what is design problem solving

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

Which program is right for you?

Through intellectual rigor and experiential learning, this full-time, two-year MBA program develops leaders who make a difference in the world.

Earn your MBA and SM in engineering with this transformative two-year program.

A rigorous, hands-on program that prepares adaptive problem solvers for premier finance careers.

A 12-month program focused on applying the tools of modern data science, optimization and machine learning to solve real-world business problems.

Combine an international MBA with a deep dive into management science. A special opportunity for partner and affiliate schools only.

A doctoral program that produces outstanding scholars who are leading in their fields of research.

Bring a business perspective to your technical and quantitative expertise with a bachelor’s degree in management, business analytics, or finance.

Apply now and work for two to five years. We'll save you a seat in our MBA class when you're ready to come back to campus for your degree.

Executive Programs

The 20-month program teaches the science of management to mid-career leaders who want to move from success to significance.

A full-time MBA program for mid-career leaders eager to dedicate one year of discovery for a lifetime of impact.

A joint program for mid-career professionals that integrates engineering and systems thinking. Earn your master’s degree in engineering and management.

Non-degree programs for senior executives and high-potential managers.

A non-degree, customizable program for mid-career professionals.

New MIT Sloan courses prioritize AI, analytics, and climate

GDPR reduced firms’ data and computation use

23 MIT startups to watch in 2024

Credit: Mimi Phan

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.

Infographic of the design thinking process

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.

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.

How to solve problems using the design thinking process

The design thinking process is a problem-solving design methodology that helps you develop solutions in a human-focused way. Initially designed at Stanford’s d.school, the five stage design thinking method can help solve ambiguous questions, or more open-ended problems. Learn how these five steps can help your team create innovative solutions to complex problems.

As humans, we’re approached with problems every single day. But how often do we come up with solutions to everyday problems that put the needs of individual humans first?

This is how the design thinking process started.

What is the design thinking process?

The design thinking process is a problem-solving design methodology that helps you tackle complex problems by framing the issue in a human-centric way. The design thinking process works especially well for problems that are not clearly defined or have a more ambiguous goal.

One of the first individuals to write about design thinking was John E. Arnold, a mechanical engineering professor at Stanford. Arnold wrote about four major areas of design thinking in his book, “Creative Engineering” in 1959. His work was later taught at Stanford’s Hasso-Plattner Institute of Design (also known as d.school), a design institute that pioneered the design thinking process.

This eventually led Nobel Prize laureate Herbert Simon to outline one of the first iterations of the design thinking process in his 1969 book, “The Sciences of the Artificial.” While there are many different variations of design thinking, “The Sciences of the Artificial” is often credited as the basis.

Anatomy of Work Special Report: How to spot—and overcome—the most crucial enterprise challenges

Learn how enterprises can improve processes and productivity, no matter how complex your organization is. With fewer redundancies, leaders and their teams can hit goals faster.

A non-linear design thinking approach

Design thinking is not a linear process. It’s important to understand that each stage of the process can (and should) inform the other steps. For example, when you’re going through user testing, you may learn about a new problem that didn’t come up during any of the previous stages. You may learn more about your target personas during the final testing phase, or discover that your initial problem statement can actually help solve even more problems, so you need to redefine the statement to include those as well.

Why use the design thinking process

The design thinking process is not the most intuitive way to solve a problem, but the results that come from it are worth the effort. Here are a few other reasons why implementing the design thinking process for your team is worth it.

Focus on problem solving

As human beings, we often don’t go out of our way to find problems. Since there’s always an abundance of problems to solve, we’re used to solving problems as they occur. The design thinking process forces you to look at problems from many different points of view.

The design thinking process requires focusing on human needs and behaviors, and how to create a solution to match those needs. This focus on problem solving can help your design team come up with creative solutions for complex problems.

Encourages collaboration and teamwork

The design thinking process cannot happen in a silo. It requires many different viewpoints from designers, future customers, and other stakeholders . Brainstorming sessions and collaboration are the backbone of the design thinking process.

Foster innovation

The design thinking process focuses on finding creative solutions that cater to human needs. This means your team is looking to find creative solutions for hyper specific and complex problems. If they’re solving unique problems, then the solutions they’re creating must be equally unique.

The iterative process of the design thinking process means that the innovation doesn’t have to end—your team can continue to update the usability of your product to ensure that your target audience’s problems are effectively solved.

The 5 stages of design thinking

Currently, one of the more popular models of design thinking is the model proposed by the Hasso-Plattner Institute of Design (or d.school) at Stanford. The main reason for its popularity is because of the success this process had in successful companies like Google, Apple, Toyota, and Nike. Here are the five steps designated by the d.school model that have helped many companies succeed.

1. Empathize stage

The first stage of the design thinking process is to look at the problem you’re trying to solve in an empathetic manner. To get an accurate representation of how the problem affects people, actively look for people who encountered this problem previously. Asking them how they would have liked to have the issue resolved is a good place to start, especially because of the human-centric nature of the design thinking process.

Empathy is an incredibly important aspect of the design thinking process. The design thinking process requires the designers to put aside any assumptions and unconscious biases they may have about the situation and put themselves in someone else’s shoes.

For example, if your team is looking to fix the employee onboarding process at your company, you may interview recent new hires to see how their onboarding experience went. Another option is to have a more tenured team member go through the onboarding process so they can experience exactly what a new hire experiences.

2. Define stage

Sometimes a designer will encounter a situation when there’s a general issue, but not a specific problem that needs to be solved. One way to help designers clearly define and outline a problem is to create human-centric problem statements.

A problem statement helps frame a problem in a way that provides relevant context in an easy to comprehend way. The main goal of a problem statement is to guide designers working on possible solutions for this problem. A problem statement frames the problem in a way that easily highlights the gap between the current state of things and the end goal.

Tip: Problem statements are best framed as a need for a specific individual. The more specific you are with your problem statement, the better designers can create a human-centric solution to the problem.

Examples of good problem statements:

We need to decrease the number of clicks a potential customer takes to go through the sign-up process.

We need to decrease the new subscriber unsubscribe rate by 10%.

We need to increase the Android app adoption rate by 20%.

3. Ideate stage

This is the stage where designers create potential solutions to solve the problem outlined in the problem statement. Use brainstorming techniques with your team to identify the human-centric solution to the problem defined in step two.

Here are a few brainstorming strategies you can use with your team to come up with a solution:

Standard brainstorm session: Your team gathers together and verbally discusses different ideas out loud.

Brainwrite: Everyone writes their ideas down on a piece of paper or a sticky note and each team member puts their ideas up on the whiteboard.

Worst possible idea: The inverse of your end goal. Your team produces the most goofy idea so nobody will look silly. This takes out the rigidity of other brainstorming techniques. This technique also helps you identify areas that you can improve upon in your actual solution by looking at the worst parts of an absurd solution.

It’s important that you don’t discount any ideas during the ideation phase of brainstorming. You want to have as many potential solutions as possible, as new ideas can help trigger even better ideas. Sometimes the most creative solution to a problem is the combination of many different ideas put together.

4. Prototype stage

During the prototype phase, you and your team design a few different variations of inexpensive or scaled down versions of the potential solution to the problem. Having different versions of the prototype gives your team opportunities to test out the solution and make any refinements.

Prototypes are often tested by other designers, team members outside of the initial design department, and trusted customers or members of the target audience. Having multiple versions of the product gives your team the opportunity to tweak and refine the design before testing with real users. During this process, it’s important to document the testers using the end product. This will give you valuable information as to what parts of the solution are good, and which require more changes.

After testing different prototypes out with teasers, your team should have different solutions for how your product can be improved. The testing and prototyping phase is an iterative process—so much so that it’s possible that some design projects never end.

After designers take the time to test, reiterate, and redesign new products, they may find new problems, different solutions, and gain an overall better understanding of the end-user. The design thinking framework is flexible and non-linear, so it’s totally normal for the process itself to influence the end design.

Tips for incorporating the design thinking process into your team

If you want your team to start using the design thinking process, but you’re unsure of how to start, here are a few tips to help you out.

Start small: Similar to how you would test a prototype on a small group of people, you want to test out the design thinking process with a smaller team to see how your team functions. Give this test team some small projects to work on so you can see how this team reacts. If it works out, you can slowly start rolling this process out to other teams.

Incorporate cross-functional team members : The design thinking process works best when your team members collaborate and brainstorm together. Identify who your designer’s key stakeholders are and ensure they’re included in the small test team.

Organize work in a collaborative project management software : Keep important design project documents such as user research, wireframes, and brainstorms in a collaborative tool like Asana . This way, team members will have one central source of truth for anything relating to the project they’re working on.

Foster collaborative design thinking with Asana

The design thinking process works best when your team works collaboratively. You don’t want something as simple as miscommunication to hinder your projects. Instead, compile all of the information your team needs about a design project in one place with Asana.

Related resources

How Asana drives impactful product launches in 3 steps

How to streamline compliance management software with Asana

New site openings: How to reduce costs and delays

Provider onboarding software: Simplify your hiring process

Ready to get started?

Training and Development

What is Design Thinking, and how is it used to problem solve?

27 Feb 2024

Stuck in a rut, struggling to find innovative solutions? Traditional problem-solving methods might leave you feeling frustrated and limited. Enter design thinking : a human-centered approach that unlocks creativity and fosters innovative solutions to complex challenges.

This blog will equip you with the knowledge and tools to use design thinking effectively, empowering you and your team to tackle any obstacle head-on. Let’s dive in and explore the transformative power of design thinking.

What IS design thinking?

Design thinking isn’t just for designers. It’s a flexible framework for anyone seeking solutions that are:

Desirable : meeting the needs and desires of users.
Feasible : practical and achievable within constraints.
Viable : sustainable and commercially viable.

Forget linear problem-solving — design thinking is iterative and collaborative . It involves five key stages:

Empathize : Understand your users deeply through observation, interviews, and empathy exercises.
Define : Clearly define the problem based on user insights, not assumptions.
Ideate : Brainstorm a wide range of potential solutions, thinking outside the box.
Prototype : Build low-fidelity prototypes to test and refine your ideas quickly.
Test : Gather feedback from users and iterate on your prototypes based on their responses.

Think of it like building a product: you start with understanding your users’ needs, then explore various possibilities, test them, and refine your approach based on real-world feedback.

How can design thinking help you solve problems?

The beauty of design thinking lies in its versatility. It can be applied to various scenarios, from developing new products and services to improving internal processes and even tackling social challenges .

Here are just a few examples:

A company struggling with customer retention might use design thinking to understand their customers’ frustrations and develop solutions to improve satisfaction.
A non-profit organization might use design thinking to design a more effective educational program by understanding the needs of both students and teachers.
A team facing communication challenges within their department might use design thinking to develop a more collaborative work environment.

Putting design thinking into practice

Ready to unleash the power of design thinking? Here are some tips to get you started:

Assemble a diverse team : Bring together individuals with different perspectives and backgrounds to generate richer ideas.
Start small : Choose a manageable problem to tackle first and experiment with the design thinking process.
Emphasize empathy : Put yourself in your users’ shoes and understand their needs deeply.
Embrace failure : View setbacks as opportunities to learn and iterate.
Build prototypes : Don’t wait for everything to be perfect. Get your ideas out there and test them early and often.
Iterate and improve : Based on user feedback, continuously refine your solutions until they truly address the problem.

Resources to help you on your design thinking journey

Remember, you don’t have to navigate the design thinking journey alone. Here are some resources to help you:

The Interaction Design Foundation (IDF) : A comprehensive website offering free articles, courses, and tools related to design thinking.
IDEO U : An online learning platform with design thinking courses and resources from the renowned design firm IDEO.
Stanford d.school : The Hasso Plattner Institute of Design at Stanford University, offering courses, workshops, and resources on design thinking.

Bonus Tip: If you’re looking for a user-friendly platform to create and share your prototypes, try Biteable . Create engaging video presentations, explainer animations , and even interactive prototypes – perfect for testing your design thinking solutions with users.

Unlock better solutions with design thinking

By embracing the human-centered approach of design thinking, you can unlock new possibilities and tackle problems with creativity and innovation. Start your design thinking journey today and see how it can transform your problem-solving approach for the better.

Make stunning videos with ease.

Take the struggle out of team communication.

Try Biteable now.

No credit card required
No complicated design decisions
No experience necessary

Please wait while you are redirected to the right page...

Are you an agency specialized in UX, digital marketing, or growth? Join our Partner Program

Learn / Guides / Design thinking guide

Back to guides

What is design thinking and why does it matter?

Solving problems is a pivotal part of product development. But some issues that come up during product development are more complex than others, and it can be difficult to find the right solution—or even know where to start looking.

That's where the concept of design thinking comes in, keeping users at the center of every process by combining problem-solving with deep empathy.

Last updated

Reading time.

This guide gives you a comprehensive overview of design thinking as a problem-solving approach. In this first chapter, you'll gain a strong understanding of what design thinking is, why it’s relevant, and how it helps you design products that you’re proud to bring into the world—and that your users will love.

Design better products with empathy

Use Hotjar to understand your customer’s habits, behaviors, frustrations, needs, and wants—so you can design a frictionless, user-centric experience.

What is design thinking?

Design thinking is a problem-solving approach to product development that places an emphasis on the user to help teams identify issues, reframe them, and generate creative solutions.

It’s a solution-based ideology, process, and collection of hands-on methods to solve complex problems in a user-centric way . Design thinking is most useful for addressing problems that are either ill-defined or unknown, by helping you:

Redefine the problem with a user-centric mindset

Identify the challenge worth solving

Develop ideas in brainstorming sessions

Adopt a hands-on approach in prototyping and testing

Who is design thinking for?

Despite its name, design thinking is not exclusively used by designers. Instead, it’s a human-centered approach to innovation practiced across science, art, engineering, and business.

In the world of product development, design thinking has been incredibly successful in showcasing relevant solutions for real problems. With it, teams can do better UX research, prototyping, and usability testing to uncover new ways to meet users’ needs.

Design thinking helps you focus on achieving practical results and solutions that:

Meet and solve a real human need

Can be developed into functional products or processes

Are economically viable

It also aims to turn ideas into tangible, testable products as quickly as possible, and make changes and improvements before building the real thing.

💡 Pro tip: don’t base your entire product on assumptions. Use design thinking to go beyond what you already know about your users and product.

Engage with your users as much as possible; run interviews, watch screen recordings to see what your users see and identify their pain points, and use Hotjar Surveys and Feedback widgets to send out a mix of full-scale surveys and quick questions.

#With Hotjar Recordings, follow users along their journey on your web app to discover how you can continue to optimize its design

Understand what users really think about your site with Feedback

5 things you need to know about design thinking

Design thinking has long been considered the holy grail of innovation. But before you incorporate it into your own workflows, you need to understand what it is and why it’s so popular.

1. Design thinking came about as a way to teach engineers how to approach problems creatively—like designers do.

The concept of design thinking was fathered by John E. Arnold, a professor of mechanical engineering at Stanford University. From there, it began to evolve as a way of creative thinking and problem-solving, leading to IDEO’s iconic 90s run and Stanford University’s d.school design thinking course as an approach to technical and social innovation.

Today, design thinking gives us the opportunity to reimagine the world and the products, systems, or institutions that reinforce the ways people relate to each other. Some of the world’s leading brands are using design thinking to drive innovation and results—from Apple to Google, and from Samsung to IBM and GE.

Dive into the Design Thinking Examples chapter of this guide to learn what actions your product team can take related to design thinking.

2. Design thinking means approaching a problem with a designer’s mindset, from the user’s perspective.

As a designer, you have this amazing power of wide-eyed curiosity. What does the world—or even just one person—need in terms of product, user experience, strategy, or complex systems? Can design help achieve it?

A designer is uniquely equipped to deal with these complex problems, with an inquisitive approach that embraces empathy, optimism, iteration, creativity, and ambiguity.

As a solution-based approach to innovation, design thinking draws techniques from the designer’s toolkit to solve problems in a creative and innovative way . The designer’s mindset helps you observe and develop empathy with the user—it asks about what they want and need from your product, and how you can use design to bring that to life.

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

Hotjar’s Feedback widget and Surveys give you clear voice of the customer (VoC) data to back up your discoveries, and Recordings and Heatmaps give you quantitative metrics on where customer issues lie with your current products.

Collect actionable product feedback so you can identify what needs to change—and how to change it

3. There are 5 principles that are pivotal to design thinking.

The five principles of design thinking are reflected in the design thinking methodology; here they are in summary:

User-centricity and empathy: human-centered design thinking keeps people at the center of every process. A good designer knows that when you stay focused on the people you're designing for—and listen to them directly—you can arrive at optimal solutions that meet their needs.

Collaboration: design thinking techniques and strategies belong at every level of a business. Innovation comes from diverse perspectives and ideas, and should involve colleagues from various departments to create a cross-functional team.

Ideation: design thinking is a solution-based framework, so the focus is on coming up with as many ideas and potential solutions as possible. These are not necessarily new (or good) ideas, but they can become the foundations of new solutions to be tested with prototypes.

Experimentation and iteration: the early and frequent testing of your solutions is inherent to the design thinking process; this way, you can gather feedback and make any necessary changes long before the product is fully developed .

A bias towards action : design thinking is an extremely hands-on approach to problem-solving. That means turning ideas into tangible prototypes and testing them in real-world contexts—an essential way to assess new ideas and identify the changes needed to make them work.

Learn more about these five principles in the Design Thinking Methodology chapter of this guide.

💡 Pro tip: in design thinking, prototyping is carried out on far-from-finished products, to understand users’ iterative experiences with a work in progress.

Getting your product ideas in front of real users for feedback can be daunting, but the basis for prototyping early and often is intended to keep you from forming attachments to ideas that may or may not be worthwhile.

Sometimes the key to user empathy is sharing or co-creating a prototype with your users and getting their feedback. By testing your prototypes with real users in context, observing their reactions , and getting feedback , you can refine your point of view, learn more about your users, and make the next iteration of the product that much better.

#Hotjar Heatmaps make it easy to visualize complex data and understand it at a glance

#Hotjar Heatmaps tools

Source: Hotjar

4. Design thinking is a solution-based framework, not a problem-focused approach.

The way you look at a problem can dictate the way you solve it. Design thinking offers an alternative to problem-focused approaches by highlighting what is working (or could work), rather than emphasizing deficits, limitations, and weaknesses.

A problem-focused approach helps to identify the problem , why it exists, and when and where it becomes a pain point for your users. The approach lets you analyze a situation and figure out where the breakdown is occurring—but you still need to figure out what comes next.

A solution-focused approach, on the other hand, helps you solve the problem. Beyond identifying the problem, and when and where it occurs, this approach lets you identify strategies to resolve the issues that are causing the problem in the first place.

In product development, solution-based approaches tend to yield more positive results and better products. A user-first approach like design thinking simplifies everything across product teams, marketing, sales, and client services, because customer goals and success metrics are the centerpiece.

A solutions-driven organization does everything from the users’ perspective first, allowing you to:

Gain empathy with users’ habits, behaviors, and needs: discover new opportunities to improve the user experience by empathizing with users and seeing an unbiased view of their experience

Design a frictionless user experience: identify pain points in the user experience and design a solution that balances both user and business needs

The focus is on coming up with as many ideas and potential solutions as possible, thinking ‘outside the box’, looking for alternative ways to view the problem, and identifying innovative solutions to the design thinking problem statements you’ve created.

For a closer look, read the Design Thinking Process and Framework chapter of this guide.

5. Design thinking is an iterative and non-linear process that encourages constant experimentation.

The design thinking process fosters creativity, innovation, and user-centricity, and helps you come up with actionable solutions. As noted above, the process outlines a series of principles, or stages, that bring this ideology to life:

Empathize : getting to know your users and their challenges

Define : homing in on what problem needs to be solved

Ideate : outside-the-box thinking about solutions and angles

Prototype : creating something tangible that users can then try-out

Test : exposing your prototype to real users to determine if your solution is valid or needs some work.

You can carry out these five-stages in parallel, repeat them, and circle back to a previous stage at any point in the process.

For example, even once you’ve defined your problem statement, you should keep building empathy with users—use design thinking tools like surveys and feedback software to validate your problem statement and update your assumptions.

The purpose of the process is to allow you to work dynamically to develop and launch innovative ideas. Regardless of how you choose to implement the design thinking process, the goal remains the same: to approach complex problems from a human perspective.

💡 Pro tip: design thinking embraces the principles of continuous discovery to evolve, adapt, and refine ideas and turn them into valuable solutions for your users.

Don’t be afraid to hop back and forth between different stages of the design thinking process to start thinking out of the box. If the creative juices aren’t flowing, go back to your users. Teams can always benefit from building more user empathy with tools like Hotjar Feedback or Surveys .

Intuitive and simple Hotjar Surveys are perfect for capturing all types of feedback

How design thinking helps teams build better products

Design thinking is a tool for creativity, innovation, and problem-solving:

It helps designers gain an understanding of user habits, behaviors, frustrations, needs, and wants.

It allows managers to foster a culture of user-centricity at every level of business.

Most importantly, it helps teams create ground-breaking products that users actually want.

Design thinking empowers teams to get their ideas out and share them. It holds the space for you to be ambiguous and messy, knowing you're moving in the direction of the outcomes you're looking for. It’s a way to start , and be willing to have 100 sketches on the floor that won’t work, before finding the one that does—from ambiguity to clarity, refinement, and launch.

Design thinking can impact and provide innovative solutions to issues product teams truly care about:

Tackling complex challenges

Design thinking encourages creative problem-solving. It pushes you further into the process of questioning: questioning the problem, the assumptions, and the implications.

A good design thinking framework will give you new perspectives on the lives of your users—including the challenges they face in your product, and the moments that delight them. Having this empathy can give you the insights you need to solve hard, worthwhile problems.

This is especially useful in a product development context—whether it’s designing a competitive product, optimizing internal processes, or reinventing an entire business model.

Moving faster, with iterative speed

Design thinking stops you from falling into assumptions and designing patterns out of habit. Instead, it shifts the focus from your problem to the solution that works best for your users.

Designing a product with insights from user observation is much more productive than starting from scratch. This shortens the development process by helping you design better products that your users actually want, from the get-go.

Design thinking also helps scale the design process through large organizations. It keeps the team and stakeholders on the same page and improves efficiency with an agile design thinking approach to early-stage feedback that stops you wasting resources on unpromising ideas.

Meeting and exceeding customer expectations to ensure customer delight

Empathy is at the heart of design. It connects you—the designer—to the people who will benefit from your work, empowering you to create products that ultimately meet real human needs.

Design thinking revolves around a deep interest to understand the people you're building for, creating the conditions for innovation to happen over and over again .

With design thinking, teams have the freedom to generate real solutions. It’s not just about coming up with ideas—it’s about turning them into prototypes, testing them, and making changes based on user feedback.

🔥 How we use the design thinking framework at Hotjar

At Hotjar , we ‘live and breathe’ design thinking and use this framework to deliver work in any part of our company—from Marketing to Product Teams.

Here are the four key product experience insights tools we use to produce granular insights that help our designers empathize with users:

Heatmaps : see where users click, navigate, and scroll to discover which elements attract attention and which get overlooked.

Feedback widgets : gather on-site user feedback to hear from customers in the wild.

Recordings : watch playbacks of users navigating your product to zero-in on issues, pain points, and bugs.

Surveys : gather VoC data both on- and off-site by sending out either short- or long-form surveys.

Minimizing uncertainty and improving confidence in design decisions

Product development can be fraught with obstacles. Your team either collects a lot of backward-looking data, which doesn’t tell you what current or future users really want, or you make risky bets based on instinct instead of evidence.

Design thinking is a strategy-making tool that shifts the focus to human behavior. By using imaginative, human-centered problem solving, you can identify new strategies and unlock new markets. Design thinking also plays a key role in reducing assumptions for product teams, and ultimately enables you to better understand users and deliver products that delight them .

Developing this type of deep empathy with your target users means you’ll be able to design products they really want, and will use and come back to.

Put users at the center of your designs, every time

Faqs about design thinking:.

Design thinking is a popular ideology and process that focuses on solving complex problems in a highly user-centric way.

It’s a creative approach to innovation and problem-solving that takes design perspectives and processes and applies them to a variety of industries to help strengthen their services, products, policies, or design processes.

The design thinking process outlines a series of steps that bring this ideology to life—starting with building empathy for the user, through to coming up with ideas and turning them into prototypes.

Why is design thinking important for product development?

Design thinking has become closely associated with innovation and the creation of ground-breaking products and services. It can be used to develop solutions for end-users, but can also help organizations boost creativity and innovation to implement new strategies across every business level.

Design thinking allows teams to understand users, challenge assumptions, redefine problems, and create innovative solutions to prototype and test.

The iterative and non-linear nature of the design thinking process allows product teams to work dynamically to develop and launch innovative ideas.

How can I practice design thinking?

The goal of the design thinking process is to come up with solutions, products, or services that are desirable for the user, economically viable from a business perspective, and technologically feasible.

To do that, start by Empathizing with your users, being more open to the user experience and seeing things from their perspectives. This will help you Define your problem statement, which helps you reframe your point of view and see a problem from a different angle.

Then, your team can start to Ideate , which may spur new approaches to your problem and bring you closer to an innovative solution that puts your users at the center. Based on this, you can start to build a Prototype to answer critical questions quickly.

When you Test your prototype, it opens you to both the many possible directions of your design and the ways it might address real human needs. Each step along the way affords the opportunity to rethink, relearn, and reboot as needed. The design process is rarely linear.

How to solve problems with design thinking

May 18, 2023 Is it time to throw out the standard playbook when it comes to problem solving? Uniquely challenging times call for unique approaches, write Michael Birshan , Ben Sheppard , and coauthors in a recent article , and design thinking offers a much-needed fresh perspective for leaders navigating volatility. Design thinking is a systemic, intuitive, customer-focused problem-solving approach that can create significant value and boost organizational resilience. The proof is in the pudding: From 2013 to 2018, companies that embraced the business value of design had TSR that were 56 percentage points higher than that of their industry peers. Check out these insights to understand how to use design thinking to unleash the power of creativity in strategy and problem solving.

Designing out of difficult times

What is design thinking?

The power of design thinking

Leading by design

Author Talks: Don Norman designs a better world

Are you asking enough from your design leaders?

Tapping into the business value of design

Redesigning the design department

Author Talks: Design your future

A design-led approach to embracing an ecosystem strategy

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

MORE FROM MCKINSEY

How design helps incumbents build new businesses

Stage 2 in the Design Thinking Process: Define the Problem

Once you’ve empathized with your users, you can move on to the second stage of the design thinking process and define the problem your users need you to solve..

If you’ve read our introduction to User Experience (UX) Design , you’ll know that UX is essentially about solving the problems that prevent users from accomplishing what they want to do with our product.

Before you can go into problem-solving mode, however, there is one very crucial step that you need to complete—one that will shape your entire design project from start to finish. In the Design Thinking process , this step is what’s known as the “define” stage.

As the second step in the Design Thinking process, the define stage is where you’ll establish a clear idea of exactly which problem you will solve for the user. You’ll then shape this into a problem statement which will act as your northern star throughout the design process.

In this guide, we’ll tell you everything you need to know about this stage in the Design Thinking process, as well as how to define a meaningful problem statement.

Here’s what we’ll cover:

What is the define stage and why is it necessary?
What is a problem statement?
How to define a meaningful problem statement
What comes after the define phase?

Before we dive in, though, if you’d like an overview of the entire Design Thinking process, check out this video:

1. What is the define stage and why is it necessary?

As the second step in the Design Thinking process, the define stage is dedicated to defining the problem: what user problem will you be trying to solve? In other words, what is your design challenge?

The define stage is preceded by the empathize phase , where you’ll have learned as much about your users as possible, conducting interviews and using a variety of immersion and observation techniques. Once you have a good idea of who your users are and, most importantly, their wants, needs, and pain-points, you’re ready to turn this empathy into an actionable problem statement.

The relationship between the empathize and define stages can best be described in terms of analysis and synthesis. In the empathize phase, we use analysis to break down everything we observe and discover about our users into smaller, more manageable components—dividing their actions and behaviour into “what”, “why” and “how” categories, for example. In the define stage, we piece these components back together, synthesising our findings to create a detailed overall picture.

Why is the define stage so important?

The define stage ensures you fully understand the goal of your design project. It helps you to articulate your design problem, and provides a clear-cut objective to work towards. A meaningful, actionable problem statement will steer you in the right direction, helping you to kick-start the ideation process (see Stage Three of the Design Thinking process ) and work your way towards a solution.

Without a well-defined problem statement, it’s hard to know what you’re aiming for. Your work will lack focus, and the final design will suffer. Not only that: in the absence of a clear problem statement, it’s extremely difficult to explain to stakeholders and team members exactly what you are trying to achieve.

With this in mind, let’s take a closer look at problem statements and how you can go about defining them.

2. What is a problem statement?

A problem statement identifies the gap between the current state (i.e. the problem) and the desired state (i.e. the goal) of a process or product . Within the design context, you can think of the user problem as an unmet need. By designing a solution that meets this need, you can satisfy the user and ensure a pleasant user experience.

A problem statement, or point of view (POV) statement, frames this problem (or need) in a way that is actionable for designers. It provides a clear description of the issue that the designer seeks to address, keeping the focus on the user at all times.

Problem or POV statements can take various formats, but the end goal is always the same: to guide the design team towards a feasible solution. Let’s take a look at some of the ways you might frame your design problem:

From the user’s perspective: “I am a young working professional trying to eat healthily, but I’m struggling because I work long hours and don’t always have time to go grocery shopping and prepare my meals. This makes me feel frustrated and bad about myself.”
From a user research perspective: “Busy working professionals need an easy, time-efficient way to eat healthily because they often work long hours and don’t have time to shop and meal prep.”
Based on the four Ws—who, what, where, and why: “Our young working professional struggles to eat healthily during the week because she is working long hours. Our solution should deliver a quick and easy way for her to procure ingredients and prepare healthy meals that she can take to work.”

As you can see, each of these statements addresses the same issue—just in a slightly different way. As long as you focus on the user, what they need and why, it’s up to you how you choose to present and frame your design problem.

We’ll look at how to form your problem statement a little later on. Before we do, let’s consider some problem statement “do”s and “don’t”s.

What makes a good problem statement?

A good problem statement is human-centered and user-focused. Based on the insights you gathered in the empathize phase, it focuses on the users and their needs—not on product specifications or business outcomes. Here are some pointers that will help you create a meaningful problem statement:

Focus on the user: The user and their needs should be front and center of your problem statement. Avoid statements that start with “we need to…” or “the product should”, instead concentrating on the user’s perspective: “Young working professionals need…”, as in the examples above.
Keep it broad: A good problem statement leaves room for innovation and creative freedom. It’s important to keep it broad enough to invite a range of different ideas; avoid any references to specific solutions or technical requirements, for example.
Make it manageable: At the same time, your problem statement should guide you and provide direction. If it’s too broad in terms of the user’s needs and goals, you’ll struggle to hone in on a suitable solution. So, don’t try to address too many user needs in one problem statement; prioritize and frame your problem accordingly.

Bearing these things in mind, let’s explore some useful methods for creating a meaningful problem statement.

3. How to write a meaningful problem statement

Writing a meaningful problem statement can be extremely challenging. How do you condense all the complexities of the user’s conscious and unconscious desires into one simple, actionable statement? Fortunately, there are some tried-and-tested methods that will help you do just that.

Space saturation and group

One of the first steps in defining a problem statement is to organize your findings from the empathize phase. Space saturation and group is a popular method used by design thinkers to collect and visually present all observations made in the empathize phase in one space. As the name suggests, you will literally “saturate” a wall or whiteboard with Post-It notes and images, resulting in a collage of artifacts from your user research.

As the Stanford d.school explains: “You space saturate to help you unpack thoughts and experiences into tangible and visual pieces of information that you surround yourself with to inform and inspire the design team. You group these findings to explore what themes and patterns emerge, and strive to move toward identifying meaningful needs of people and insights that will inform your design solutions.”

This method should involve anyone who took part in the empathize stage of the design project, and should take no longer than 20-30 minutes.

The four Ws

Asking the right questions will help you put your finger on the right problem statement. With all your findings from the empathize phase in one place, ask yourself the four Ws: Who , what , where , and why?

Who is experiencing the problem? In other words, who is your target user; who will be the focus of your problem statement?
What is the problem? Based on the observations you made during the empathize phase, what are the problems and pain-points that frequently came up? What task is the user trying to accomplish, and what’s standing in their way?
Where does the problem present itself? In what space (physical or digital), situation or context is the user when they face this problem? Are there any other people involved?
Why does it matter? Why is it important that this problem be solved? What value would a solution bring to the user, and to the business?

Approaching your observations with these four questions in mind will help you to identify patterns within your user research. In identifying the most prevalent issues, you’ll be one step closer to formulating a meaningful problem statement.

The five whys

Another question-based strategy, the five whys technique can help you delve deeper into the problem and drill down to the root cause. Once you’ve identified the root cause, you have something that you can act upon; somewhere specific to focus your problem-solving efforts.

Let’s take our previous example of the young working professional who wants to eat healthily, but finds it difficult to do so. Here’s how you might use the five whys to break the problem down and get to the root cause:

Why is she not eating healthily? → She orders takeaway everyday.
Why does she order takeaway everyday? → Her fridge and cupboards are empty.
Why are the fridge and cupboards empty? → She hasn’t been grocery shopping in over a week.
Why hasn’t she been grocery shopping? → She doesn’t have time to go to the supermarket.
Why doesn’t she have time? → She works long hours and is exhausted.

The root cause here is a lack of time, so your solution might focus on efficiency and convenience. Your final problem statement might look something like this: “Young working professionals need a quick, convenient solution to eating healthily.”

4. What comes after the define phase?

By the end of the define phase, you’ll have turned your findings from the empathize stage into a meaningful, actionable problem statement. With your problem statement to hand, you’ll be ready to move on to the ideation phase , where you’ll turn your problem statement into “how might we” questions and generate as many potential solutions as possible.

As you move through the Design Thinking process, you’ll constantly refer back to your problem statement to make sure you’re moving in the right direction. A well-thought-out problem statement will keep you on track, help you communicate your objectives to key stakeholders, and ultimately lead you to that all-important user solution.

Want to learn more about designing user-friendly solutions? Check out these articles:

UX Best Practices: How Can You Become A Better Designer?
What Is User Experience Design? Everything You Need To Know To Get Started
This Is Why Empathy Matters As A UX Designer
What is lean UX?

Case Studies
Flexible Products

Expert Insights
Research Studies

Creativity and Culture
Management and Leadership
Business Solutions

Member Spotlight
Employee Spotlight

What is design thinking and why is it important?

Here’s what you need to know about this creative problem-solving technique, including a definition and why it’s taking the business world by storm.

img src="WeWork106BoulevardHaussmann.jpg" alt="open floor coworking area with natural light in Paris">

Design thinking started out as a process for creating sleek new technology and products. But this methodology is now widely used across both the private and public sectors, for business and personal projects, all around the world.

Design-thinking methodology was popularized by design consulting firm IDEO . The methods gained momentum in the larger business world after Tim Brown, the chief executive officer of IDEO, wrote an article in 2008 for the Harvard Business Review about the use of design thinking in business—including at a California hospital, a Japanese bicycle company, and the healthcare industry in India. Today, one of the most popular courses at Stanford University is Designing Your Life , which applies design thinking to building a joyful career and life.

Here’s what design thinking is, how it works, and why it’s important.

What is design thinking?

Design thinking is a process for solving problems by prioritizing the consumer’s needs above all else. It relies on observing, with empathy, how people interact with their environments , and employs an iterative, hands-on approach to creating innovative solutions .

Design thinking is “human-centered,” which means that it uses evidence of how consumers (humans) actually engage with a product or service, rather than how someone else or an organization thinks they will engage with it. To be truly human-centered, designers watch how people use a product or service and continue to refine the product or service in order to improve the consumer’s experience. This is the “iterative” part of design thinking. It favors moving quickly to get prototypes out to test, rather than endless research or rumination.

In contrast to traditional problem-solving, which is a linear process of identifying a problem and then brainstorming solutions , design thinking only works if it is iterative. It is less of a means to get to a single solution, and more of a way to continuously evolve your thinking and respond to consumer needs.

Why is design thinking important?

Design thinking enables organizations to create lasting value for consumers. The process is useful in any complex system ( not just design systems ) because it:

Aims to solve a concrete human need

Using an observational, human-centric approach, teams can uncover pain points from the consumer that they hadn’t previously thought of, ones that the consumer may not even be aware of. Design thinking can provide solutions to those pain points once they’re identified.

Tackles problems that are ambiguous or difficult to define

Consumers often don’t know what problem they have that needs solving or they can’t verbalize it. But upon careful observation, one can identify problems based on what they see from real consumer behavior rather than simply working off of their ideas of the consumer. This helps define ambiguous problems and in turn makes it easier to surface solutions.

Leads to more innovative solutions

Humans are not capable of imagining things that are not believed to be possible, which makes it impossible for them to ask for things that do not yet exist. Design thinking can help surface some of these unknown pain points that would otherwise have never been known. Using an iterative approach to tackle those problems often lead to non-obvious, innovative solutions .

Makes organizations run faster and more efficiently

Rather than researching a problem for a long time without devising an outcome, design thinking favors creating prototypes and then testing to see how effective they are.

The five stages of the design-thinking process

Design thinking follows a five-stage framework.

1. Empathize

In this first stage, the designer observes consumers to gain a deeper understanding of how they interact with or are affected by a product or issue. The observations must happen with empathy, which means withholding judgment and not imparting preconceived notions of what the consumer needs. Observing with empathy is powerful because it can uncover issues the consumer didn’t even know they had or that they could not themselves verbalize. From this point, it’s easier to understand the human need for which you are designing.

In this second stage, you gather your observations from the first stage to define the problem you’re trying to solve. Think about the difficulties your consumers are brushing up against, what they repeatedly struggle with, and what you’ve gleaned from how they’re affected by the issue. Once you synthesize your findings, you are able to define the problem they face.

The next step is to brainstorm ideas about how to solve the problem you’ve identified. These ideation sessions could be in a group, where your team gathers in an office space that encourages creativity and collaboration , an innovation lab , or can be done solo. The important part is to generate a bunch of different ideas. At the end of this process, you’ll come up with a few ideas with which to move forward.

4. Prototype

This is the stage that turns ideas into an actual solution. Prototypes are not meant to be perfect. The point of a prototype is to come out quickly with a concrete version of the idea to see how it is accepted by consumers. Examples of prototypes include a landing page to test consumer desire for a product or a video that demonstrates streamlined logistic processes.

Once you give a prototyped solution to consumers, you must observe how they interact with it. This testing stage is the one in which you collect feedback on your work.

The design-thinking process is an iterative, rather than linear, one. At the end of the fifth stage, you’ll likely have to go back to one or several of the other stages. Perhaps the testing has shown you need to develop another prototype, for which you’d return to the fourth stage. Or perhaps it’s shown that you’ve misdefined the consumer’s needs. If so, you would have to return to an earlier stage of the process.

What industries and roles can benefit from design thinking?

While design thinking originated with designers, it is now widely used by people from all disciplines . Even among design agencies the work is famously cross-functional: IDEO and similar agencies hire non-designers—chefs, engineers, social scientists, biologists—and integrate them into their project teams to add perspective.

Our growth innovation team at WeWork comprises a designer, who focuses on applying this method for the end consumer of a project; a technologist, who uses this technique to deliver value to engineers; and a business strategist, who applies this method to deliver value for business owners and various stakeholders.

Design thinking has been used at Kaiser Permanente to overhaul the system of shift changes among nursing staff. It has helped the Singapore government make the process for securing a work pass in the nation-state easier and more human. Design thinking has been used to solve business problems at companies like Toyota, Intuit, SAP, and IBM .

One reason for the proliferation of design thinking in industries is that it’s useful to break down problems in any complex system, be it business, government, or social organizations. It can be used to explore big questions about how to respond to the growth of technology and globalization, how to pivot in response to rapid change, and how to support individuals while catering to larger organizations.

Design thinking can be used by all departments in a business. It can be fostered by bright, airy physical workspaces that cater to the way employees prefer to work. To employ design thinking in all projects, managers should first define the consumers they’re trying to help and then employ the five stages of design thinking to define and tackle the identified problems. Employing a design-thinking process makes it more likely a business will be innovative, creative, and ultimately more human.

This article was originally published on October 18, 2019, and has been updated throughout by the editors.

Graham Tuttle was a director of growth innovation at WeWork. He has more than a decade of experience in design and new product development. Prior to WeWork, Tuttle worked at frog in design strategy, helping global enterprises and startups take a user-centered approach to product development, innovation, and investment strategy. He has an M.B.A. and a masters of design from the Illinois Institute of Technology and contributed to the development of 101 Design Methods: A Structured Approach for Driving Innovation in Your Organization , a step-by-step guidebook for innovation planning.

Every leader wants a thriving culture, but only select leaders know that investing in wellness can make it happen. Companies ahead of the game have already seen positive results, as research shows nine out of 10 companies that track their wellness spending see a positive ROI.

Designed to cultivate a positive and respectful working environment, here are the most common coworking etiquette rules.

“Busyness” doesn’t always equate with progress—learning how to prioritize tasks will help you make the most of your workday

Business Essentials
Leadership & Management
Credential of Leadership, Impact, and Management in Business (CLIMB)
Entrepreneurship & Innovation
Digital Transformation
Finance & Accounting
Business in Society
For Organizations
Support Portal
Media Coverage
Founding Donors
Leadership Team

Harvard Business School →
HBS Online →
Business Insights →

Business Insights

Harvard Business School Online's Business Insights Blog provides the career insights you need to achieve your goals and gain confidence in your business skills.

Career Development
Communication
Decision-Making
Earning Your MBA
Negotiation
News & Events
Productivity
Staff Spotlight
Student Profiles
Work-Life Balance
AI Essentials for Business
Alternative Investments
Business Analytics
Business Strategy
Business and Climate Change
Creating Brand Value
Design Thinking and Innovation
Digital Marketing Strategy
Disruptive Strategy
Economics for Managers
Entrepreneurship Essentials
Financial Accounting
Global Business
Launching Tech Ventures
Leadership Principles
Leadership, Ethics, and Corporate Accountability
Leading Change and Organizational Renewal
Leading with Finance
Management Essentials
Negotiation Mastery
Organizational Leadership
Power and Influence for Positive Impact
Strategy Execution
Sustainable Business Strategy
Sustainable Investing
Winning with Digital Platforms

5 Examples of Design Thinking in Business

Business team engaging in design thinking

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.

Access your free e-book today.

What Is Design Thinking?

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

The four stages of the design thinking process: clarify, ideate, develop, and implement

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.

Design Thinking and Innovation | Uncover creative solutions to your business problems | Learn More

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.

Which HBS Online Entrepreneurship and Innovation Course is Right for You? | Download Your Free Flowchart

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.

About the Author

May 27, 2013

50 Design Problems In 50 Days: Real Empathy For Innovation (Part 1)

11 min read
UX , Prototyping , UX , User Research
Share on Twitter , LinkedIn

About The Author

Peter Smart is a designer, speaker and writer from the UK. He recently travelled 2517 miles to try and solve 50 problems in 50 days using design. He now … More about Pete ↬

Email Newsletter

Weekly tips on front-end & UX . Trusted by 200,000+ folks.

I recently travelled 2517 miles to try to solve 50 problems in 50 days using design — a journey that would challenge me to fundamentally rethink my understanding of the user-experience design process.

I set myself a challenge. I wanted to test the limits of design’s ability to solve problems — big and small. To do this, I left the comfort of my computer chair and set out into the unknown. Each day, I had 24 hours to observe a problem, attempt to solve it and then communicate the solution .

On my own shoestring budget, from grimy backstreet hostels to bustling cities, I travelled Europe attempting to solve a different social problem that I observed every day. The project itself was an incredible experience. Some days, my solutions were OK, some days I failed, and some days the solutions were great. The point, however, was not to succeed, but to get up every day and try again — even when I had failed the day before.

The adventure taught me an unbelievable amount about design’s power to solve problems and about my own capacities as a designer. Importantly, it honed my ability to think through and tackle problems rapidly.

In the first of three articles, I’ll share what travelling from the bustling metropolis of London to the cobbled backstreets of Turin taught me about the design process and about the power of empathy to foster innovation .

Tube Congestion

It was day 19 of my 50-day adventure. I found myself dashing to catch an underground train, running until I arrived at the station to find a sea of people crammed onto the platform. There were problems on the line, and trains were delayed. Surveying the scene, I decided to make this my problem for the day.

I took a step back, analyzed the situation in front of me and got to work. Having started my own design consultancy at 15 years old and now consulting as a user-experience lead, I knew how I would start:

Observe . I examined the flow of people, watched them jostle for position and looked at the methods of entry and exit from the platform.
Analyze . I calculated the time between trains, counted the number of people waiting to board and tried to identify patterns in the way people behaved.
Interview . I spoke to people waiting to board, asked them how they felt and what would make this experience better.

I collected as much useful information as I could about the way people were engaging with the service…

… and came up with nothing.

At best, I had some pretty predictable solutions, chief of which was simply to increase the number of trains — a solution that hardly felt adequate.

Frustrated, I sat down. Then as the next train arrived, opened its doors and let on passengers, I heard a voice bellowing in the distance:

“Move! Come on! Move!”

I looked up to find a hefty underground attendant shouting at commuters. I walked over and asked him what the problem was.

“We can fit more people on the train, but they just won’t get on!”

I thought for a moment.

The next train rolled in.

Passengers started to board.

And I got on.

Immediately, the train pulled away, and I tried to find a place to stand, still surprised that I had decided to board. As I tried to find a spot among the sweaty mass of people, I suddenly understood the real problem.

There was space further down towards the middle of each carriage, enough to fit at least another 10 people. However, people didn’t want to move down the carriages. Instead, they crammed by the doors for fear of not being able to get off at their stop.

Whereas my best design processes had failed, getting on the train revealed the real problem to me as clear as day. I discovered the underlying problem not because I had observed, analyzed or interviewed, but because I had felt it myself.

Real Empathy

Trying to solve 50 problems in 50 days enabled me to realize, among other things, that the constraints of our design process can allow us to neglect a vital tenant of creating truly effective solutions: it can allow us to miss real empathy.

Real empathy is not naturally fostered in focus groups. It’s not uncovered in analytics. It doesn’t start with personas or empathy maps.

Real empathy starts with people .

Innovation Via Immersion

My adventure fundamentally challenged me on how we understand people as part of our design process. The quality of our problem solving is directly linked to our ability to understand the problem. As I tried to tackle a new problem every day, I learned that analysis of people’s behaviours and problems simply wasn’t enough — I had to make them my own .

From sitting with beggars on the streets of Turin (day 42) to getting lost in the streets of Antwerp (day 23) to having no money or energy in Zurich (day 38), my adventures immersed me in unfamiliar situations and enabled me to learn, analyze and solve more effectively than I ever could in isolation.

Empathic research helps us understand our users’ needs beyond the functional, enabling us to develop more appropriate design outcomes. It is one of a raft of valuable processes and tools, on its own seemingly no more important than any other. However, while good designers understand the tools, great designers understand people .

Methods For Anyone And Everyone

Empathic research is not new. Yet, it is too often treated merely as a tool to create new products or as the domain of pin-up design agencies that have the budgets and clients to accommodate this type of critical inquiry. This needn’t be, and simply is not, the case. The best-designed solutions, however small, are born from real understanding of the underlying, complex needs.

We can’t all travel thousands of miles every time we start a new project, and commercial realities constrain the time and resources of our projects. However, gaining a deeper understanding of people doesn’t require allocating drastically more time for ethnographic research or sacrificing other areas of the process.

Below are some of the methods I started to employ on my adventure, with many more picked up along the way. Use them, build on them, and develop your own. Our aim should be to understand people more deeply and, in doing so, to solve their problems more effectively.

Get Into A Cold Sweat

Do everything you can to feel what your audience feels, whether it’s ecstasy, powerlessness or relief. Say you are tasked with creating a journey-planning website. It is too often a temptation to unquestioningly rely on the conventions we’ve accumulated from other designed experiences. Innovation is born out of a natural distrust of convention and a desire to create smarter, more intuitive experiences.

Pick two locations you’ve never been to and try to travel from one to the other without using any technology. You’ll soon have that unnerving feeling of being lost in unfamiliar surroundings. Doing so will surface valuable, first-hand insight into the interventions you’ve relied on when no technology was at hand. How did you find your way? Which landmarks guided you? What processes did you rely on? How can these tools be translated into your service? The empathic research process is grounded in understanding an experience from the user’s perspective. Feeling what your users feel will enable you to understand complex scenarios more intimately and, in doing do, to solve them more effectively.

Interview People Meet People

To gain empathic understanding, rather than distanced analysis, go to meet people where they are — in their environments, not in our labs. Focus groups give us some insight into people’s experiences, but they can’t enable true understanding. We’re aware that experiences are felt: they are predominantly emotional not rational. By asking people to communicate their experiences in our settings, we are asking them to rationalise their thoughts and actions. This can never paint an totally accurate picture.

Rather than interviewing users, we should look to meet people. Take creating an e-commerce website for a bathroom retailer. Go down to a showroom and watch how people interact with the products. Meeting people in their environments allows us not only to ask them what they think of the products in front of them, but to physically see how they form their opinions . What stages of decision-making did they go through? Where were they looking? What did they compare the product to in order to reach their decision? These insights will inevitably inform better decisions and foster more intuitive results.

Everyone Is A Designer

If empathic research teaches us anything, it’s to be humble and realize that everyone on the planet is a designer — and is usually better at solving problems than we are . We all commit deliberate acts of organization to overcome problems, from the way we arrange our desks to the way we use a window to catch our reflection. Empathic investigation helps us to observe the ways in which people are already overcoming obstacles, and it often uncovers solutions that are more elegant than we’d expect.

Trying to design a daily news-feed mobile app? Walk into any library and spend some time looking at how people physically interact with information. From bending page corners into bookmarks, to underlining in pencil to make scanning faster, to positioning journals side by side for easier cross-referencing, once you start to really look, you’ll gain insights that enable you to combine people’s half-solutions into even more useful experiences.

Prototype In Situ

When we try to consolidate what we’ve learnt into design decisions, we do so in our studios, often on our high quality screens. Try picking up your pen, getting out of the office and finding a location in which someone might typically use the service you’re creating. Now try to design. You’ll soon have to deal with the same distractions, complications and restrictions that some of your users face. How does that affect your design decisions?

There are many more techniques for getting under people’s skin, but these are just a few to start. Ultimately, empathic research is not about asking users what they want, but about understanding their needs for ourselves.

The Solution… Not Quite

So, what was the result of getting on that underground train, being squashed among busy commuters and feeling people’s anxiety for myself?

Initially, the result was another pretty predictable solution .

I leveraged the closing of the train doors to suggest that people move closer together. This didn’t feel good enough — more like a public-service announcement than an effective solution.

The Solution: Play

So, I thought harder, drawing on my experiences and instinctive responses, and I ended up asking myself the question, “How can I turn a logistical problem into an enjoyable experience that people actually want to engage with?”

The solution? To introduce “play”. I transformed the floors of the underground carriage into a game of Monopoly. Rather than standing in jail, people are encouraged to move down the carriage, towards Mayfair — an engaging and participatory solution to a complex problem.

Since being published, 50 Problems in 50 Days has received some super press and some unexpected awards. This particular solution was one of the most discussed and has been one of the most widely shared.

Empathetic understanding is a vital tool in fostering innovation. If we can better understand the people we are designing for, the better our decisions, designs and results will be. Travelling 2517 miles taught me that if we wish to innovate, we must go beyond analyzing people’s experiences and try and make them our own.

Understanding people better often requires us to get outside and get our hands dirty but, in doing so, allows us to better analyze and solve. In the words of Diego Rodriguez , partner at IDEO:

"In doing, there is knowing. Doing is the resolution of knowing."

Thanks for reading. Stay tuned for more problems, solutions and learning from my 2517-mile adventure. In part two, I’ll describe how trying to solve 50 problems in 50 days taught me it’s OK to be an utter fool… and how it’s OK for you to be one, too.

Smashing Newsletter

Tips on front-end & UX, delivered weekly in your inbox. Just the things you can actually use.

Front-End & UX Workshops, Online

With practical takeaways, live sessions, video recordings and a friendly Q&A.

TypeScript in 50 Lessons

Everything TypeScript, with code walkthroughs and examples. And other printed books.

Reviews / Why join our community?
For companies
Frequently asked questions

Creative Problem Solving

What is creative problem solving.

Creative problem solving (CPS) is a process that design teams use to generate ideas and solutions in their work. Designers and design teams apply an approach where they clarify a problem to understand it, ideate to generate good solutions, develop the most promising one, and implement it to create a successful solution for their brand’s users.

An illustration of a tilted square showing a process in motion with Clarify, Ideate, Develop and Implement shown on it.

Why is Creative Problem Solving in UX Design Important?

Creative thinking and problem solving are core parts of user experience (UX) design. Note: the abbreviation “CPS” can also refer to cyber-physical systems. Creative problem solving might sound somewhat generic or broad. However, it’s an ideation approach that’s extremely useful across many industries.

Not strictly a UX design-related approach, creative problem solving has its roots in psychology and education. Alex Osborn—who founded the Creative Education Foundation and devised brainstorming techniques—produced this approach to creative thinking in the 1940s. Along with Sid Parnes, he developed the Osborn-Parnes Creative Problem Solving Process. It was a new, systematic approach to problem solving and creativity fostering.

Diagram of CPS process showing Fact finding, Idea finding and Solution finding with 12 sub-sections.

Osborn’s CPS Process.

The main focus of the creative problem solving model is to improve creative thinking and generate novel solutions to problems. An important distinction exists between it and a UX design process such as design thinking. It’s that designers consider user needs in creative problem solving techniques, but they don’t necessarily have to make their users’ needs the primary focus. For example, a design team might trigger totally novel ideas from random stimuli—as opposed to working systematically from the initial stages of empathizing with their users. Even so, creative problem solving methods still tend to follow a process with structured stages.

What are 4 Stages of Creative Problem Solving?

The model, adapted from Osborn’s original, typically features these steps:

Clarify: Design teams first explore the area they want to find a solution within. They work to spot the challenge, problem or even goal they want to identify. They also start to collect data or information about it. It’s vital to understand the exact nature of the problem at this stage. So, design teams must build a clear picture of the issue they seek to tackle creatively. When they define the problem like this, they can start to question it with potential solutions.

Ideate: Now that the team has a grasp of the problem that faces them, they can start to work to come up with potential solutions. They think divergently in brainstorming sessions and other ways to solve problems creatively, and approach the problem from as many angles as they can.

Develop: Once the team has explored the potential solutions, they evaluate these and find the strongest and weakest qualities in each. Then, they commit to the one they decide is the best option for the problem at hand.

Implement: Once the team has decided on the best fit for what they want to use, they discuss how to put this solution into action. They gauge its acceptability for stakeholders. Plus, they develop an accurate understanding of the activities and resources necessary to see it become a real, bankable solution.

What Else does CPS Involve?

A diagram showing Divergent and Convergent thinking as a process between a problem and solution.

Two keys to the enterprise of creative problem solving are:

Divergent Thinking

This is an ideation mode which designers leverage to widen their design space when they start to search for potential solutions. They generate as many new ideas as possible using various methods. For example, team members might use brainstorming or bad ideas to explore the vast area of possibilities. To think divergently means to go for:

Quantity over quality: Teams generate ideas without fear of judgment (critically evaluating these ideas comes later).

Novel ideas: Teams use disruptive and lateral thinking to break away from linear thinking and strive for truly original and extraordinary ideas.

Choice creation: The freedom to explore the design space helps teams maximize their options, not only regarding potential solutions but also about how they understand the problem itself.

Author and Human-Computer Interactivity Expert, Professor Alan Dix explains some techniques that are helpful for divergent thinking:

Transcript loading…

Convergent Thinking

This is the complementary half of the equation. In this ideation mode, designers analyze, filter, evaluate, clarify and modify the ideas they generated during divergent thinking. They use analytical, vertical and linear thinking to isolate novel and useful ideas, understand the design space possibilities and get nearer to potential solutions that will work best. The purpose with convergent thinking is to carefully and creatively:

Look past logical norms (which people use in everyday critical thinking).

Examine how an idea stands in relation to the problem.

Understand the real dimensions of that problem.

Professor Alan Dix explains convergent thinking in this video:

What are the Benefits of Creative Problem Solving?

Design teams especially can benefit from this creative approach to problem solving because it:

Empowers teams to arrive at a fine-grained definition of the problem they need to ideate over in a given situation.

Gives a structured, learnable way to conduct problem-solving activities and direct them towards the most fruitful outcomes.

Involves numerous techniques such as brainstorming and SCAMPER, so teams have more chances to explore the problem space more thoroughly.

Can lead to large numbers of possible solutions thanks to a dedicated balance of divergent and convergent thinking.

Values and nurtures designers and teams to create innovative design solutions in an accepting, respectful atmosphere.

Is a collaborative approach that enables multiple participants to contribute—which makes for a positive environment with buy-in from those who participate.

Enables teams to work out the most optimal solution available and examine all angles carefully before they put it into action.

Is applicable in various contexts—such as business, arts and education—as well as in many areas of life in general.

It’s especially crucial to see the value of creative problem solving in how it promotes out-of-the-box thinking as one of the valuable ingredients for teams to leverage.

Watch as Professor Alan Dix explains how to think outside the box:

How to Conduct Creative Problem Solving Best?

It’s important to point out that designers should consider—and stick to—some best practices when it comes to applying creative problem solving techniques. They should also adhere to some “house rules,” which the facilitator should define in no uncertain terms at the start of each session. So, designers and design teams should:

Define the chief goal of the problem-solving activity: Everyone involved should be on the same page regarding their objective and what they want to achieve, why it’s essential to do it and how it aligns with the values of the brand. For example, SWOT analysis can help with this. Clarity is vital in this early stage. Before team members can hope to work on ideating for potential solutions, they must recognize and clearly identify what the problem to tackle is.

Have access to accurate information: A design team must be up to date with the realities that their brand faces, realities that their users and customers face, as well as what’s going on in the industry and facts about their competitors. A team must work to determine what the desired outcome is, as well as what the stakeholders’ needs and wants are. Another factor to consider in detail is what the benefits and risks of addressing a scenario or problem are—including the pros and cons that stakeholders and users would face if team members direct their attention on a particular area or problem.

Suspend judgment: This is particularly important for two main reasons. For one, participants can challenge assumptions that might be blocking healthy ideation when they suggest ideas or elements of ideas that would otherwise seem of little value through a “traditional” lens. Second, if everyone’s free to suggest ideas without constraints, it promotes a calmer environment of acceptance—and so team members will be more likely to ideate better. Judgment will come later, in convergent thinking when the team works to tighten the net around the most effective solution. So, everyone should keep to positive language and encourage improvisational tactics—such as “yes…and”—so ideas can develop well.

Balance divergent and convergent thinking: It’s important to know the difference between the two styles of thinking and when to practice them. This is why in a session like brainstorming, a facilitator must take control of proceedings and ensure the team engages in distinct divergent and convergent thinking sessions.

Approach problems as questions: For example, “How Might We” questions can prompt team members to generate a great deal of ideas. That’s because they’re open-ended—as opposed to questions with “yes” or “no” answers. When a team frames a problem so freely, it permits them to explore far into the problem space so they can find the edges of the real matter at hand.

An illustration showing the How Might We Formula with an example.

UX Strategist and Consultant, William Hudson explains “How Might We” questions in this video:

Use a variety of ideation methods: For example, in the divergent stage, teams can apply methods such as random metaphors or bad ideas to venture into a vast expanse of uncharted territory. With random metaphors, a team prompts innovation by drawing creative associations. With bad ideas, the point is to come up with ideas that are weird, wild and outrageous, as team members can then determine if valuable points exist in the idea—or a “bad” idea might even expose flaws in conventional ways of seeing problems and situations.

Professor Alan Dix explains important points about bad ideas:

Copyright holder: William Heath Robinson. Appearance time: 1:30 - 1:33 Copyright license and terms: Public domain. Link: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/c9/William_Heath_Robinson_Inventions_-_Page_142.png
Copyright holder: Rev Stan. Appearance time: 1:40 - 1:44 Copyright license and terms: CC BY 2.0 Link: As yummy as chocolate teapot courtesy of Choccywoccydoodah… _ Flickr.html
Copyright holder: Fabel. Appearance time: 7:18 - 7:24 Copyright license and terms: CC BY-SA 3.0 Link: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Hammer_nails_smithonian.jpg
Copyright holder: Marcus Hansson. Appearance time: 05:54 - 05:58 Copyright license and terms: CC BY 2.0 Link: https://www.flickr.com/photos/marcus_hansson/7758775386

What Special Considerations Should Designers Have for CPS?

Creative problem solving isn’t the only process design teams consider when thinking of potential risks. Teams that involve themselves in ideation sessions can run into problems, especially if they aren’t aware of them. Here are the main areas to watch:

Bias is natural and human. Unfortunately, it can get in the way of user research and prevent a team from being truly creative and innovative. What’s more, it can utterly hinder the iterative process that should drive creative ideas to the best destinations. Bias takes many forms. It can rear its head without a design team member even realizing it. So, it’s vital to remember this and check it. One team member may examine an angle of the problem at hand and unconsciously view it through a lens. Then, they might voice a suggestion without realizing how they might have framed it for team members to hear. Another risk is that other team members might, for example, apply confirmation bias and overlook important points about potential solutions because they’re not in line with what they’re looking for.

Professor Alan Dix explains bias and fixation as obstacles in creative problem solving examples, and how to overcome them:

Conventionalism

Even in the most hopeful ideation sessions, there’s the risk that some team members may slide back to conventional ways to address a problem. They might climb back inside “the box” and not even realize it. That’s why it’s important to mindfully explore new idea territories around the situation under scrutiny and not merely toy with the notion while clinging to a default “traditional” approach, just because it’s the way the brand or others have “always done things.”

Dominant Personalities and Rank Pulling

As with any group discussion, it’s vital for the facilitator to ensure that everyone has the chance to contribute. Team members with “louder” personalities can dominate the discussions and keep quieter members from offering their thoughts. Plus, without a level playing field, it can be hard for more junior members to join in without feeling a sense of talking out of place or even a fear of reprisal for disagreeing with senior members.

Another point is that ideation sessions naturally involve asking many questions, which can bring on two issues. First, some individuals may over-defend their ideas as they’re protective of them. Second, team members may feel self-conscious as they might think if they ask many questions that it makes them appear frivolous or unintelligent. So, it’s vital for facilitators to ensure that all team members can speak up and ask away, both in divergent thinking sessions when they can offer ideas and convergent thinking sessions when they analyze others’ ideas.

Premature Commitment

Another potential risk to any creativity exercise is that once a team senses a solution is the “best” one, everyone can start to shut off and overlook the chance that an alternative may still arise. This could be a symptom of ideation fatigue or a false consensus that a proposed solution is infallible. So, it’s vital that team members keep open minds and try to catch potential issues with the best-looking solution as early as possible. The key is an understanding of the need for iteration—something that’s integral to the design thinking process, for example.

A diagram of the 5-stage Design Thinking Process.

Overall, creative problem solving can help give a design team the altitude—and attitude—they need to explore the problem and solution spaces thoroughly. Team members can leverage a range of techniques to trawl through the hordes of possibilities that exist for virtually any design scenario. As with any method or tool, though, it takes mindful application and awareness of potential hazards to wield it properly. The most effective creative problem-solving sessions will be ones that keep “creative,” “problem” and “solving” in sharp focus until what emerges for the target audience proves to be more than the sum of these parts.

Learn More About Creative Problem Solving

Take our course, Creativity: Methods to Design Better Products and Services .

Watch our Master Class Harness Your Creativity To Design Better Products with Alan Dix, Professor, Author and Creativity Expert.

Read our piece, 10 Simple Ideas to Get Your Creative Juices Flowing .

Go to Exploring the Art of Innovation: Design Thinking vs. Creative Problem Solving by Marcino Waas for further details.

Consult Creative Problem Solving by Harrison Stamell for more insights.

Read The Osborn Parnes Creative Problem-Solving Process by Leigh Espy for additional information.

See History of the creative problem-solving process by Jo North for more on the history of Creative Problem Solving.

Questions about Creative Problem Solving

To start with, work to understand the user’s needs and pain points. Do your user research—interviews, surveys and observations are helpful, for instance. Analyze this data so you can spot patterns and insights. Define the problem clearly—and it needs to be extremely clear for the solution to be able to address it—and make sure it lines up with the users’ goals and your project’s objectives.

You and your design team might hold a brainstorming session. It could be a variation such as brainwalking—where you move about the room ideating—or brainwriting, where you write down ideas. Alternatively, you could try generating weird and wonderful notions in a bad ideas ideation session.

There’s a wealth of techniques you can use. In any case, engage stakeholders in brainstorming sessions to bring different perspectives on board the team’s trains of thought. What’s more, you can use tools like a Problem Statement Template to articulate the problem concisely.

Take our course, Creativity: Methods to Design Better Products and Services .

Watch as Author and Human-Computer Interaction Expert, Professor Alan Dix explains important points about bad ideas:

Some things you might try are: 1. Change your environment: A new setting can stimulate fresh ideas. So, take a walk, visit a different room, or work outside.

2. Try to break the problem down into smaller parts: Focus on just one piece at a time—that should make the task far less overwhelming. Use techniques like mind mapping so you can start to visualize connections and come up with ideas.

3. Step away from work and indulge in activities that relax your mind: Is it listening to music for you? Or how about drawing? Or exercising? Whatever it is, if you break out of your routine and get into a relaxation groove, it can spark new thoughts and perspectives.

4. Collaborate with others: Discuss the problem with colleagues, stakeholders, or—as long as you don’t divulge sensitive information or company secrets—friends. It can help you to get different viewpoints, and sometimes those new angles and fresh perspectives can help unlock a solution.

5. Set aside dedicated time for creative thinking: Take time to get intense with creativity; prevent distractions and just immerse yourself in the problem as fully as you can with your team. Use techniques like brainstorming or the "Six Thinking Hats" to travel around the problem space and explore a wealth of angles.

Remember, a persistent spirit and an open mind are key; so, keep experimenting with different approaches until you get that breakthrough.

Watch as Professor Alan Dix explains important aspects of creativity and how to handle creative blocks:

Read our piece, 10 Simple Ideas to Get Your Creative Juices Flowing .

Watch as Professor Alan Dix explains the Six Thinking Hats ideation technique.

Creative thinking is about coming up with new and innovative ideas by looking at problems from different angles—and imagining solutions that are truly fresh and unique. It takes an emphasis on divergent thinking to get “out there” and be original in the problem space. You can use techniques like brainstorming, mind mapping and free association to explore hordes of possibilities, many of which might be “hiding” in obscure corners of your—or someone on your team’s—imagination.

Critical thinking is at the other end of the scale. It’s the convergent half of the divergent-convergent thinking approach. In that approach, once the ideation team have hauled in a good catch of ideas, it’s time for team members to analyze and evaluate these ideas to see how valid and effective each is. Everyone strives to consider the evidence, draw logical connections and eliminate any biases that could be creeping in to cloud judgments. Accuracy, sifting and refining are watchwords here.

Watch as Professor Alan Dix explains divergent and convergent thinking:

The tools you can use are in no short supply, and they’re readily available and inexpensive, too. Here are a few examples:

Tools like mind maps are great ways to help you visualize ideas and make connections between them and elements within them. Try sketching out your thoughts and see how they relate to each other—you might discover unexpected gems, or germs of an idea that can splinter into something better, with more thought and development.

The SCAMPER technique is another one you can try. It can help you catapult your mind into a new idea space as you Substitute, Combine, Adapt, Modify, Put to another use, Eliminate, and Reverse aspects of the problem you’re considering.

The “5 Whys” technique is a good one to drill down to root causes with. Once you’ve spotted a problem, you can start working your way back to see what’s behind it. Then you do the same to work back to the cause of the cause. Keep going; usually five times will be enough to see what started the other problems as the root cause.

Watch as the Father of UX Design, Don Norman explains the 5 Whys technique:

Read all about SCAMPER in our topic definition of it.

It’s natural for some things to get in the way of being creative in the face of a problem. It can be challenging enough to ideate creatively on your own, but it’s especially the case in group settings. Here are some common obstacles:

1. Fear of failure or appearing “silly”: when people worry about making mistakes or sounding silly, they avoid taking risks and exploring new ideas. This fear stifles creativity. That’s why ideation sessions like bad ideas are so valuable—it turns this fear on its head.

2. Rigid thinking: This can also raise itself as a high and thick barrier. If someone in an ideation session clings to established ways to approach problems (and potential solutions), it can hamper their ability to see different perspectives, let alone agree with them. They might even comment critically to dampen what might just be the brightest way forward. It takes an open mind and an awareness of one’s own bias to overcome this.

3. Time pressure and resource scarcity: When a team has tight deadlines to work to, they may rush to the first workable solution and ignore a wide range of possibilities where the true best solution might be hiding. That’s why stakeholders and managers should give everyone enough time—as well as any needed tools, materials and support—to ideate and experiment. The best solution is in everybody’s interest, after all.

It takes a few ingredients to get the environment just right for creative problem solving:

Get in the mood for creativity: This could be a relaxing activity before you start your session, or a warm-up activity in the room. Then, later, encourage short breaks—they can rejuvenate the mind and help bring on fresh insights.

Get the physical environment just right for creating problem solving: You and your team will want a comfortable and flexible workspace—preferably away from your workstations. Make sure the room is one where people can collaborate easily and also where they can work quietly. A meeting room is good as it will typically have room for whiteboards and comfortable space for group discussion. Note: you’ll also need sticky notes and other art supplies like markers.

Make the atmosphere conducive for creative problem solving: Someone will need to play facilitator so everyone has some ground rules to work with. Encourage everyone to share ideas, that all ideas are valuable, and that egos and seniority have no place in the room. Of course, this may take some enforcement and repetition—especially as "louder" team members may try to dominate proceedings, anyway, and others may be self-conscious about sounding "ridiculous."

Make sure you’ve got a diverse team: Diversity means different perspectives, which means richer and more innovative solutions can turn up. So, try to include individuals with different backgrounds, skills and viewpoints—sometimes, non-technical mindsets can spot ideas and points in a technical realm, which experienced programmers might miss, for instance.

Watch our Master Class Harness Your Creativity To Design Better Products with Alan Dix, Professor, Author and Creativity Expert.

Ideating alone? Watch as Professor Alan Dix gives valuable tips about how to nurture creativity:

Copyright holder: GerritR. Appearance time: 6:54 - 6:59 Copyright license and terms: CC-BY-SA-4.0 Link: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Blick_auf_das_Dylan_Thomas_Boathouse_und_die_Trichterm%C3%BCndung_des_Taf,_Wales.jpg

Research plays a crucial role in any kind of creative problem solving, and in creative problem solving itself it’s about collecting information about the problem—and, by association, the users themselves. You and your team members need to have a well-defined grasp of what you’re facing before you can start reaching out into the wide expanses of the idea space.

Research helps you lay down a foundation of knowledge and avoid reinventing the wheel. Also, if you study existing solutions and industry trends, you’ll be able to understand what has worked before and what hasn't.

What’s more, research is what will validate the ideas that come out of your ideation efforts. From testing concepts and prototypes with real users, you’ll get precious input about your creative solutions so you can fine-tune them to be innovative and practical—and give users what they want in a way that’s fresh and successful.

Watch as UX Strategist and Consultant, William Hudson explains important points about user research:

First, it’s crucial for a facilitator to make sure the divergent stage of the creative problem solving is over and your team is on to the convergent stage. Only then should any analysis happen.

If others are being critical of your creative solutions, listen carefully and stay open-minded. Look on it as a chance to improve, and don’t take it personally. Indeed, the session facilitator should moderate to make sure everyone understands the nature of constructive criticism.

If something’s unclear, be sure to ask the team member to be more specific, so you can understand their points clearly.

Then, reflect on what you’ve heard. Is it valid? Something you can improve or explain? For example, in a bad ideas session, there may be an aspect of your idea that you can develop among the “bad” parts surrounding it.

So, if you can, clarify any misunderstandings and explain your thought process. Just stay positive and calm and explain things to your critic and other team member. The insights you’ve picked up may strengthen your solution and help to refine it.

Last—but not least—make sure you hear multiple perspectives. When you hear from different team members, chances are you’ll get a balanced view. It can also help you spot common themes and actionable improvements you might make.

Watch as Todd Zaki Warfel, Author, Speaker and Leadership Coach, explains how to present design ideas to clients, a valuable skill in light of discussing feedback from stakeholders.

Lateral thinking is a technique where you approach problems from new and unexpected angles. It encourages you to put aside conventional step-by-step logic and get “out there” to explore creative and unorthodox solutions. Author, physician and commentator Edward de Bono developed lateral thinking as a way to help break free from traditional patterns of thought.

In creative problem solving, you can use lateral thinking to come up with truly innovative ideas—ones that standard logical processes might overlook. It’s about bypassing these so you can challenge assumptions and explore alternatives that point you and your team to breakthrough solutions.

You can use techniques like brainstorming to apply lateral thinking and access ideas that are truly “outside the box” and what your team, your brand and your target audience really need to work on.

Professor Alan Dix explains lateral thinking in this video:

1. Baer, J. (2012). Domain Specificity and The Limits of Creativity Theory . The Journal of Creative Behavior, 46(1), 16–29. John Baer's influential paper challenged the notion of a domain-general theory of creativity and argued for the importance of considering domain-specific factors in creative problem solving. This work has been highly influential in shaping the understanding of creativity as a domain-specific phenomenon and has implications for the assessment and development of creativity in various domains.

2. Runco, M. A., & Jaeger, G. J. (2012). The Standard Definition of Creativity . Creativity Research Journal, 24(1), 92–96. Mark A. Runco and Gerard J. Jaeger's paper proposed a standard definition of creativity, which has been widely adopted in the field. They defined creativity as the production of original and effective ideas, products, or solutions that are appropriate to the task at hand. This definition has been influential in providing a common framework for creativity research and assessment.

1. Fogler, H. S., LeBlanc, S. E., & Rizzo, B. (2014). Strategies for Creative Problem Solving (3rd ed.). Prentice Hall.

This book focuses on developing creative problem-solving strategies, particularly in engineering and technical contexts. It introduces various heuristic problem-solving techniques, optimization methods, and design thinking principles. The authors provide a systematic framework for approaching ill-defined problems, generating and implementing solutions, and evaluating the outcomes. With its practical exercises and real-world examples, this book has been influential in equipping professionals and students with the skills to tackle complex challenges creatively.

2. De Bono, E. (1985). Six Thinking Hats . Little, Brown and Company.

Edward de Bono's Six Thinking Hats introduces a powerful technique for parallel thinking and decision-making. The book outlines six different "hats" or perspectives that individuals can adopt to approach a problem or situation from various angles. This structured approach encourages creative problem-solving by separating different modes of thinking, such as emotional, logical, and creative perspectives. De Bono's work has been highly influential in promoting lateral thinking and providing a practical framework for group problem solving.

3. Osborn, A. F. (1963). Applied Imagination: Principles and Procedures of Creative Problem-Solving (3rd ed.). Charles Scribner's Sons.

Alex F. Osborn's Applied Imagination is a pioneering work that introduced the concept of brainstorming and other creative problem-solving techniques. Osborn emphasized how important it is to defer judgment and generate a large quantity of ideas before evaluating them. This book laid the groundwork for many subsequent developments in the field of creative problem-solving, and it’s been influential in promoting the use of structured ideation processes in various domains.

Answer a Short Quiz to Earn a Gift

What is the first stage in the creative problem-solving process?

Implementation
Idea Generation
Problem Identification

Which technique is commonly used during the idea generation stage of creative problem-solving?

Brainstorming
Prototyping

What is the main purpose of the evaluation stage in creative problem-solving?

To generate as many ideas as possible
To implement the solution
To assess the feasibility and effectiveness of ideas

In the creative problem-solving process, what often follows after implementing a solution?

Testing and Refinement

Which stage in the creative problem-solving process focuses on generating multiple possible solutions?

Better luck next time!

Do you want to improve your UX / UI Design skills? Join us now

Congratulations! You did amazing

You earned your gift with a perfect score! Let us send it to you.

Check Your Inbox

We’ve emailed your gift to [email protected] .

Literature on Creative Problem Solving

Here’s the entire UX literature on Creative Problem Solving by the Interaction Design Foundation, collated in one place:

Learn more about Creative Problem Solving

Take a deep dive into Creative Problem Solving with our course Creativity: Methods to Design Better Products and Services .

The overall goal of this course is to help you design better products, services and experiences by helping you and your team develop innovative and useful solutions. You’ll learn a human-focused, creative design process.

We’re going to show you what creativity is as well as a wealth of ideation methods ―both for generating new ideas and for developing your ideas further. You’ll learn skills and step-by-step methods you can use throughout the entire creative process. We’ll supply you with lots of templates and guides so by the end of the course you’ll have lots of hands-on methods you can use for your and your team’s ideation sessions. You’re also going to learn how to plan and time-manage a creative process effectively.

Most of us need to be creative in our work regardless of if we design user interfaces, write content for a website, work out appropriate workflows for an organization or program new algorithms for system backend. However, we all get those times when the creative step, which we so desperately need, simply does not come. That can seem scary—but trust us when we say that anyone can learn how to be creative on demand . This course will teach you ways to break the impasse of the empty page. We'll teach you methods which will help you find novel and useful solutions to a particular problem, be it in interaction design, graphics, code or something completely different. It’s not a magic creativity machine, but when you learn to put yourself in this creative mental state, new and exciting things will happen.

In the “Build Your Portfolio: Ideation Project” , you’ll find a series of practical exercises which together form a complete ideation project so you can get your hands dirty right away. If you want to complete these optional exercises, you will get hands-on experience with the methods you learn and in the process you’ll create a case study for your portfolio which you can show your future employer or freelance customers.

Your instructor is Alan Dix . He’s a creativity expert, professor and co-author of the most popular and impactful textbook in the field of Human-Computer Interaction. Alan has worked with creativity for the last 30+ years, and he’ll teach you his favorite techniques as well as show you how to make room for creativity in your everyday work and life.

You earn a verifiable and industry-trusted Course Certificate once you’ve completed the course. You can highlight it on your resume , your LinkedIn profile or your website .

All open-source articles on Creative Problem Solving

10 simple ideas to get your creative juices flowing.

4 years ago

Open Access—Link to us!

We believe in Open Access and the democratization of knowledge . Unfortunately, world-class educational materials such as this page are normally hidden behind paywalls or in expensive textbooks.

If you want this to change , cite this page , link to us, or join us to help us democratize design knowledge !

Privacy Settings

Our digital services use necessary tracking technologies, including third-party cookies, for security, functionality, and to uphold user rights. Optional cookies offer enhanced features, and analytics.

Experience the full potential of our site that remembers your preferences and supports secure sign-in.

Governs the storage of data necessary for maintaining website security, user authentication, and fraud prevention mechanisms.

Enhanced Functionality

Saves your settings and preferences, like your location, for a more personalized experience.

Referral Program

We use cookies to enable our referral program, giving you and your friends discounts.

Error Reporting

We share user ID with Bugsnag and NewRelic to help us track errors and fix issues.

Optimize your experience by allowing us to monitor site usage. You’ll enjoy a smoother, more personalized journey without compromising your privacy.

Analytics Storage

Collects anonymous data on how you navigate and interact, helping us make informed improvements.

Differentiates real visitors from automated bots, ensuring accurate usage data and improving your website experience.

Lets us tailor your digital ads to match your interests, making them more relevant and useful to you.

Advertising Storage

Stores information for better-targeted advertising, enhancing your online ad experience.

Personalization Storage

Permits storing data to personalize content and ads across Google services based on user behavior, enhancing overall user experience.

Advertising Personalization

Allows for content and ad personalization across Google services based on user behavior. This consent enhances user experiences.

Enables personalizing ads based on user data and interactions, allowing for more relevant advertising experiences across Google services.

Receive more relevant advertisements by sharing your interests and behavior with our trusted advertising partners.

Enables better ad targeting and measurement on Meta platforms, making ads you see more relevant.

Allows for improved ad effectiveness and measurement through Meta’s Conversions API, ensuring privacy-compliant data sharing.

LinkedIn Insights

Tracks conversions, retargeting, and web analytics for LinkedIn ad campaigns, enhancing ad relevance and performance.

LinkedIn CAPI

Enhances LinkedIn advertising through server-side event tracking, offering more accurate measurement and personalization.

Google Ads Tag

Tracks ad performance and user engagement, helping deliver ads that are most useful to you.

Share Knowledge, Get Respect!

or copy link

Cite according to academic standards

Simply copy and paste the text below into your bibliographic reference list, onto your blog, or anywhere else. You can also just hyperlink to this page.

New to UX Design? We’re Giving You a Free ebook!

Download our free ebook The Basics of User Experience Design to learn about core concepts of UX design.

In 9 chapters, we’ll cover: conducting user interviews, design thinking, interaction design, mobile UX design, usability, UX research, and many more!

Data Science
Data Analysis
Data Visualization
Machine Learning
Deep Learning
Computer Vision
Artificial Intelligence
AI ML DS Interview Series
AI ML DS Projects series
Data Engineering
Web Scrapping

Genetic Algorithms and Genetic Programming for Advanced Problem Solving

Genetic algorithms (GAs) and genetic programming (GP) are branches of evolutionary computing, a subset of artificial intelligence where solutions evolve over time to fit a given set of parameters or solve specific problems. These techniques are inspired by the biological concepts of reproduction, mutation, and natural selection.

This article explores some intriguing and practical applications of genetic algorithms and genetic programming across various industries.

Table of Content

Introduction to Genetic Algorithms

Introduction to genetic programming, key principles of evolutionary algorithms, examples in optimization problems, real-world applications of genetic algorithms and genetic programing, tools and libraries for genetic algorithms in python.

Genetic Algorithms (GAs) are optimization techniques inspired by the principles of natural selection and genetics. They operate on a population of potential solutions, evolving these solutions through processes analogous to biological evolution, such as selection, crossover (recombination), and mutation.

Key Components of Genetic Algorithms

Population: A set of candidate solutions.
Chromosomes: Data structures representing solutions, typically encoded as strings of binary or other types of genes.
Fitness Function: A function that evaluates how good a solution is with respect to the problem being solved.
Selection: The process of choosing the fittest individuals to reproduce.
Crossover: The process of combining two parent solutions to produce offspring.
Mutation: The process of making random alterations to offspring to maintain genetic diversity.

Genetic Programming (GP) extends the concept of genetic algorithms to evolve programs or expressions. Instead of evolving a set of parameters or solutions, GP evolves entire programs or expressions that can perform a task or solve a problem.

Key Components of Genetic Programming

Population: A set of programs or expressions.
Fitness Function: A measure of how well a program or expression performs a given task.
Selection, Crossover, and Mutation: Similar to GAs, but applied to program structures or expressions.

Evolutionary Algorithms (EAs), including GAs and GP, are based on several fundamental principles:

Natural Selection: The idea that better solutions are more likely to be selected for reproduction.
Genetic Variation: Diversity in the population is introduced through crossover and mutation to explore a wider solution space.
Survival of the Fittest: Solutions are evaluated based on a fitness function, and the fittest solutions are more likely to be selected for the next generation.

These principles ensure that the algorithm explores a variety of solutions and converges towards optimal or near-optimal solutions.

1. Knapsack Problem

The Knapsack Problem is a classic optimization problem where the goal is to maximize the total value of items placed in a knapsack without exceeding its weight capacity.

GA Approach:

Representation: Items are represented as binary strings, where each bit indicates whether an item is included.
Fitness Function: Evaluates the total value of selected items while penalizing solutions that exceed the weight limit.
Crossover and Mutation: Involve swapping items between solutions or flipping bits to introduce variation.

Example: Solving the 0/1 Knapsack Problem using GAs can yield good approximations even for large instances where exact methods become computationally infeasible.

2. Traveling Salesman Problem (TSP)

The Traveling Salesman Problem involves finding the shortest possible route that visits a set of cities and returns to the origin city.

Representation: Routes are represented as permutations of city indices.
Fitness Function: Measures the total distance of the route.
Crossover and Mutation: Involves techniques like order crossover (OX) and swap mutation to preserve the feasibility of routes.

Example: GAs can effectively solve TSP instances with hundreds of cities, providing near-optimal solutions in a reasonable time frame.

3. Scheduling Problems

Scheduling Problems involve assigning resources to tasks over time, aiming to optimize certain criteria like minimizing completion time or maximizing resource utilization.

Representation: Schedules are represented as sequences or matrices of tasks and resources.
Fitness Function: Measures the quality of the schedule based on criteria like total completion time or resource conflicts.
Crossover and Mutation: Involve swapping tasks or adjusting schedules to explore different configurations.

Example: GAs are used in job-shop scheduling to minimize makespan or in timetabling to ensure conflicts are resolved efficiently.

1. Optimizing Complex Systems

One of the classic applications of genetic algorithms is in optimizing complex systems where traditional approaches might fail due to the vastness of the solution space. For example, GAs have been effectively used in airline industry for scheduling flights and crew assignments, considering numerous constraints and objectives. Similarly, they have been applied to optimize the layout of components on a computer chip, which involves a highly complex configuration space.

2. Automated Design and Creativity

In the field of automated design, GAs can generate innovative solutions to engineering problems. For instance, NASA has used genetic algorithms to design antennae for spacecrafts. These algorithms generated unconventional, asymmetric designs that performed better than the traditional symmetrical ones. Similarly, in architecture, GAs have helped in creating novel building layouts that optimize space utilization and environmental factors like sunlight and airflow.

3. Financial Market Analysis

Genetic algorithms have found a niche in the financial sector for portfolio optimization and algorithmic trading. By simulating numerous investment scenarios, GAs help in identifying the best allocation of assets that maximizes returns and minimizes risks. Moreover, they are used in trading algorithms to predict market movements and execute trades at optimal times.

4. Game Development and AI

In game development, genetic programming has been employed to evolve behaviors for non-player characters (NPCs), making them more challenging and realistic opponents. For example, GAs have been used to develop strategic behaviors in games like chess and Go, where the vast number of possible moves makes brute force approaches impractical.

5. Machine Learning and Data Mining

GAs are increasingly integrated into machine learning workflows, particularly in feature selection and model optimization. By selecting the most relevant features from large datasets, GAs improve the efficiency and accuracy of predictive models. Additionally, they are used to optimize neural network architectures in deep learning without human intervention.

6. Robotics and Autonomous Vehicles

In robotics, genetic programming can automate the design of control systems for autonomous robots, enabling them to adapt to new environments and perform complex tasks without explicit programming. This approach has been instrumental in developing autonomous vehicles, where GAs optimize driving strategies based on real-time data.

Python provides a variety of libraries and tools for implementing genetic algorithms. Here are some popular options:

DEAP (Distributed Evolutionary Algorithms in Python): DEAP is a flexible and efficient library for evolutionary algorithms. It provides tools for defining custom genetic algorithms, including selection, crossover, and mutation operators. The features include customizable operators, easy integration with existing code, and extensive documentation.
PyGAD: PyGAD is a library designed for creating and experimenting with genetic algorithms in Python. It offers an intuitive API and support for various optimization problems. The feature include simple syntax, built-in optimization functions, and support for multi-objective problems.
Genetic Algorithm Library (GALib): GALib is a library specifically focused on genetic algorithms and provides a range of functionalities for implementing and experimenting with GAs. The feature include comprehensive GA components, support for custom fitness functions, and easy configuration.
Scikit-Optimize: Scikit-Optimize extends the Scikit-learn library to include optimization algorithms, including evolutionary algorithms for hyperparameter tuning and other optimization tasks. The features include integration with Scikit-learn, support for various optimization techniques, and user-friendly interface.

Genetic Algorithms and Genetic Programming are powerful tools for solving a wide range of optimization and search problems. By mimicking natural evolution, these techniques can explore large and complex solution spaces to find effective solutions across various domains, including engineering, finance, and biomedicine. The availability of specialized libraries in Python further simplifies the implementation of these algorithms, making them accessible to a broader audience of researchers and practitioners. As technology advances, the integration of GAs and GP with fields like artificial intelligence and machine learning is expected to yield even more innovative solutions to complex challenges.

Please Login to comment...

Improve your Coding Skills with Practice

What kind of Experience do you want to share?

IMAGES

Infographic: Harness the Power of Design Thinking to Retool How You
Design Thinking, Essential Problem Solving 101- It’s More Than
Design Thinking, Essential Problem Solving 101- It’s More Than
Design thinking
Design Thinking, Essential Problem Solving 101- It’s More Than
Creative problem solving in graphic design

VIDEO

Day 1
FLOWCHARTS+EXAMPLE 3&4|CHAPTER 7 ALGORITHM DESIGN&PROBLEM SOLVING|O LEVEL&IGCSE COMPUTER SCIENCE2210
Chemical Reaction Engineering
Designing Destiny: INSD Student Revelations and Reflections
A2-Level (9618)
PROGRAM DEVELOPMENT LIFE CYCLE|CHAPTER 7 ALGORITHM DESIGN&PROBLEM SOLVING|O LEVEL COMPUTER SCIENCE

COMMENTS

Design thinking, explained
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 ...
What Is Design Thinking & Why Is It Important?
What Is Design Thinking? Design thinking is a mindset and approach to problem-solving and innovation anchored around human-centered design.
Design Thinking, Essential Problem Solving 101- It's More Than
Design thinking is a process by which designers approach problem solving. It incorporates analytical, synthetic, divergent and convergent thinking to create a wide number of potential solutions and then narrow these down to a "best fit" solution.
How to solve problems using the design thinking process
Is your team in a creative rut? The design thinking process helps your team focus on human-centric solutions. If your team is looking to solve ambiguous questions or open-ended problems, the design thinking process can help you.
What is Design Thinking?
Design thinking is a non-linear, iterative process that teams use to understand users, challenge assumptions, redefine problems and create innovative solutions.
The 5 Stages in the Design Thinking Process
The Design Thinking process is a human-centered, iterative methodology that designers use to solve problems. It has 5 steps—Empathize, Define, Ideate, Prototype and Test.
What is design thinking?
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.
What Exactly Is Design Thinking? [Updated Guide for 2024]
Design thinking is an approach used for practical and creative problem-solving. It is based heavily on the methods and processes that designers use (hence the name), but it has actually evolved from a range of different fields—including architecture, engineering and business.
What is Design Thinking, and how is it used to problem solve?
Learn how to use design thinking to solve your team's most challenging problems and unlock innovative solutions.
4 Stages of Design Thinking
Design thinking is an approach to problem-solving and innovation that's both user-centric and solutions-based—that is, it focuses on finding solutions instead of problems.
What is the Design Thinking? Definition, Importance ...
Design Thinking is defined as a human-centered approach to innovation and problem-solving that prioritizes understanding the needs of users, generating creative solutions, and iterating through rapid prototyping and testing. Learn more about design thinking importance, examples and process.
What is design thinking and why does it matter?
Design thinking is a problem-solving approach to product development that places an emphasis on the user to help teams identify issues, reframe them, and generate creative solutions. It's a solution-based ideology, process, and collection of hands-on methods to solve complex problems in a user-centric way. Design thinking is most useful for ...
How to solve problems with design thinking
Design thinking is a systemic, intuitive, customer-focused problem-solving approach that can create significant value and boost organizational resilience. The proof is in the pudding: From 2013 to 2018, companies that embraced the business value of design had TSR that were 56 percentage points higher than that of their industry peers.
Stage 2 in the Design Thinking Process: Define the Problem
What is a problem statement and why does it matter in design thinking? Here's all you need to know about stage 2 of the design thinking process.
Design Thinking: A Creative Approach to Problem Solving
Abstract. Design thinking—understanding the human needs related to a problem, reframing the problem in human-centric ways, creating many ideas in brainstorming sessions, and adopting a hands-on approach to prototyping and testing—offers a complementary approach to the rational problem-solving methods typically emphasized in business schools.
What is Design Thinking and Why Is It So Popular?
Design thinking is essentially a problem-solving approach that has the intention to improve products. It helps you assess and analyze known aspects of a problem and identify the more ambiguous or peripheral factors that contribute to the conditions of a problem.
What is design thinking and why is it important?
What is design thinking? Design thinking is a process for solving problems by prioritizing the consumer's needs above all else. It relies on observing, with empathy, how people interact with their environments, and employs an iterative, hands-on approach to creating innovative solutions.
Design Thinking vs Problem-Solving: Understanding the Differences
Design thinking is more about creating new solutions, problem solving is more about finding solutions to existing problems. Design thinking starts by understanding the user's needs and then using that understanding to create new and innovative solutions. Problem-solving, on the other hand, is focused on finding a solution to a specific problem.
5 Examples of Design Thinking in Business
The design thinking process has played a key role in the success of modern organizations. Here are five examples of design thinking in business.
What is a design problem statement and why is it necessary?
Defining the design problem way before generating potential solutions is crucial in the design process as it allows design teams to develop user-centered solutions that are achievable. A problem statement is a clear description of the issue (problem) which also includes a vision and methods used to make ways into solving the problem.
50 Design Problems In 50 Days: Real Empathy For Innovation (Part 1)
I recently travelled 2517 miles to try to solve 50 problems in 50 days using design — a journey that would challenge me to fundamentally rethink my understanding of the user-experience design process. I set myself a challenge. I wanted to test the limits of design's ability to solve problems — big and small.
Creative Problem Solving
Creative problem solving (CPS) is a process that design teams use to generate ideas and solutions in their work. Designers and design teams apply an approach where they clarify a problem to understand it, ideate to generate good solutions, develop the most promising one, and implement it to create a successful solution for their brand's users.
Genetic Algorithms and Genetic Programming for Advanced Problem Solving
2. Automated Design and Creativity. In the field of automated design, GAs can generate innovative solutions to engineering problems. For instance, NASA has used genetic algorithms to design antennae for spacecrafts. These algorithms generated unconventional, asymmetric designs that performed better than the traditional symmetrical ones.

Which program is right for you?

Executive Programs

Design thinking, explained

What is design thinking?

Understand the problem

Involve users

Prototype and test. Repeat.

Implementation

What can design thinking do for your business?

Ready to go deeper?

Related Articles

How to solve problems using the design thinking process

What is the design thinking process?

Anatomy of Work Special Report: How to spot—and overcome—the most crucial enterprise challenges

A non-linear design thinking approach

Why use the design thinking process

Focus on problem solving

Encourages collaboration and teamwork

Foster innovation

The 5 stages of design thinking

1. Empathize stage

2. Define stage

3. Ideate stage

4. Prototype stage

Tips for incorporating the design thinking process into your team

Foster collaborative design thinking with Asana

Related resources

How Asana drives impactful product launches in 3 steps

How to streamline compliance management software with Asana

New site openings: How to reduce costs and delays

Provider onboarding software: Simplify your hiring process

Ready to get started?

What is Design Thinking, and how is it used to problem solve?

What IS design thinking?

How can design thinking help you solve problems?

Putting design thinking into practice

Resources to help you on your design thinking journey

Unlock better solutions with design thinking

Take the struggle out of team communication.

What is design thinking and why does it matter?

Last updated

Design better products with empathy

What is design thinking?

Who is design thinking for?

5 things you need to know about design thinking

1. Design thinking came about as a way to teach engineers how to approach problems creatively—like designers do.

2. Design thinking means approaching a problem with a designer’s mindset, from the user’s perspective.

3. There are 5 principles that are pivotal to design thinking.

4. Design thinking is a solution-based framework, not a problem-focused approach.

5. Design thinking is an iterative and non-linear process that encourages constant experimentation.

How design thinking helps teams build better products

Tackling complex challenges

Moving faster, with iterative speed

Meeting and exceeding customer expectations to ensure customer delight

🔥 How we use the design thinking framework at Hotjar

Minimizing uncertainty and improving confidence in design decisions

Put users at the center of your designs, every time

Why is design thinking important for product development?

How can I practice design thinking?

How to solve problems with design thinking

MORE FROM MCKINSEY

Stage 2 in the Design Thinking Process: Define the Problem

1. What is the define stage and why is it necessary?

Why is the define stage so important?

2. What is a problem statement?

What makes a good problem statement?

3. How to write a meaningful problem statement

Space saturation and group

The four Ws

The five whys

4. What comes after the define phase?

What is design thinking and why is it important?

What is design thinking?

Why is design thinking important?

Aims to solve a concrete human need

Tackles problems that are ambiguous or difficult to define

Leads to more innovative solutions

Makes organizations run faster and more efficiently

The five stages of the design-thinking process

1. Empathize