Problem Solving Process

A Company has reached out to you (your team) to create a solution to aid their users order food online. Using the design thinking approach, walk me through how you intend to create the solution.

Using the design thinking approach for this problem I will critically think about the problem or as a team I will hold a thinking session with my team members and try to solve the problem using the design thinking phases. Firstly,

Phase 1: Empathise (Research Your Users’ Needs)

Carry out a research of users or potential users need, this can be done by sending questionnaire to the users or sending team into the street to interview users, surveys or opinion polls can also be used to get relevant data. Ask questions about their experiences using other online food ordering services, what their expectations were and if it was met. Doing this will help me better understand the core needs of the user and this will also prevent me from assuming I understand what the user needs.

Phase 2: Define (State Your Users’ Needs and Problems)

Using the data gotten from the empathizing stage, you try to answer questions like what difficulties and barriers are your users coming up against? What patterns do you observe? What is the big user problem that your team needs to solve?. At this point you have a clear statement of the problem you hope to solve with your product. You can start to come up with solutions and ideas.

Phase 3: Ideate (Challenge Assumptions and Create Ideas)

Now that you know what the problem is and also what your users expect from the finished product. The next phase is to try to come up with ways to solve this problem. Using an online food ordering app as a case study, come up with as many solutions as possible. At this point we are not concerned with the feasibility if the solution we just want to have as many solution as possible. Then from the pool of solutions we can streamline them and pick the best optimum solution.

Phase 4: Prototype (Start to Create Solutions)

To investigate or better understand the experience of the ideas you’ve generated, produce some form of inexpensive, scaled-down versions of the product, this prototype should have the specific or core features that will be found in the final product Throughout the prototype stage, the proposed solutions may be accepted, improved, redesigned or rejected depending on how they fare in prototype form.

Stage 5: Test (Try Your Solutions Out)

To know how your product will be accepted in the market, it has to be tested. So after prototyping, the product will be sent to some selected user so as to enable them test if it meets the required need.