Design Thinking Explained Step by Step – Including an Example

Design Thinking is a user-centered approach to problem solving and innovation. It is based on three fundamental principles:

While many methods aim to reach decisions quickly, the strength of Design Thinking lies in deliberate, lingering hesitation: before committing to a canonical solution, a shared understanding of the problem must be established.

Even though the Design Thinking process isn’t strictly linear, six phases help create structure. They provide orientation and make it clear what kind of thinking is happening at a given moment.

At the beginning, it is all about understanding. The goal here is to build contextual knowledge and approach the problem space as free of bias as possible.
Typical activities include:

A reasonable first step is a simple question: “What do we actually know – and what are we only assuming?”

In this phase, the behavior of real people is observed. It’s less about what they say and much more about what they do. This includes their actions, routines, and the patterns behind them.
Methods that are considered especially important in this phase include:

The goal is to make implicit needs visible – those things users wouldn’t consciously articulate themselves, but that strongly shape their decisions.

All steps taken up to this point come together to transform raw observations into a structured way of understanding:

In this phase, a Point of View (POV) often emerges as a precisely phrased problem definition. A good POV is usually narrow enough to create focus, and open enough to allow for different solution approaches.

Now it gets creative. The goal isn’t to find the perfect solution right away, but to deliberately expand the space of possibilities.
Helpful methods include:

The quality of ideas usually comes from their diversity. Only later – depending on the specific case – are ideas evaluated, prioritized, and narrowed down.

Prototypes are central artifacts in Design Thinking. They give abstract concepts a tangible form – quickly, lightly, and intentionally imperfect.
Examples include:

A prototype doesn’t have to be beautiful. It just needs to answer one question: “What do we want to achieve, when, and with what means?”

In the final phase of each individual cycle, the solution is tested, observed, and critically questioned:

Testing isn’t a final endpoint, it’s more like feeding insights back into the process. Learnings flow into earlier phases and lead to revised prototypes, new POVs, or further ideas – ad infinitum.

To show how Design Thinking works in practice, let’s look at a simplified example – one that is very similar to something that actually happened:

A university wants to develop a digital tool that helps students organize exams – and, beyond that, supports them in transferring what they’ve learned into future contexts.

Interviews with administrative staff show: processes are fragmented, deadlines are inconsistent, information is hard to find, and the documentation of content is heavily nested.

Close observation shows: students navigate between emails, PDFs, and multiple portals. Many maintain parallel, self-made solutions (notes and spreadsheets in various apps, differing from person to person).

Core problem: the information flow is inconsistent, which leads to stress and unnecessary mistakes. In addition, the fragmented nature of the existing information is highly obstructive.

In this specific case, proposals ranged from a calendar app with built-in chatbot features to automated, context-sensitive reminders aligned with milestones across the entire course of study and extending into the initial transition phase into the job market. All of this was paired with AI-driven connectivity designed to explicitly point beyond the exam period as well.

A simple Click Dummy presented a central dashboard with deadlines, exam registration, and personalized hints. That was enough to test the core functionalities.

Initial tests revealed that students additionally want a to-do list that can be sorted by priorities they set themselves. This was implemented in a subsequent cycle.

The prototype was then refined, tested again, and gradually evolved step by step.

Design Thinking creates a structured space in which people, problems, and possible solutions can enter into a productive dialogue. Within the environment shaped by Design Thinking, it becomes possible to move along new paradigms that deviate from the given norm and to look for viable terrain off the beaten path. At the same time, the method mix of Design Thinking compels you to take real needs seriously and to avoid developing solutions in a vacuum, instead, it pushes you to contextualize them and connect them directly to the underlying problem. In this way, Design Thinking combines empathy with creativity and makes complex problem spaces tangible.

In the end, the most important message of Design Thinking is: “Truly great solutions don’t emerge from linear thinking, but from curious learning, through dialogue, and by iterating a lot.”