Design Thinking Toolbox
Welcome to The Design Toolbox, a resource for mastering and implementing design thinking. Here, you’ll find a curated collection of processes, tools, and methodologies that shape creative outcomes in digital design, product design, art direction, and creative direction.
These tools provide a structured framework to guide you through each stage of the design thinking process, empowering you to apply them effectively to your projects whenever needed.
These tools are applied across each stage of work for clients and projects.
Welcome to The Design Toolbox, a resource for mastering and implementing design thinking. Here, you’ll find a curated collection of processes, tools, and methodologies that shape creative outcomes in digital design, product design, art direction, and creative direction.
These tools provide a structured framework to guide you through each stage of the design thinking process, empowering you to apply them effectively to your projects whenever needed.
These tools are applied across each stage of work for clients and projects.
Identifying and Framing a Challenge
A way of consolidating a collection of research of similar situations happening locally or around the world in relation to an identified disagio.
A specific, positive, actionable description consisting of two parts. The first is the design space, or what the designer is doing; and the second is the ambition, or why the designer is doing it.
A logical process to find the single correct solution to a problem. Also considered an organized approach to structure ideas.
A codified process consisting of five phases: empathizing with the users, defining the problem to solve, ideating solutions to the problem, prototype mockups of the solution, and test with real-life users. This process is cyclical and generally involves several iterations in order to find a final solution.
An Italian term that roughly translates as “uneasiness;” a feeling that something does not quite work, without the certainty of exactly what or why. In Systems Design Thinking it is a way of identifying a potential space for a solution without defining the problem to be solved.
A process that involves free-flowing thinking to come up with as many different ideas as possible in a short period of time, while deferring evaluation.
Gathering User Emotions
The first step of the design thinking process. It requires connecting with the users and understanding their emotions, feelings, and needs.
The sample of users identified for the first stage of the design thinking process.
A subdivision of the empathy field, used to help organize and control the information gathered during the empathy fieldwork.
Typically, the third step of the design thinking process. It employs divergent thinking in order to come up with potential innovative solutions to the defined problem. This process often uses varied strategies (such as brainstorming, mind-mapping, etc.) to generate a large number of ideas.
Typically considered the fourth step in the design thinking process. Creating a low-cost model of the solution designed, so that it can be tested prior to production.
A presentation or collection of documents that describes the extent of the empathy fieldwork. It includes the challenge statement, the empathy space, the users-in-action visualization, and the constraints, as well as the stakeholders and sponsors.
A stakeholder who is closely related to the disagio and invested in coming up with a solution. The sponsor can help the designer identify and define the challenge statement by providing key information, as well as become a support through the design process.
A key team of people who have a relationship to the issue being worked on or who have influence over the solution.
Combining different elements or approaches, or collaborating in order to arrive at a solution.
An approach to problem solving that combines the creative design thinking process with the synthetic and analytical approach of systems engineering.
A defined parameter of the individuals affected by the problem that the designer is attempting to solve.
A refined concept of the users doing something at a specific time and place.
Crafting User Narratives
A tool used to visualize groups of data according to how they are related to one another.
The second step of the D-school Design Thinking process, in which user emotions gathered during the Empathy phase are translated into a problem to be solved.
The shorthand name of The Hasso Plattner Institute of Design at Stanford University. The D-school is based around the Design Process approach to problem solving and creative thinking.
Needs, insights, and surprises identified while unpacking empathy episodes Emotional Data Relationship Map (EDRM) A modified Affinity Diagram that organizes the relationships between emotional data. There are many ways to present or visualize an EDRM
A problem-solving approach which involves systematic inquiry through an iterative process of asking “why?” five times in order to identify the root cause of a problem.
A narrative description that links together the relationships found in the EDRM to form a single, comprehensive vision of the problem.
An expression that captures a designer’s awareness that something interesting or significant is happening without the designer being completely clear about it.
A type of user data that captures something useful or significant about user attitudes, beliefs, or behavior.
Systematically repeating a series of actions to arrive at a more refined approximation of the desired outcome.
A type of user data that describes something that is essential to a users well-being or happiness.
A photo and text-based documentation of a fictional character created to represent users encountered during fieldwork. A Persona can be baseGRQaspecific real-world user, or they can be a composite of details from several users who are similar.
A process to identify the highest-level source of a problem by using the systematic inquiry of the 5 whys practice.
A type of user data that expresses an unexpected situation, user attitude, or user behavior.
An idea in the design stage; an object that will perform specific functions; an invention in the design stage to solve a certain challenge.
An objective of your System that is tailored specifically to solving the problems of one or more Personas, or to improving on what is already working for them.
A catalog of words that can be used to express what a person may desire in order to feel satisfied. Universal needs lists are often grouped into broad categories such as physical well-being, autonomy, connection, meaning, and honesty.
Processing emotions gathered during fieldwork with the intent of generating emotional data in the form of needs, insights, and surprises.
Generating User Centered Solutions
The process of conceiving ideas with the purpose of exploring multiple possible prototype solutions. Brainstorming begins with divergent thinking to generate as many ideas as possible. Following this, convergent thinking is used to distill the ideas into the most desirable and feasible.
A high-level requirement of a system, or a user’s needs expressed in the How Might We Capabilities Diagram
A brainstorming session that collects all the best prototypes together for a final round of diverging and converging. From the composite brainstorming session, one candidate concept will be chosen for prototyping.
A visualization tool used to select a concept to prototype after a brainstorming session. It consists of a graph that features the desirability of an idea in one axis, and its feasibility and viability on the other. The results of the voting process are plotted on the graph in order to assess what is the best option to move forward with.
A modified version of the requirements diagram; it uses a framework created by the D-School to brainstorm and ideate new solutions to a problem that consider the needs of all the users, in relation to one another.
A modified version of a System Context Diagram used to visualize the programmatic relations between the users and the to-be-defined system, and among the users themselves. It is created before the ideate phase of the design process, so it does not contain a system per se, making it different from a standard System Context Diagram
A diagram used in systems engineering to illustrate a set of specific relationships existing between the different goals (or requirements) the system aims for.
Any sections under the main capabilities included in a How Might We Capabilities Diagram
Prototyping
A broken-down version of the system where each block represents a system component used to refine the concept components built during the ideation phase.
A hands-on approach to validate a concept and experiment with a prototype prior to having users go through the testing process.
The prototype created during the design process right before beta testing. It is the original solution to the problem based on the result of the empathy fieldwork
An Activity Diagram is a visual representation of the workflow of activities the users will go through when engaging with the system. The Emotional Activity Diagram is a modified version that additionally includes the emotional states of the personas (users) as they move through each activity.
A modified version of a concept sketch that involves all the personas created and featured on the problem dynamic, and they are all captured in action.
Traditionally, Use Case Diagrams are a methodology to record a set of interactions between actors, or a role played by the user, and the system. In System Design Thinking, the actors are the personas created during the process. It includes a main action, called a Main Use Case, as well as sub actions called Sub Use Cases.
Generally the fourth phase of the Design Thinking process; it involves creating a version of the concept solution that can then be tested with real users either in the lab or in the field.
The process of creating a prototype that is more quickly, easily, and cheaply made than a full functional prototype but that still enables the design team to test out the concept. A rough prototype also allows for the iteration process to work faster and be more cost effective.
A general-purpose modeling language for system’s engineering applications as a way to distinguish these kind of sub-use cases with the different direction of the arrow connecting to the main use case.
Testing and Iteration
The first prototype created in the process of iteration. After Design 0 goes through rough validation and user testing, the designer incorporates stakeholder and user feedback into the system resulting in Design 1. Every following iteration is named consecutively from this point (Design 2, Design 3, etc.).
The process of pitching the rough prototype to sponsors and stakeholders before starting the user testing phase. Rough validation involves communicating not only the proposed solution but also the results from the empathy fieldwork.
The fifth phase of the design process, user testing involves bringing the prototype to users to test it to see how the prototype plays out in the real world. It allows the designer to identify problems that users may encounter while engaging with the system or solution.