to create a flashy, high-tech product.

Instead, focus on what your users are asking for.

It’s easy for designers to become disconnected from their user. Don’t be afraid to take risks and immerse yourself in the lives of the people who will actually interact with your product. Then implement their feedback and test your results. Eventually, you’ll land on that final iteration with the potential to change the world around you.

If you’d like to learn more about design thinking, check out these other articles:

• 5 design thinking exercises every UX designer should know
• How to get a design thinking certification: the best programs and courses
• How to run an awesome design thinking workshop
• 3 Examples of interaction design at its best

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• USER EXPERIENCE (UX) DESIGN
• User Interface (UI) Design
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• USER EXPERIENCE Design
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7 Examples of Design Thinking in Practice (And What We Can Learn From Them)

Design thinking is a problem-solving methodology that actively addresses user-centric challenges. Learn how industry leaders implement this concept through our compilation of real-life design thinking examples.   

Design thinking has risen as an influential methodology for problem-solving that actively employs empathy, brainstorming, and testing to produce novel solutions. However, contrary to popular belief, this methodology is not just a handy tool for designers and has found application in multiple different industries. 

In this article, we explore some key examples and case studies where popular brands have implemented design thinking in the pursuit of finding solutions to complex challenges, as well as what you can learn from each.  Here’s what we cover:

How is Design Thinking Implemented?

• GE Healthcare
• Project Bloks

Is Design Thinking Intuitive?

The design thinking process is a systematic approach to problem-solving that follows a structured framework for producing novel solutions. The same is implemented through five distinct steps:

The first step of the design thinking process, empathise, is dedicated to gaining profound insights into the needs, desires, and challenges of the end users. The main goal at this point is to observe and collect user data without letting any preconceived notions hinder the process.

During the define step, all data collected is meticulously synthesized to formulate a precise problem statement. The goal is to refine and narrow down the scope of the problem into clear and concise statements by identifying recurring user patterns, discerning trends, and categorising problem areas.

This is the point in the design process where most creativity, innovation, and solutions are birthed. The primary aim is to effectively address the identified problem statements and alleviate user pain points through solution-oriented interventions.

The prototype step is all about bringing ideas and solutions to life through experimentation. This is a particularly important step as it allows individuals to see the tangible impact of their solutions and focus on their functionality and effectiveness.

User feedback is paramount at this stage, as it significantly influences the design process. The testing step offers an invaluable opportunity to assess the ease of functioning, operational efficiency, and how effectively the solution tackles the problem statement.

Since design thinking is inherently iterative, the steps in the process are not set in stone and often take a non-linear approach. For deeper insights into how each of these steps flesh out in practice, you can refer to this Parent Assistance Project by AND learner Shrikant Subramaniam. 

Examples of design thinking applications

Design thinking has been extensively used across industries and sectors to address common user and business problems. However, some monumental examples where major brand names employed design thinking to spearhead their growth are what we will cover.

Renowned as a prominent influencer in the shoe design industry, Nike has maintained its status as a favourite among athletes for nearly five decades. 

Source: Nike

How they use design thinking

Nike’s design ideology of ‘ moving forward ’ has consistently focused on creating new, groundbreaking innovations. Here are a few design thinking strategies that the brand has consistently implemented in their process:

• Nike’s innovation is rooted in user needs. Since the brand caters to athletes, their products are not just sports gear but are rather developed to cater to questions of comfort and performance - a big factor when it comes to athletic prowess. 
• Nike’s emphasis on user-centric design is also evident in their vast offering of designs and styles that are developed to cater to the cultural nuances of diverse groups at a global level. 
• Nike’s design thinking approach also places a huge emphasis on prototyping without constraints. Their Flyknit Racer is an excellent example of dedication to prototyping considering the final design was achieved after 195 trials.

Application of Design Thinking by Nike

Nike’s Air Force One campaign, which established the brand as a leader in the sports fashion industry, utilised pressurised air technology. The product was developed keeping in mind not only what athletes needed in terms of performance, but also what they wanted in terms of style and comfort. 

Another instance where Nike drove business decisions based on user needs was with its Nike Dunk SB line. Struggling to enter the skateboarding community, the brand involved skateboarders in the design process to understand what they were looking for in skateboarding footwear and, by extension, their perception of Nike. The Nike SB line of shoes saw great success and earned Nike a spot within the skateboarding community. 

What you can learn from Nike

Nike has explored new ventures, but its primary target audience has always been athletes, with performance being at the core of all business and design decisions. The brand’s ability to understand and empathize with the needs of customers, combined with its flexibility towards prototyping and testing, has propelled them to success. 

Known as the pioneer of the experience economy, Airbnb today stands as a $75.4B company still dictating the fundamentals of user-friendly design. However, behind Airbnb’s massive success lies its approach to human-centric design. 

Source: Airbnb

When it comes to actively addressing user pain points, Airbnb has always focused on human-centric design. The biggest challenge for Airbnb has been to address the ‘ absence of trust ’ guests feel when booking a room. Some design thinking-based strategies came in quite handy in addressing these.

• The social bias against strangers was addressed through rampant user research that prioritized empathy. Airbnb’s decision to design a form suggesting an appropriate host message length and suggestive prompts was rooted in this research, which found a correlation between the message length and host acceptance rates. 
• The UI UX of the platform has been carefully designed to enhance user experience since it is the first brand touchpoint for users. Personalised recommendations, the incorporation of storytelling to foster an emotional connection, and the addition of detailed information and pictures are deliberate decisions that allow Airbnb to address the lack of trust among customers. 
• The Airbnb office was also redesigned to resemble apartments. The idea was to allow employees to function in the environment that they were designing for, actualising the importance of empathy and the role it plays in successful ideation.

Application of Design Thinking by Airbnb

While Airbnb has consistently applied design thinking principles, two notable case studies exemplify its commitment to this approach. First, when faced with the challenge of low registrations, Airbnb founders took a hands-on approach by personally visiting hosts in New York to assist them in uploading high-quality images of their properties. Despite being an unconventional and non-scalable decision, this initiative proved highly effective, doubling revenue by alleviating customer uncertainty regarding the accommodations they were considering.

Similarly, Airbnb adopts the 'Patient Approach' as part of its onboarding process for new employees. This involves sponsoring trips for employees during their first or second week to experience firsthand the customer's journey. Employees are tasked with documenting their experiences and answering structured questions, fostering an environment of empathy-driven innovation within the company.

What you can learn from Airbnb

The essence of the design thinking process lies in empathy, a principle that Airbnb has fully embraced and mastered. From having employees experience a customer’s journey to making business decisions based on empathy, Airbnb’s success showcases the value of deviating from traditional approaches to address challenges. The company’s focus on testing new hypotheses for making long-term decisions has also contributed to its success. 

Credited for bringing in the phenomenon of ‘binge-watching’, Netflix has been known for keeping up with the changing market and producing customer-friendly solutions. The application of design thinking has undoubtedly helped this streaming giant maintain its position in the market. 

Source: Netflix

Netflix’s primary goals, ever since its inception, have been:

• To reduce user effort by elevating the overall experience. 
• To utilise user data to adapt to the changing market needs

This approach has pioneered several customer-friendly innovations. Features like ‘Skip Intro’ or ‘Because you watched’ were developed after observing user behaviour and have contributed to the platform’s unmatched experience. 

The incorporation of video previews instead of still images or movie posters is one small change that significantly improved user experience. Similarly, the decision to create and stream original content that fit user tastes further enabled Netflix to strengthen its hold over the market. 

Application of Design Thinking by Netflix

Netflix's Shuffle button is a prime example of design thinking in practice. Recognising that the vast array of choices on the platform sometimes overwhelms users, based on data from user research, Netflix effectively removed the burden of decision-making from the user's shoulders. 

Instead of spending precious time browsing through countless options, users can simply hit the Shuffle button and let Netflix curate a selection for them. This not only alleviates decision fatigue but also adds an element of surprise and spontaneity to the viewing process.

What you can learn from Netflix

Netflix constantly gathers user feedback and actively applies gathered data to the next iterative improvement. This constant cycle of feedback and testing based on the user’s changing needs is the core of design thinking and Netflix employs it seamlessly.

4. GE Healthcare

Founded in 1994, GE Healthcare is headquartered in Chicago, Illinois, and operates in more than 100 countries. It was through design thinking that the brand revamped the typically scary experience that children face when undergoing a scan.

Source: GE Healthcare

The experience of undergoing a scan has often proven to be harrowing for young children. Identifying this as a potential pain point for the young audience, Doug Dietz, the chief designer at GE Healthcare identified two problem statements:

1- To reduce the anxiety children experienced while undergoing a standard scan

2- To address the need for anaesthesiologists to help calm down children for a scan

Doug's journey began with a keen desire to gain a deeper understanding of his target audience, much in line with the “empathize” step of the design thinking process. To achieve this, he took proactive steps such as actively observing children at a daycare centre and engaging with child specialists to uncover the motivations and behaviours of young children.

Doug also organised a brainstorming session at a children's museum, wherein the children participated and contributed by sketching out their ideas. Many of these later served as valuable inspiration for refining designs and prototypes.

Drawing from his extensive research findings, Doug developed what would become known as the 'Adventure Series', a groundbreaking pilot program implemented at the children's hospital within the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center.

Application of Design Thinking by GE Healthcare

As per the ‘Adventure Series’, MRI machines were completely redesigned into captivating adventure environments. Each machine was decorated with distinct themes, such as pirate ships, black holes, beach scenes, and whimsical sandcastles to make the MRI experience enjoyable and engaging for young children. This not only alleviated the fears and anxieties associated with the procedure but also significantly reduced the children’s dependency on anesthesiologists for scans, bringing down overall expenses. In fact, the overall patient satisfaction rating went up to 90% after the intervention. [H4] What you can learn from GE Healthcare

GE Healthcare stands as one of the best examples of the application of the design thinking process. Right from Doug Dietz’s immersive user research to understand the needs of young children and empathizing with their fear right up to the multidisciplinary approach he undertook towards the problem statement, each step exemplifies the lasting impact design thinking can have if done right. 

5. UberEats

UberEats stands out among other delivery services as one of the fastest-growing platforms. Unlike a retrospective approach, which focuses on refining existing models, UberEats opted for a forward-thinking strategy, emphasising the importance of creativity and user-centric design from the outset. 

Source: UberEats Newsletter

The design thinking approach that UberEats took concentrated primarily on three levels: empathising, iteration, and testing.

At the empathising level, UberEats designers conducted interviews with stakeholders at every touchpoint of the delivery process. This included delivery partners seeking to increase their earnings, restaurant owners interested in business expansion, and customers ordering food. To effectively empathize with each group, UberEATS launched three distinct programs operating at different levels:

• The Walkabout Program allowed employees to travel to different cities and learn key aspects like the culture of the city, transportation system, and interview each stakeholder for first-hand information.  
• Order Shadowing enabled designers to observe the app operation in person. Essentially, employees were asked to shadow delivery partners during their shifts, visit restaurants at peak hours, and observe how people interacted with the app to order food from home. 
• Fireside Chats, was started as a program that encouraged all stakeholders to provide feedback on their experience. These were lightweight sessions that were put in place particularly to help designers actively empathise with the users and bridge any gaps between the Walkabout and Shadow programs. 

Application of Design Thinking by UberEats

UberEats' application features aim to optimise the experiences of all stakeholders. Notable functionalities include drivers' ability to undertake rides and deliveries concurrently for increased income, a restaurant sales dashboard empowering chefs to refine dishes based on demand, and the 'Under 30 Minutes' service for swift deliveries. Additionally, user behaviour insights led to the 'Most Popular Item' category being introduced for simplified ordering and a dedicated driver app facilitating efficient route planning by avoiding congested parking areas.

What you can learn from UberEats

UberEats stands as a valuable example of how incorporating design thinking into the strategic and planning levels can lead to long-term success. In the case of UberEats particularly, the emphasis on user research and empathising helped the company accurately assess the needs and create solutions that addressed latent customer desires.  

Oral-B, a renowned brand in oral hygiene products, has consistently leveraged design thinking principles across its product development and innovation endeavours. Notably, one standout project showcasing the effective application of design thinking is the redesign of Oral-B's children's toothbrush. 

Source: IDEO

Oral-B's Children's Toothbrush exemplified a comprehensive integration of design thinking principles, from empathizing to testing. The initiative was driven by two key challenges:

• Creating a children's toothbrush that transformed oral hygiene into an enjoyable experience for young users.
• Enhancing the toothbrush design to meet children's needs and gain a competitive edge in the market.

To address these challenges, Oral B partnered with IDEO and conducted extensive observational research to comprehend children's interactions with the product. Through this process, the design team observed that children tended to grasp the toothbrush with their palms rather than their fingers due to limited dexterity. This user insight led to the creation of a prototype solution named the "Squish Gripper."

Application of Design Thinking by Oral B

The children's toothbrush featured the “Squish Gripper”, a wider handle with a soft texture grip, facilitating easier handling for children. This aspect was crucial as many existing children's toothbrushes on the market were essentially scaled-down versions of adult products, lacking consideration for a child's grip strength. Subsequently, the prototype underwent testing with young users, who were observed while using the product. The team also incorporated vibrant colours and engaging graphics to appeal to children and make them look forward to brushing their teeth. 

What you can learn from Oral B

Oral-B's children's toothbrush exemplifies the power of accurate observation in driving success. By delving into why children held the toothbrush with their palms instead of fingers, designers uncovered a gap between needs and market supply, paving the path to eventual success.

7. Project Bloks

Project Bloks was an experimental research project initiated by Google's Creative Lab in collaboration with IDEO to explore tangible programming for kids. The experiment focused on making coding more accessible to young children who might not have access to digital devices or might find traditional programming methods too abstract.

Source: Google Research

The core idea behind Project Bloks was to create a system of physical, modular components that children could use to learn programming concepts in a hands-on, playful way. These components consisted of three main things:

• Pucks: These were small, programmable physical objects that represented different programming commands or actions, such as "turn left," "move forward," or "start/stop." Each puck had a unique shape and colour, making them easily recognizable and distinguishable.
• Base Boards: The baseboards were flat, circuit-board-like surfaces onto which the pucks could be attached and programmed. 
• Brain Board: This was the central processing unit of the system, responsible for interpreting the commands programmed into the pucks and executing them. It connected to the baseboards and provided the computational power needed to run the programming logic.

To develop these three essential components the team at IDEO observed how children interacted with their environment. The research also included interacting with teachers and parents which helped narrow down three essential design principles that the product was supposed to incorporate: simplicity, modularity, and familiarity. The final product development stage took an iterative process where teams first made rough sketches and mockups that were tested before zeroing in on a final design.  

Application of Design Thinking by Project Bloks

Project Bloks allowed children to arrange the pucks on the baseboards to create sequences of instructions. Children could activate it by pressing a play button, and the Brain Board would execute the instructions, allowing them to see the results of their code in action. By doing so, Project Bloks provided a physical, tangible interface that could be easily understood and manipulated by children of various ages and backgrounds. 

What you can learn from Project Bloks

Project Bloks' effectiveness stems from thorough empathetic research. Observations of children's interactions informed a product that revolutionised programming for kids, simply by enhancing interactivity and user-friendliness.

The iterative nature of design thinking often leads to the misconception that the process is inherently intuitive. This is especially apparent in activities like empathising and brainstorming, which may seem subjective and instinctual. However, it's crucial to understand that mastering design thinking requires dedicated time and effort. Even fundamental principles such as empathy and brainstorming necessitate a structured approach to effectively filter out a designer's preconceptions and biases. Tools like empathy mapping, journey maps, and persona creation serve as essential aids in this regard.

For individuals more accustomed to linear, analytical problem-solving approaches, the open-ended nature of design thinking can present unique challenges. In such cases, seeking professional guidance through a formal design thinking course can be the most effective way to adopt the required mindset. Consider reading this blog that curates a list of the best design thinking courses to help you choose the best one. 

We hope this comprehensive guide to design thinking examples could throw light on what this problem-solving methodology can do. If you are particularly interested in learning design thinking in the context of user experience, AND’s UX UI Design courses could be an excellent starting point.

Here are some related resources that you might find useful:

• Watch this session by Shiva Viswanathan, Design Head of Ogilvy Pennywise, and Naman Singh, Product Experience Designer at RED.
• Talk to a course advisor to discuss how you can transform your career with one of our courses.
• Pursue our UX UI Design courses - all courses are taught through live, interactive classes by industry experts, and some even offer a Job Guarantee.
• Take advantage of the scholarship and funding options that come with our courses to overcome any financial hurdle on the path of your career transformation.

Note: All information and/or data from external sources is believed to be accurate as of the date of publication.

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• Volume 7, Issue 2
• Design thinking as an approach for innovation in healthcare: systematic review and research avenues
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• http://orcid.org/0000-0002-2759-8036 Mariana Oliveira ,
• http://orcid.org/0000-0001-8361-0637 Eduardo Zancul ,
• http://orcid.org/0000-0003-4937-0339 André Leme Fleury
• School of Engineering, Industrial Engineering Department , Universidade de São Paulo (USP) , Sao Paulo , Brazil
• Correspondence to Dr Eduardo Zancul, School of Engineering, Industrial Engineering Department, Universidade de São Paulo (USP), Sao Paulo, Brazil; ezancul{at}usp.br

Design thinking has been increasingly adopted as an approach to support innovation in healthcare. Recent publications report design thinking application to various innovation projects, across medical specialties, including paediatrics, psychiatry, radiology, gastroenterology, oncology, orthopaedics and surgery, as well as to innovation in hospital operations and healthcare management. Current literature in the area typically focuses on single case descriptions. With the recent increase in the number of cases, there is an opportunity to assess multiple cases to identify patterns and avenues for further research. This study provides a systematic review of published design thinking projects in healthcare. The aim of the study is to provide an overview of how design thinking has been applied in the healthcare sector. Data collection was based on Institute of Scientific Information (ISI) Web of Science, PubMed and Scopus databases. The systematic review followed Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses guidelines. A total of 32 original pieces of research was selected for analysis, being classified and assessed. The paper presents current status of research and practice from various perspectives, including the design thinking progression phase—inspiration, ideation, implementation—and the prevalence of design thinking tools. Avenues for further research include the need to increase focus on the inspiration phase, the opportunity for platforms for leveraging the integration of individuals in innovation projects, and the opportunity to enhance the role of lead users in healthcare innovation.

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All data relevant to the study are included in the article or uploaded as supplemental information. Data reuse is permitted.

https://doi.org/10.1136/bmjinnov-2020-000428

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Summary box

What is already known.

Design thinking has been adopted in healthcare innovation projects in several domains, with reports of positive outcomes.

What are the new findings?

The research details the design thinking processes and tools applied in healthcare based on multiple case reports.

Design thinking provides a frame for addressing the development of healthcare innovation by balancing contextual factors (eg, users, stakeholders, resources) and clinical evidence.

Design thinking is an ally for democratising access to healthcare through innovative solutions in low-resource settings.

Opportunities for further research include: (a) increased focus on the inspiration stage, (b) creation of platforms for leveraging the integration of individuals in health innovation projects, (c) e-health focused user research and (d) lead user involvement.

Introduction

Healthcare is increasingly applying design knowledge and competence to deal with challenges, 1 as design provides a frame for understanding and developing a subject or business and its related policies, products, resources and services. 2 As a matter of fact, innovation is required to address the changing environments (eg, ageing of the population) and guarantee the financial sustainability of health services; 3 this may be achieved by improving health outcomes at a good value, reducing cost for care or tracking health outcomes. 4 In this scenario, design thinking emerges as an approach for incorporating innovation in medical practice in public and private sectors. 5 Clinical outcomes of healthcare interventions that claim to have employed design thinking have proven to be positive. 6 Design thinking application may potentially benefit the design of new health devices, products and processes, and the implementation of evidence-based practices. 7

Brown 8 popularised the term design thinking and promoted a significant increase in its published research literature. Despite the increase in research, there is still a lack of standardisation regarding the definition and understanding of what is design thinking. 9–11 In convergence with trends in the literature, we define design thinking as a human-centred approach for solving complex problems employing attributes such as creativity, user involvement, multidisciplinary teamwork, iteration, prototyping and user centredness. 9–11 Many toolkits 12 13 and practical guides 14 presenting design thinking processes have been published; despite of using different terms to refer to the design thinking phases, they follow the same overall logic for problem-solving. 9–11 15 16 Practically, design thinking may be portrayed in three iterative phases: inspiration, ideation and implementation.

Inspiration is the first phase and it is based on need-finding: understanding the core issue of the problem by empathising with the user and discovering their explicit and non-explicit needs. Users and stakeholders identification is critical for innovation success; 17 18 in healthcare, this task has an increased complexity due to the various paying systems structures. 4 Ethnographic research techniques, such as observation and interviewing, are recommended at the inspiration phase. 16 After the need is defined, data analysis and solution conceptualisation start at the second phase, ideation; many strategies may be used to foster concept generation and free-of-judgement creativity at this second phase. 10 Studies acknowledge the positive effects of a visually stimulating environment on problem-solving; 19 low-fidelity prototyping is used as a source of ideas and a tool for concept validation; 15 sensemaking tools, like mind-mapping, are used to support brainstorming. 16 The aims of the third and final phase, implementation, are to refine and build the concept validated during the second phase and draw a marketing strategy for the final product. Prototyping is again required at this phase, but with higher fidelity as testing will also be required. 16

Previous works have analysed the impacts of solutions developed using a design thinking approach on health outcomes both in broad 1 and deep 6 accounts. However, rigorous evaluations on how design thinking is operationalised in the health sector from a process perspective remain an opportunity for further integrating design knowledge into health research. 1 This article aims to appraise the final results of solutions developed using design thinking in healthcare and the course of actions and tools that took place throughout development. As the enactment of the design thinking approach is context-dependent, 10 20 the format of a systematic literature search and review are aligned with the aim of this research; 21 22 an exhaustive search allows for an aggregate appreciation of the literature, and capturing several configurations in which design thinking is adopted.

We contribute to the literature by consolidating previous reports on how design thinking has been applied in the healthcare sector and drawing conclusions from these reports. This article is also directed to practitioners as it presents tools used when applying design thinking. We will analyse articles reporting solutions ranging from the early stages of their development to solutions that are available to the market. By reviewing articles that report developing solutions, we aim to capture perspectives on every phase in the development process and avoid publication bias. We will review and tabulate aspects of each study, such as the nature of the innovation intervention, which design thinking tools were employed, team multidisciplinarity and stakeholder involvement. Finally, we will discuss the contents of the studies analysed and possible avenues for research. We aim to provide an overview of the best practices on design thinking in healthcare.

Data collection began with a search in Institute of Scientific Information (ISI) Web of Science, PubMed and Scopus databases without start date constraint (ie, from their inception) until October 2019; the earliest publication record found dated from February 2003. The three databases were chosen to provide a comprehensive search on journals focused on the disciplines of interest of this paper (eg, design, business, engineering, health sciences). The search strings used were ‘“design think*” or “user-cent* design” or “user cent* design” or “human-cent* design” or “human cent* design”’ + ‘innovation’ + ‘“health*” or “medical”’ included on title, abstract or keywords. In spite of subtle differences among the terms user-centred design, human-centred design and design thinking, 1 there is a conceptual overlap between these terms. In accordance with previous works, we will use them as synonyms. 1 6

The systematic review followed Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses guidelines (see online supplemental file exhibit A1 ). 23 Only primary peer-reviewed studies were eligible for the study. Search was restricted to papers published in English. A total of 224 articles and reviews were identified in database search, of which 150 came to be non-duplicate documents. Scopus yielded 89 unique results to our search, the Web of Science (WoS) database yielded 32 non-duplicate results when compared with Scopus results, and the PubMed database yielded 29 non-duplicate results when compared with Scopus and WoS results.

Supplemental material

An initial selection process was conducted aiming to filter documents that were not aligned with the research scope through title and abstract analysis, followed by a full-text review of the selected articles. Our research targets articles describing experiences, perceptions and assessment on the development of innovative health-related solutions, specifically on medical devices, products and processes following a design thinking approach. In this review, medical devices refer to hardware solutions, medical products refer to innovative treatments or service offerings solutions (eg, mobile health (m-health) solutions), and processes refer to untangible routines, whether these routines are visible to the patients or not. 24 25 Articles unrelated were discarded. Most articles discarded in title and abstract review regarded pharmaceutical solutions and health aids to be used by the patients without an interface to a health professional. In full-text review, the articles discarded included theoretical reports without an associated solution development, literature reviews, event descriptions, and articles that were not focused on the solution development (eg, design theory, design teaching, testing routines).

After title and abstract review, 65 articles were selected for full-text review. This sample was submitted to bibliometric analysis to identify the main references in their cocitation network, which resulted in the addition of eight references. Finally, following a full-text review, 32 references were selected for analysis. Selection process is made available ( online supplemental file exhibit A2 ).

Literature review results

The final 32 studies were reviewed and summarised ( online supplemental file exhibits A3 and A4 ). As design thinking has no unique coded language, 9 some of the objects of interest in this review were coded for analysis and comparison purposes ( online supplemental file exhibit A5 presents our codes and their correspondance with each of the papers in our sample). A few codes (eg, prototyping) are present in more than one design thinking phase; when evaluating the papers, we took into consideration reports given by the authors to assess the maturity of the activities and whether these activities would fall into one phase or another (eg, cardboard prototypes were considered an ideation phase activity, while functional prototypes were considered implementation phase activities).

Solution status was classified according to what is reported in their studies; due to design thinking’s iterative nature, it is possible that one intervention has performed an ‘implementation’ phase activity, but its status is still at the ideation stage. At the time of publishing, five of the solutions were at the inspiration stage of design thinking and had finalised their need assessments, 26–29 or had study protocols established. 30 Eighteen of the 32 solutions were at the ideation stage, having either a visual prototype, 31 a design concept 32–35 or a functional prototype 36–48 finalised. Regarding the implementation stage, out of eight solutions, one had a final product developed but not implemented, 3 six were fully implemented, 49–54 and one had been implemented and failed. 55 One solution was discontinued due to resource limitations. 56

Regarding medical specialty, of the 32 studies, 10 discussed initiatives to manage chronic disease, 3 32 35 37 38 40 41 46 50 55 4 brought solutions for hospital management, 26 34 47 49 4 on paediatrics, 43 44 51 53 3 on psychiatry, 30 31 48 2 on radiology, 27 39 2 on geriatrics, 29 43 and single articles pulverised in multiple areas, such as addiction, 36 family health, 28 gastroenterology, 52 general practice, 42 oncology, 54 orthopaedics 33 and surgery. 45

A noteworthy theme across our sample is the creation and use of cloud-based multipurpose digital platforms. 35 38 41 43 46 This type of intervention aims to provide an actionable use of information by patients, health professionals and providers while optimising resource allocation (eg, one of the papers presents two solutions for medication management targetting two different populations using a shared architecture for personal health record systems). 43

Four of the papers in our sample provide solutions that aim to address more than one target condition; 28 31 50 51 these works elicited from both user and desk research that these conditions were intertwined and could benefit from being treated as a whole rather than as separate parts. For example, one of the solutions developed a clinical decision support for addressing tuberculosis prevention and treatment considering the high prevalence of HIV infection among the local population. 50

Another recurring theme is the systematisation of stakeholder involvement across various specialties and target conditions, such as orthopaedics, 33 surgical rounds 26 and pharmacy management. 34 One of the papers even reported an increase in its engagement metrics after the refinement of the intervention based on stakeholder feedback. 48

The vast majority of the papers in our sample report interventions in the form of software tools. Only six of the papers report the development of medical devices; we assume this happens due to resource constraints and a longer time to market of medical devices when compared with other types of interventions (eg, one of the papers reported a 48-month project duration). 39 Isolated papers report the creation of events (eg, creation of a seasonal community market to generate income aiming to address social determinants of health inequities), 53 timetables (eg, collaborative creation of a timetable balancing employees’ preferences and nursing home needs), 49 toolkits and decision support systems. The following sections present the main elucidations resulting from the systematic review.

Tools employed

Each phase of the design thinking approach and their objectives is presented in figure 1 ; for each phase, we listed the five most reported tools in our sample and their prevalence rate.

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Three phases of the design thinking approach, objectives for each phase and main tools employed.

As for the tools employed in the inspiration stage by the authors in our sample, they emphasise the bystander roles of the researchers or individuals when first starting a new project applying design thinking. At this stage, the designer—or any professional acting as a designer—must put aside his/her convictions about the problem addressed. Only then he/she is ready to effectively absorb relevant information regarding the context in which the solution is going to be developed. It is fundamental to consider this context as broadly as possible (considering time and resource limitations) to visualise the actors impacted, possible side problems that could interfere, previous documentation to improve the understanding of the situation, and any other relevant information.

Interview is the most employed tool in the inspiration stage. We assume this happens because an introductory interview is easy to perform, easy to gain access to, may have multiple formats (eg, by telephone, 33 semistructured, 27 28 30 34 39 40 unstructured 26 ) and are greatly clarifying. Observations 26 29 53 and reviews of various sorts (eg, clinical practice review, 28 32 54 literature review 30 51 ) are also clarifying and, after the initial contact is made, require little effort from the user involved in the research. Focus groups 31 36 56 and user empathy tools (eg, clinical immersion, 54 experience maps 31 ) could bring substantial information to the project but have the downside of requiring significant time and effort from both the research team and possible users or stakeholders of the intervention. Tools that do not rely solely on spoken accounts of the users or stakeholders, such as observations, do have the advantage of allowing the research team to uncover opportunities for innovation that the users or stakeholders do not perceive as valuable or achievable; we refer to these opportunities as the user’s unspoken needs.

The ideation phase gathers data collected at the immersion phase and makes sense of it by creating inputs and specifications for the solution. In other words, the users’ spoken and unspoken needs will be translated into the solution’s technical requirements. However, this ‘translation’ and data analysis is not always obvious. 34 39 50 To initialise the design of a solution, conceptualisation 40 43 45 and correlated tools such as brainstorming 27 33 49 are strongly recommended to keep the ideas as broad and fluid as possible. Other user empathy tools (eg, personas, 29 36 45 experience maps 33 47 ) may be used to support this stage. After this initial wave of ideas, the most promising ones are selected for prototyping, 36 37 40 48 which is used as a tool for concept visualisation. Design thinking postulates that prototyping helps the design team to perceive the strengths and weaknesses of their solution early in the design process and even get feedback 3 34 37 40 42 43 from the users. Anchoring the conceptualisation activities in low-fidelity prototypes promotes a quick escalation in the attributes of the concept and smart allocation of resources in ideas that are worth pursuing.

The implementation phase, which aims to refine the ideated concept into a viable solution, was the least reported among our sample, as a significant portion of the articles did not report reaching this phase. Some of those who had reached it focused their reports on assessing the intervention and not describing their development process, 51–53 and a couple of articles reported that they would not disclose these issues due to commercial confidentiality. 27 39 Among the references that did report tools employed in the implementation stage, testing was the most mentioned tool (eg, user testing, 37 42 44 requirements testing 34 45 ), followed by prototyping, 31 34 36 38 40 45 47 53 interviews, 33 36 42 50 54 55 solution evaluation, 36 44 46 50 and solution feedback. 3 34 38 44 It caught our attention that commercial analysis was reported by only three articles in our sample. 33 53 54 If the solution is meant to be commercially viable, this aspect must be addressed in a diligent manner.

Disciplines and stakeholders involved

Although combining different competences and backgrounds is a best practice for design thinking, 8 more than half of the articles in our sample did not report multidisciplinarity in their design thinking teams. This is problematic as diverse teams are more likely to promote relevant innovative solutions. 10 Among the literature that mentioned disciplines and areas involved in their teams, the most cited were health-related disciplines, 3 27 30 32 37 38 49 50 54 design, 30 33 38 49 53 54 Information Technology (IT), 38 50 55 56 Research and Development (R&D) 32 33 37 50 and engineering. 27 32 54

Besides congregating multiple areas of knowledge, it is necessary to gather different perspectives. Managing stakeholders in the healthcare sector is not trivial as healthcare users vary in their roles as device operators, patients or decision-makers. 29 Understanding who the stakeholders are and their roles is a key factor for achieving relevant results and requires an understanding of the business model around the product. 29 33 A solution development focused on technical issues and neglecting stakeholders' perspectives is susceptible to barriers in implementation. 39 55 Stakeholder participation assessment tools 57 and frameworks for listening to the voices of the customer, business and technology 33 are strategies to promote effective stakeholder involvement.

Developing medical devices and products must follow regulatory requirements. In the USA, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is the main body of regulation for medical devices. 58

Even though regulatory issues are inherently critical to the implementation of medical devices and products, only 12% of the articles in our sample mention the FDA or another regulator, 27 33 54 56 with only one of them stating the class their devices were fitted in. 33 Our attempt to stratify the findings in our sample according to regulation status or classification was not successful, as we found that a number of our references did not address regulatory issues. This might indicate a lack of maturity of research—or even awareness—in this topic. Design thinking brings the possibility of everyone being a part of the design process on the table, but one individual must own the process and be accountable for design feasibility and regulatory issues. Additionally, two articles did not go into detail on their developments claiming commercial confidentiality. 27 39

Discussion and avenues for research

Drawing attention to the inspiration stage.

Regarding the reportings on the tools employed in the inspiration phase, it was noted that solutions that were in more advanced stages of development—ranging from having a functional prototype to being fully implemented and commercialised—often failed to report the tools employed in the inspiration stage (19% of the sample) or lacked detail about this stage. We believe that this bias is due to the fact that researchers often prioritise describing the intervention developed to the detriment of reporting the development process.

We perceive this ‘setting aside’ of the initial development stage as counterproductive for the replication of design thinking: the engagement and understanding of the final user which is acquired from the inspiration stage are essential for developing appropriate solutions, at the risk of developing solutions that relieve the symptoms of a problem without addressing its root causes. 59 In fact, it is more crucial for the direction of the intervention that users and stakeholders are involved in the early stages when compared with the late stages of the innovation process. 18 60 If the body of literature on design thinking does not consider the relevance of this stage, there is a tendency that individuals learning from this body of literature will have the same perception. This may incur professionals involved in projects employing the design thinking approach neglecting information collected in the inspiration stage, and realising that their solutions do not fulfil user needs. 39 55 Although exhibits from the literature present a systematisation of how to incorporate the results of the inspiration phase and user-centred research throughout the development process, 27 29 due to the variety of stakeholders, users and types of problems in healthcare, further studies seeking to formalise the incorporation of inspiration phase data throughout development would be beneficial to the theory and practice of health research involving design.

Research groups, networks and common platforms for healthcare innovation

One thing that caught our attention was the establishment of research groups and software platforms for improving synergy in the development of healthcare solutions. UK-based Multidisciplinary Assessment of Technology Centre for Healthcare—a publicly funded research group with close collaboration with medical device industries—presents substantial results on research regarding the role of the user in medical device development. 61 Project HealthDesign was a sponsored multiyear, multisite project that gathered design teams across the USA to develop e-health applications using a common back-end platform. 35 41 43 Tidepool is an open-access platform designed to host and integrate applications related to diabetes management, counting with open-source development to augment and sustain the platform. 38

How to make these fruitful connections happen? Norman et al 62 propose the Complex Network Electronic Knowledge Translation Research (CoNEKTR) model for integrating individuals from distinct backgrounds by their common interest in promoting innovation in healthcare; we could not find evidence of CoNEKTR’s applicability and performance outcomes. A proven effective model for leveraging the integration of individuals around healthcare innovation will certainly be a major contribution to this research field.

The future of e-health

Approximately 56% of the articles in our sample reported a healthcare solution using e-health, with the major amount of those discussing m-health. Regarding technology usage, a part of the papers in our sample reported the development of auxiliary technologies for telemedicine, 52 56 and data-gathering technologies, such as personal health records, 29 35 41 43 55 patient self-monitoring 3 40 46 and patient motivation trackers. 32 48

Developing functional and usable e-health applications is not trivial, as there is a need to create an in-depth understanding of the user’s needs, desires, limitations, preferences, attitudes and behaviours through a user model that will serve as a common point for the different individuals involved in the development process. 29 However, capturing these psychological and psychosocial nuances is not possible with the ‘traditional’ application of user-centred methods like user profiles and personas, as they tend to rely on demographic data and shallow caricatures of user groups. 29 Not employing the rigour, time and collective sense of the importance of user research may doom user research to become an unactionable or overlooked work. 39 55

In-depth user research is necessary to address users’ underlying cognitive and behavioural patterns, user subgroups and characteristics unique to different conditions (eg, knowledge about the disease, support network, comorbidities); capturing the amount of data necessary to build actionable user profiles and personas is resource consuming, but its benefits outweigh its costs. 29 Design thinking may provide a framework for aligning healthcare system needs, user needs and software requirements towards healthcare innovation. 34 There are numerous conceptual layers from which the development of successful e-health solutions can be studied: system integration, wearables, user heuristics and interface design are just a few of them.

User involvement

von Hippel 63 introduced the concept of lead users as composed of two main characteristics: the first is that lead users face needs that will be general in the market-place prior to the bulk of that market-place; the second is that they could benefit by obtaining a solution to their needs and thus are highly motivated to seek one. These users play an active role in the development process, beyond the passive role implied by expert-driven user-centred practices, such as interviews, personas and journey mapping. There is evidence of the potential benefits of involving lead users in the co-creation and development of solutions in healthcare. 18 Involving these users could potentially increase development rates and expertise in pioneer technologies and boost commercial performance. Consequently, it could increase manufacturers’ profits by reducing time to market and development costs. 18 Even though there are generic suggestions in the literature of how to retain these lead users, 64 further research on identifying and contacting lead users in the healthcare sector may benefit future development projects.

Another discussion regarding user involvement in the healthcare industry is motivated by understanding who is the user of interest. While there are more obvious contexts where we can identify the main user (eg, a mobile app for patient self-monitoring 3 29 30 46 ), in other cases, such as a medical imaging device, 27 39 it is not clear if the main user is the patient or the healthcare professional and it is not trivial to counterbalance their needs. On top of this, there is a third stakeholder—the payer—which could be either a provider or a healthcare organisation. Further discussion on whether and how design thinking is a suitable approach to manage these user layers would be a contribution to the literature.

Design thinking is a flexible approach for innovation which is being used to develop healthcare solutions. Considering healthcare, our research shows evidence that design thinking is an approach to innovation in clinical and managerial settings, across a wide range of medical specialties. Our research findings endorse that design thinking provides a frame for addressing the development of innovation in healthcare by balancing contextual factors (eg, users, stakeholders, resources) and clinical evidence. Additionally, our sample shows that design thinking is an ally for democratising access to healthcare through innovative solutions in low-resource settings. Design thinking provides an arsenal of tools for problem-solving across the phases of inspiration, ideation and implementation.

With this review, we aimed to present a selection of practical applications of design thinking in healthcare, highlighting the most common practices among them. We present this selection of practice and tools as a guide, rather than as a toolset. The selection of 32 papers shows that design thinking is not a one-size-fits-all approach and that it may be adapted to different circumstances. To further advance this field, future research should follow more rigorous procedures for reporting health research involving design; this could be achieved by following structured guidelines. 65 Additionally, future research on emerging technologies in service of health should address user-centred design, providing replicable procedures on how to identify and address user needs. Finally, once a more consistent body of literature is consolidated, with standardised report procedures, a research agenda for quantitatively assessing the relationship between design choices and clinical outcomes may provide more assertive recommendations for the incorporation of design knowledge into health innovation.

Strengths and limitations

Despite our efforts to establish clear selection criteria, sample selection and subsequent codification were subjected to the authors’ bias. The lack of standards in reporting health research involving design, and the variability of studies in our sample both in their objects of study and development stages refrained this review from assessing criteria such as design success rate, design success critical paths, optimal team composition for design success and types of intervention (eg, devices, products, processes) for which design thinking may be more suitable. This may be interpreted as a clash between design and health sciences underlying research traditions and epistemologies. To address this issue and enable further analysis in future literature reviews, we recommend future works that report interventions on the intersection of design and health to consider following of systematic guidelines. 65

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Supplementary materials

Supplementary data.

This web only file has been produced by the BMJ Publishing Group from an electronic file supplied by the author(s) and has not been edited for content.

• Data supplement 1

Contributors ALF and MO planned the study. MO conducted the data gathering and literature review analysis. ALF and EZ guided the research method and revised the manuscript.

Funding This study was financed by the Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior (CAPES) – Finance Code 001 and by the Ocean R&D Programme.

Competing interests None declared.

Provenance and peer review Not commissioned; externally peer reviewed.

Supplemental material This content has been supplied by the author(s). It has not been vetted by BMJ Publishing Group Limited (BMJ) and may not have been peer-reviewed. Any opinions or recommendations discussed are solely those of the author(s) and are not endorsed by BMJ. BMJ disclaims all liability and responsibility arising from any reliance placed on the content. Where the content includes any translated material, BMJ does not warrant the accuracy and reliability of the translations (including but not limited to local regulations, clinical guidelines, terminology, drug names and drug dosages), and is not responsible for any error and/or omissions arising from translation and adaptation or otherwise.

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Table of Contents

What is design thinking , what are the key principles of design thinking , design thinking methodology, design thinking framework, design thinking examples, top design thinking examples.

All great innovators in art, literature, science, music, and business have practiced design thinking. Design is the product of innovation which is the key to progress and success. But innovation doesn't come that easily. That's exactly where design thinking comes in. Learning from the design thinking examples mentioned in this article, you can create a powerful framework that can revolutionize your approach to anything.

Design thinking is a non-linear and iterative process used to solve problems innovatively and creatively. It was originally used to teach engineers how to approach problems creatively. It aims to achieve practical solutions and results that are:

• Technically feasible
• Economically viable 
• Desirable for the user

The key principles of design thinking can be listed as follows:

• User centricity
• Collaboration
• Experimentation
• Implementation

Before moving on to some of the best design thinking examples, let us learn about the fundamental principles of design thinking . 

• Empathize: To find solutions that respond to user needs and feedback, one needs to step into the user's shoes. 
• Define: This phase requires observing and analyzing a situation without bias. Then create a problem statement or create a question to define the core problems you have identified that drive the rest of the process. 
• Ideate: Here is where you make use of diverse perspectives and ideas. The aim is to develop as many ideas and solutions as possible. 
• Prototype: This is the experimental phase. The aim here is to identify the best solution for each problem. 
• Test: This is the final stage. Evaluators test the prototypes. However, as you will see in the design thinking process examples, it is an iterative process. 

As you will see in the design thinking examples, the design thinking framework is divided into three phases: immersion, ideation, and implementation. 

The stages mentioned above are not always sequential. Your team can run them in parallel, out of order, and also repeat them. You might focus on just one aspect of the design thinking process, such as making a conscious effort to be empathy-driven. You can conduct user interviews to find out what the customers are missing.

Design thinking has inspired many human-centered products, from health to technology. Every business, be it startups, large corporations, or nonprofit organizations, is trying to understand its users' needs and come up with innovative ideas . Here are some of the best design thinking examples of products and services that lead to success. 

• Overview: Airbnb is a multi-billion dollar online platform right now. But it went close to bankruptcy in its early days. It is one of the best design thinking examples. Like with many startups, they were barely noticed by anyone at their launch. A small change in the design thinking principle made it a multi-billion dollar business. 
• Challenge: Diverse listings in different categories and cities brought traffic to their site. The company still wasn't making any revenue. 
• Realization: They found that there was a repeated pattern in the pictures of their advertisements. The pictures weren't very appealing, as the owners took them with smartphones. Moreover, not all the rooms were shown. They didn't get many bookings because people weren't sure what they would be paying for.
• Solution: As a result, Airbnb associates traveled to New York to meet the hosts and help them take high-quality pictures. This non-scalable and non-technical solution doubled their revenue within a week. Airbnb continues to test ideas and understand the needs of the people who use their platform.

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• Overview: To understand the different markets and how their products fit into the physical conditions of various cities, UberEats constantly research the places where their customers live, work, and eat. This is one of the best design thinking examples that led to success. 
• Challenge: The problem was how to connect people to restaurants in different cities.  
• Realization: UberEats realized that to serve its customers, it needed to immerse and learn about the experiences of restaurant workers, delivery partners, and customers. And the food culture and ecosystem of each city.
• Solution: While developing UberEats, the designers constantly traveled to different markets to interview users. From following delivery drivers to paying a visit to local restaurant owners, they did it all. The team, based on the insights, then ran experiments and built prototypes. They created features like the "Most Popular Items'' category. Through research and iteration, it has continued to transform the experience of food delivery.

Oral B Electric Toothbrush

• Overview: The electric toothbrush was modified to cater better to the customers' needs. This is one of the design thinking examples that can teach designers a lot about the process.
• Challenge: The designers originally wanted to make a high-tech device that provided in-depth data on their customer's brushing performance. 
• Realization: researching and interviewing the users allowed them to discover that people were already nervous about not brushing. Therefore, providing detailed data on their hygiene habits would increase anxiety. The key insight was found. People were looking to make brushing less stressful.
• Solution: The design team decided to make brushing simple by adding features such as chargeable batteries and brush head replacements. This is one of the classic design thinking examples. 
• Overview: This is again one of the best design thinking examples. The onset of the digital era disrupted Burberry’s business. But if you observe the design thinking problem statement example Burberry has to offer, you will see how its approach led to its success.
• Challenge: Burberry was being written off as the fashion brand of olden times.
• Realization: Instead of being intimidated by the challenge, it tried to appeal to Gen X users. They studied the sentiments and behavior of their target audience.
• Solution: The company invested in its social media strategy. By doing this, it increased its appeal and connected with the audience. This is one of the classic digital thinking problem statement examples. 
• Overview: Pillpack is one of the best design thinking process examples. It is an online pharmacy that delivers medicine and prescription drugs.
• Challenge: How to make it easy for people to order medicines online and be a trustworthy platform.
• Realization: Pillpack chose to work with designers and used a human-centered approach to refine its brand vision and strategy.
• Solution: The company followed a design thinking process while making its brand strategy and overall design. In 2014, Time Magazine labeled Pillpack the year's best invention. Moreover, it was acquired by Amazon for $1 billion in 2018.
• Overview: Netflix is one of the prime design thinking examples. It used the approach to determine what its customers wanted and needed and later changed its business model to meet those needs. 
• Challenge: Customers were looking for more interesting content. It was faced with competition as movies and sitcoms were easily available on other platforms as well. 
• Realization: Netflix used the design thinking approach to develop new ideas. It kept testing and experimenting. Netflix knew they needed more to lure customers.
• Solution: Netflix started giving DVD subscriptions. It was tested and experimented on for ten years. People were made comfortable with streaming videos. It took over the market as broadband and internet services began to grow. 
• Overview: Nike combined sports and design when it launched the first sneaker with technology in it. 
• Challenge: The challenge NIKE faced most was how to avoid going out of trend. Even though it had loyal customers, it knew it had to offer something unique. 
• Realization: Nike kept looking for partners to gain insights from their customers. This, in turn, inspired the company's designers. Thus Nike focuses on the need and better service to its loyal customers.
• Solution: Nike is one of the best design thinking process examples. The designers redesigned the shoes with a transparent panel. This allowed the wearer to show the socks they chose to wear underneath. It also developed pressurized air technology to help athletes perform their best. Apart from that, it quickly became a fashion statement. 

Project Bloks

• Overview: Project Bloks provides an interactive learning experience. It teaches coding to children.
• Challenge: The main challenge was making coding interesting for young brains. 
• Realization: They realized they had to make computer science educational, fun, and tangible for kids.
• Solution: Project Blocks is a prime design thinking process example. To find out how kids play and learn, they made use of materials like foam, paper, and Play-Doh. They found what made children engaged and curious. Then incorporating a kid-centered approach led them to help kids learn through physical building.

Life-saving Dot

• Overview: Millions of women in rural areas suffer from iodine deficiency which may lead to breast cancer and several complications in pregnancy
• Challenge: While many supplements were available, rural women were not inclined towards taking them.
• Realization: The design had to be made more familiar and trustworthy to make these women less apprehensive about the supplements. 
• Solution: The Life Saving Dot came up with iodine patches that looked like bindis. These bindis dispensed the required amount of iodine to the wearer daily. 

Embrace Incubator

• Overview: Every year, more than 1 million babies that are born premature die due to Hypothermia.
• Challenge: to provide incubators in rural areas at a low cost that would help save the lives of these premature babies. 
• Realization: the team had to find a way to make these rural hospitals have access to incubators to provide better facilities.
• Solution: Embrace Incubator invented an incubator that wasn’t expensive and came with a built in sleeping bag that can be warmed.

Aarambh Help Desk

• Overview: Students in rural areas cannot access proper amenities like study tables or comfortable chairs. This caused a high dropout rate. 
• Challenge: to build a product that is economically viable & easy to produce on a large scale.
• Realization: They needed to provide every student with these amenities at a very low budget.
• Solution: Aarambh desk provides a portable study table cum school bag economically and efficiently. They collected discarded cartons from retailers and corporate houses. The cartons were then folded using stencils to form a portable writing desk and double up as a school bag.

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Constructivist Learning Theory and Creating Effective Learning Environments

• First Online: 30 October 2021

Cite this chapter

• Joseph Zajda 36  

Part of the book series: Globalisation, Comparative Education and Policy Research ((GCEP,volume 25))

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This chapter analyses constructivism and the use of constructivist learning theory in schools, in order to create effective learning environments for all students. It discusses various conceptual approaches to constructivist pedagogy. The key idea of constructivism is that meaningful knowledge and critical thinking are actively constructed, in a cognitive, cultural, emotional, and social sense, and that individual learning is an active process, involving engagement and participation in the classroom. This idea is most relevant to the process of creating effective learning environments in schools globally. It is argued that the effectiveness of constructivist learning and teaching is dependent on students’ characteristics, cognitive, social and emotional development, individual differences, cultural diversity, motivational atmosphere and teachers’ classroom strategies, school’s location, and the quality of teachers. The chapter offers some insights as to why and how constructivist learning theory and constructivist pedagogy could be useful in supporting other popular and effective approaches to improve learning, performance, standards and teaching. Suggestions are made on how to apply constructivist learning theory and how to develop constructivist pedagogy, with a range of effective strategies for enhancing meaningful learning and critical thinking in the classroom, and improving academic standards.

The unexamined life is not worth living (Socrates, 399 BCE).

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Zajda, J. (2021). Constructivist Learning Theory and Creating Effective Learning Environments. In: Globalisation and Education Reforms. Globalisation, Comparative Education and Policy Research, vol 25. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-71575-5_3

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