What is Design Thinking?
Design thinking, told as a story about an editor who stops guessing at a desk and loops through meeting readers directly instead.
Why isn't this book selling?The editor has no idea why.
The editor just guesses alone at a desk.The editor has never actually met a real reader — so guesses made at a desk often miss.
Design thinking means meeting readers directly, looping through asking, building, and reworking.No guessing at a desk — ideas keep getting checked in front of readers.
The five stages don't run just once in order — the team loops back to earlier ones as needed.Test results send the team back to earlier stages, even to meeting readers again.
Design thinking doesn't replace the whole publishing process.Design thinking finds what to write — it doesn't replace every other step.
Design thinking is a problem-solving method that meets readers directly instead of guessing at a desk, looping through empathize, define, ideate, prototype, and test.
Design thinking is a human-centered, iterative method that starts by empathizing with users, redefines the problem, generates many ideas, builds a cheap prototype, tests it with real users, then loops back to earlier stages based on the results. This five-stage breakdown is best known from the Stanford d.school model. It focuses on finding what to build before deciding how to build it.
When grown-ups say it
- Design Thinking
- A problem-solving method that meets readers directly instead of guessing. It loops through five stages, again and again.
- Empathize
- The first stage — meeting the reader in person. This is where desk-guessing stops.
- Define
- The stage of pinning down what really confuses readers. It narrows 'a good book' down to one concrete problem.
- Ideate
- The stage of throwing out as many ideas as possible. Good and bad ideas get sorted out later.
- Prototype
- A cheap, quickly made sample page. It's for checking reader reactions, not for shipping.
- Requirements Engineering
- A more systematic process of asking before writing. It overlaps with empathize/define, and goes on to write requirements down and verify them. → the one who asks before writing
- A/B Test
- A test that measures, with numbers, which of two options works better. It goes deeper into the test stage with statistics. → which cover really sells better
- Usability Test
- Having people actually try the prototype and watching them. Often paired with the test stage. → the test where a reader just tries the book cold