A complete guide to the design thinking process

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What is design thinking? Definition & meaning

Design thinking is an iterative process where teams seek to understand user needs, challenge assumptions, define complex problems to solve, and develop innovative solutions to prototype and test. The goal of design thinking is to come up with user-focused solutions tailored to the particular problem at hand.

Some of the world's most visionary leaders and thinkers (hello, Steve Jobs!) have used design thinking to take their organizations to new heights. But you don't have to be the founder of Apple to use it. You can use design thinking in virtually any situation, industry, or organization to create user-centric solutions to specific problems. Product managers use it to validate new features before development. Marketing teams apply it to understand customer journeys. Consultants run design thinking workshops to help clients identify opportunities. The methodology works wherever teams need to solve problems with users at the center.

Design thinking process & key approaches explained

The design thinking process puts customers’ and users’ needs at the center and aims to solve challenges from their perspective.

Design thinking typically follows five distinct stages:

• Empathize
• Define
• Ideate
• Prototype
• Test

Each stage builds on the previous one; though, the process is iterative. Teams often move back and forth between stages as they learn more about users and refine their solutions.

Stage 1: Empathize — understand user needs & context

The first stage of design thinking lays the foundation for the rest of the process because it focuses on the needs of the real people using your product. At this stage, you want to get familiar with the people experiencing the problems you’re trying to solve, understanding their point of view, and learning about their user experience. You want to understand their challenges and what they need from your product or company to address them.

The goal of this stage is for your team to develop a user-centered vision of the core problem you need to solve. The idea is to challenge any assumptions or biases teams have, instead using their customer perspective as a guiding source. This is important because it aligns the team on what needs to be considered during the rest of the design thinking process.

To help you get a solid understanding of the problems you’re solving, you can ask a lot of questions to build empathy with your users. It’s helpful to visualize their experience. A common way to do this is to assemble a customer journey map. This helps identify areas of friction and understand customer preferences.

Mural AI can accelerate this stage by helping teams synthesize research findings. The Summarize feature can quickly distill key insights from user interviews, while Cluster helps organize feedback into themes so patterns emerge faster.

Stage 2: Define — frame the right problem to solve

After gathering insights in the empathy stage, teams need to synthesize what they’ve learned into a clear problem statement. The Define stage is where you take all those user insights and distill them into a focused challenge your team can solve.

A good problem statement (sometimes called a “Point of View” or POV statement) should be:

• Human-centered: Framed around user needs, not business goals
• Broad enough: To allow for creative solutions
• Narrow enough: To be actionable and achievable

For example, instead of “We need to increase app engagement,” a human-centered problem statement might be: “Busy parents need a way to track their family’s schedules without adding another task to their day.”

During the Define stage, teams often use affinity mapping to group related insights together and identify patterns. This is where Mural AI’s Cluster feature becomes particularly valuable. You can take dozens of sticky notes from user research and automatically organize them by theme, helping you spot connections you might have missed.

The Define stage connects directly to the ideate stage. Once you have a clear problem statement, your team has a focused target for brainstorming solutions.

Stage 3: Ideate — creative idea generation techniques

Your priority here is to think outside the box and source as many ideas as possible from all areas of the business. Bring in people from different departments so you benefit from a wider range of experiences and perspectives during ideation sessions. Don’t worry about coming up with concrete solutions or how to implement each one at this point. You’ll build on that later. The goal is to explore new and creative ideas rather than come up with an actual plan.

Key steps in the ideation phase:

1. Start with your problem statement: Use the problem definition from the previous stage to focus your brainstorming on solving the right challenge
2. Choose a brainstorming technique: Select an approach that fits your goal and team size, such as round robin, brainwriting, or mind mapping
3. Generate without judging: Encourage quantity over quality initially, and avoid evaluating ideas during the brainstorming session
4. Prioritize your ideas: Once you have several ideas, prioritize them based on how well they address user needs and feasibility
5. Select ideas to prototype: Choose the most promising concepts to move forward to the prototype stage

Mural AI can help teams generate more ideas faster. AI-powered mind maps let you start with a central theme and instantly expand with related concepts, giving your team a head start so they can focus on refining the best ideas rather than starting from scratch.

We’ve put together a list of different brainstorming techniques to help your teams come up with creative new ideas.

Stage 4: Prototype — build & test early concepts

At this stage, your team’s goal is to remove uncertainty around your proposed solutions. This is where you start thinking about them in more detail, including how you’ll bring them to life. Your prototypes should help the team understand if the design or solution will work as it’s intended to.

Here, the focus is on speed and efficiency. You don’t want to invest a ton of time or resources into these solutions yet because you’re not sure they’re the best ones for the problem you’re trying to solve. You just need a functional, interactive prototype that can prove your concept. These are learning opportunities to help you spot any issues or opportunities before you take it any further.

Prototypes can take many forms depending on what you’re building:

• Paper sketches or wireframes for digital products
• Storyboards showing a service experience
• Physical mockups made from simple materials
• Clickable prototypes using design tools
• Role-playing scenarios for service design

Mural’s visual canvas gives teams a shared space to sketch concepts, map user flows, and diagram how solutions will work. The AI diagram feature can help teams quickly create flowcharts to visualize processes and identify potential issues before building anything.

Stage 5: Test — validate solutions with real users

The testing stage is normally one of the last stages of the design thinking process. After you’ve developed a concept or prototype, you need to test it in the real world to understand its viability and usability. It’s where your product, design, or development teams evaluate the creative solutions they’ve come up with, to see how real users interact with them.

Testing your concepts and observing how people interact with them helps you understand whether or not the prototype solves real problems and meets their needs, before you invest in it fully.

Key activities in the testing stage include:

• Usability testing: Watch users interact with your prototype and note where they struggle
• Feedback collection: Gather qualitative feedback about what works and what doesn’t
• Iteration planning: Identify specific improvements based on testing results

Mural AI’s Classify feature helps teams analyze feedback from testing sessions by sorting responses by sentiment. This quickly reveals what users love, what frustrates them, and where they feel neutral, so you can prioritize improvements effectively.

However, design thinking is an iterative process: You may go through the ideation, prototyping, and testing phases multiple times to improve and refine your solutions as you learn more from your users.

Human-centered design vs design thinking: key differences

These two terms are often used together, because they complement one another. However, they’re two different things, so understanding their differences is important.

Simply put, design thinking is a working process, while human-centered design is a mindset or approach.

Design thinking provides a structured methodology for solving problems. It gives teams a clear set of stages to follow. Human-centered design, on the other hand, is a philosophy that keeps users at the center of every decision throughout the product lifecycle.

The first step in finding success with design thinking is to foster a culture of human-centered design within your team. This is because design thinking focuses so heavily on the users and customers, which are the people using your product or service.

For a deeper exploration of how these approaches work together, see our guide on design thinking vs human-centered design.

To inspire your team, we’ve put together four human-centered design examples and explain why they work so well.

Benefits of design thinking for teams & organizations

For organizations who’ve never run a design thinking workshop before, it can feel like a big change in how you approach the design process. But it can offer many benefits for your business.

Foster a true design culture within your organization

Design thinking is an iterative process. It’s not something you do once and call it done. The more you do it, the more you’ll see a design-focused culture emerge within your organization, which is much more effective than going to one-off creative retreats or setting up expensive innovation centers that no one ever uses.

This mindset and cultural shift can help scale design thinking within the business. But it’s important to know how to avoid some of the pitfalls companies can face when trying to create a design culture internally.

Encourage collaboration across departments

Design thinking isn’t just for the designers on the team. The earlier stages of the process, such as Empathize, Define, and Ideate, are perfect for bringing in people from across the business. In fact, bringing in varied viewpoints and perspectives can help you come up with more creative or effective solutions.

You can use the design thinking process to get more people involved, and help everyone contribute ideas.

Improve understanding of user needs

So many companies say they’re “customer focused,” but lack a clear understanding of what really matters most to their customers in the context of their product or service. Design thinking puts the user front and center, with the Empathize stage dedicated to understanding and discovering user needs.

Skills & mindsets needed for effective design thinking

To get the most out of a design thinking exercise, you’ll need a collaborative and creative mindset within your team. The team needs to be willing to explore new ideas, and focused on customer or user needs.

Here are some specific skills to help your design thinking process run smoothly.

Divergent and convergent thinking

Divergence and convergence is a human-centered design approach to problem-solving. It switches between expansive and focused thinking, giving you a process that balances understanding people’s problems and developing solutions. Learn more about divergent and convergent thinking and how to apply it in your workshops.

It focuses on understanding a user’s needs, behaviors, and motivations, to help you develop empathy for their problems. Then, it encourages experimentation and iteration to help you effectively design solutions to meet those needs.

Collaborative working

Design thinking isn’t a solo activity. You’ll bring in people from different teams or business areas. To get the most out of the process, everyone needs to collaborate and communicate effectively. Teams that are good at collaborating drive the best outcomes, while also making it an enjoyable experience working together.

There are several core collaboration skills your team needs to succeed:

• Open-mindedness
• Communication
• Adaptability
• Organization
• Time management
• Creativity
• Trust

Participatory or collaborative design

For many design teams and creative folks, the idea of designing something with other people can be enough to make them shudder. “Design by committee” is their idea of a nightmare. But the design thinking process isn’t about “making the logo 10% bigger” or “using a different shade of blue.” It’s user- and solution-focused.

You’ll get the best outcomes if you bring insights, perspectives, and expertise from multiple stakeholders. That includes at the Prototype and Test stages, as everyone will have ideas to contribute to help you bring solutions to life.

Common design thinking challenges & how to overcome them

If your team hasn’t mastered or fully committed to each one of the design thinking steps, you may encounter problems that make it harder to reap the benefits of design thinking.

Here are four common challenges that teams face when implementing design thinking practices:

1. A company culture that doesn’t foster collaboration: Design thinking requires open communication and willingness to share ideas. If your organization has silos or competitive dynamics, start with smaller cross-functional projects to build trust.
2. An inability to adjust to non-linear processes: Teams accustomed to waterfall workflows may struggle with iteration. Set expectations upfront that you’ll likely revisit earlier stages as you learn more.
3. A lack of in-depth user research: Skipping or rushing the empathy stage leads to solutions that miss the mark. Invest time in understanding users before jumping to solutions.
4. Getting too invested in a single idea: Design thinking requires letting go of ideas that don’t test well. Create a culture where “failing fast” is valued as learning.

Design thinking tools, templates & collaboration examples

Using Mural for design thinking

There are lots of tools you can use to run design thinking workshops, including Mural. We help designers work as effectively as possible, so they can get to better solutions quicker. Mural’s visual workspace is perfect for in-person, remote, or asynchronous collaborative sessions. Key features include:

• AI-powered mind maps to generate ideas and explore new directions instantly
• Cluster and Classify to organize research and feedback automatically
• Summarize to quickly synthesize insights from user interviews
• Real-time and async collaboration so distributed teams can contribute on their own schedules
• Facilitation Superpowers® with timers, voting, and attention management to keep workshops engaging
• Seamless integrations to connect your work with tools like Jira, Microsoft Teams, and Slack

And to help you get started, we’ve hand-picked some Mural templates relevant to each stage of the design process below.

Templates for the Empathize stage

The empathy map template helps you visualize the thoughts, feelings, and actions of your customers to help you develop a better understanding of their experiences. The map is divided into four quadrants, where you record the following:

• Thoughts: The customer’s internal dialogue and beliefs
• Feelings: The customer’s emotional responses
• Actions: The customer’s actions and behaviors
• Observations: What the customer is seeing and hearing

Try Mural’s empathy map template

Templates for the Define stage

The rose, thorn, bud exercise helps you understand a situation or problem by identifying what’s working, what’s not, and areas for improvement. You start by listing out the problem, then identifying the positive aspects (the rose), negatives (thorn), and possible solutions for improvement (the buds).

You can use this template to run the exercise individually or in groups. It gives you a way to gather new ideas and perspectives on the problem you’re solving in real time.

Try Mural’s rose, thorn, bud template

Templates for the Ideate stage

The round robin brainstorming exercise is a collaborative session where every person contributes multiple ideas. This is a great way to come up with lots of different ideas and solutions in the ideation stage of design thinking, where you’re focusing on quantity and creativity.

Bringing in ideas from every team member encourages people to share their unique perspectives, and can also help you avoid groupthink.

Try Mural’s round robin template

Templates for the Prototype stage

Schematic diagramming helps you map out how an idea will work in practice, as a functional system. Schematic diagramming is very flexible, so it can be used in many types of projects to make sure your idea is structurally sound. It can help you map out workflows and identify any decisions you need to make to bring your idea to life.

Try Mural’s schematic diagramming template

Templates for the Test stage

In think aloud testing, users test out a product or prototype and talk through the relevant tasks as they complete them. You can use this template to record the feedback, insights, and experiences of your testers, and identify the success and failure points in your proposed solution.

Try Mural’s think aloud testing template

Design thinking examples: What it looks like in practice

Design thinking is a very flexible approach that works for companies of any size, from large enterprises to small startups.

Here are some examples of how companies use design thinking for many types of creative projects.

HPE drives customer-obsessed innovation

HPE founded an initiative called HPE Innovation Catalysts that uses design thinking to drive a customer-obsessed culture. By combining Mural’s visual workspace with the LUMA System, cross-functional teams come together to get on the same page and prioritize product development based on customer needs.

SAP improves collaboration with human-centered design

SAP used Mural and Microsoft Teams to collaborate on human-centered design in a hybrid work environment, improving overall efficiency by 10%. The visual workspace helped distributed teams align on customer insights and iterate on solutions together.

fluent transforms its sales process

Consulting firm fluent has used design thinking methods to help their sales team co-create solutions with their customers. It’s helped sellers become more customer-centric. Now, their sellers can create mutual success plans with their prospects, making it easier for them to find a path forward together.

Support design thinking with tools that facilitate creative collaboration

While we’ve covered some of the skills and behaviors you need to successfully run design thinking exercises, having the right tools can help a lot, too. A collaborative platform helps teams communicate, share ideas, and turn those ideas into solutions together.

Mural helps teams visualize their ideas in a collaboration platform built for teamwork. This helps everyone stay on the same page, while giving them the ability to add their own ideas freely and easily. Mural facilitates effective collaboration both in person and remotely, making it ideal for design thinking workshops for co-located and distributed teams. Plus, it has tons of ready-to-use templates (like the ones we listed above) to help you get started.

Ready to give it a try? Start your account today, and run your next design thinking workshop in Mural.

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