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How Design Thinking helps solve complex problems step by step
- Development
- 9 min Read
- 19 May 2025
When you’re faced with a complex problem in a product, service, or workflow, it’s easy to jump right in and fix the problem. But if you skip understanding what your target users need, you’re actually risking building something they won’t use. Guesswork leads to wasted time and effort.
Design thinking is a better approach to figuring things out. It gives you a clear process for uncovering the real problem and building something useful. It cuts through the assumptions and long meetings you have made to create a product, by focusing on real user needs, step by step.
Here I will go over how design thinking helps teams deal with unclear problems and move forward with more focus and speed.
What is Design Thinking?
Design Thinking is a method that designers use to solve problems step by step. It starts with focusing on the people you are designing for. Designers involve users early in the process to understand their needs and behaviors. These insights become the foundation for generating ideas and turning them into reality.
Instead of jumping straight to solutions like a traditional process, it zooms in on:
- What do users need?
- Why are they fighting?
- And how can we solve it in a better and more useful way?
And no, you don’t have to be a designer to use it. Product owners, business leaders, developers, and even government teams use design thinking to break down messy problems and gain clarity.
Key characteristics of Design Thinking:
- Human-centered: It starts and ends with real people.
- Iterative: You test and adjust continuously.
- Collaboration: Multiple perspectives yield better ideas.
- Action-oriented: Focused on doing, not just planning.
The 5 most important steps in the Design Thinking process
Design thinking follows a structure that keeps you moving forward without locking yourself into rigid rules. Let’s break them down:
1. Feel empathy
The first step is to understand your users in depth to design accordingly. Listen to them, observe how they interact with products, see their interests, and learn from their behavior.
You can do this by:
- Conduct their interviews.
- Collaborate with them to find out their needs and pain points.
- Put your assumptions aside to see the problem from their perspective.
The most common techniques:
- Interviews with users
- Contextual investigation
- Mapping empathy
- Observation
2. Define
After gathering insights, the next step is to synthesize them and define the core problem. It’s about turning messy input into a clear, actionable problem. Teams often make the mistake of solving symptoms, not root causes.
It is about:
-
- Analyze user observations to identify patterns.
- Frame the problem in a user-centered way.
The most common techniques:
- Affinity diagram
- Framing the problem statement
- Mapping the user journey
- “How would we” questions
3. Ideas
Once you have a clear picture of the problem, you need to come up with ideas. There is a need to think of as many options as possible, no matter how big or small. Teams from multiple departments, such as product, engineering, marketing, and support, come together to share ideas openly. Remember, no idea is too wild at this stage. Often, the idea that seems simplest works best.
Just brainstorm to explore a variety of ideas without judging them.
-
- Quantity over quality in the beginning.
- Encourage wild ideas.
- Use tools like mind maps or “How can we” questions.
The most common techniques:
- Idea generation
- Mind mapping (Mind mapping)
- SCAMPER Technology
- Sketch
4. Prototype
Once you have an idea, the next step is to create a simple, concrete version of it. This can be sketches or paper models, to see how your idea works in practice. This entire process is known as prototyping. You need to focus on the main features so that you can test specific aspects of the solution.
Prototypes help us to:
- Explore how users interact with the concept
- Find friction points early
- Avoid overinvesting in features that users don’t want
This step allows you to experiment and learn quickly without significant investment.
The most common techniques:
- Paper prototypes
- Wireframes
- Clickable mockups
- Storyboarding (in English)
5. Testing
Finally, test prototypes with real users. This will give you valuable feedback.
- Analyze user interaction with the prototype.
- Identify what is working well and what needs improvement.
See how users interact with the prototype, notice where they get stuck or excited. Use this data to learn how to improve the solution to better meet user needs.
The most common techniques:
- Usability testing
- A/B testing
- User feedback sessions
- Think-aloud protocol
When to use Design Thinking (and when not to)?
Design Thinking is most useful when you are faced with a tricky problem without a clear solution, especially when it involves human-centered challenges and their needs.
Use Design Thinking when:
- You are solving a “wicked problem”, something complex, unclear and multidimensional.
- You need to understand how people behave and what drives their actions.
- You need insight into user desires to design a new product or service.
- You need new ideas.
- You are at the beginning of a project and are still thinking about what problem you are going to solve.
Avoid Design Thinking when:
- The problem is clearly defined and requires a technical or analytical solution.
- You already have a validated solution and just need to run it.
- The priority is speed, predictability and standardization, not creativity.
- The challenge is purely data-driven and requires statistical modeling more than empathy for the user.
- Stakeholders are not open to iteration, testing, or user feedback.
Closing thoughts
Design Thinking isn’t just for designers. It’s a way of thinking that helps solve real-world problems. It helps teams work faster, reduce risk, and make smarter decisions by focusing on what users really need. Whether you’re building an app, improving how things work in your business, or launching something new, Design Thinking helps you do it better.
Do you need help solving a complex problem?
At Bluell, we turn your uncertainty into strategy and strategy into working software. Whether it’s an app, a service or a process, you bring the challenge, we help you solve it. Get in touch and we’ll build something that works.
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