Application of Design Thinking Methodology to the Various Phases of the Software Development Life Cycle

Introduction

Design thinking is often thought as a creative way of problem solving. We are told to believe what we are told and what we read, and with that is the down coming of creativity. Designers need to see the world through the eyes of a 5-year-old. We need to give ourselves permission to be creative. It takes intelligence to answer a question, but it takes creativity to answer the question. We have to imagine the world as to it never existed before. Design thinking can be termed as “consumer-centric”, “end-user centric” or simply “human-centric” thinking. It works from the perspective of the user in general with user satisfaction being the primary goal. The methodology that I adopted is thinking from the user’s perspective and working towards user’s satisfaction as the goal.

Agile and Scrum methodologies are widely practiced almost amongst all the organizations. The design thinking methodology and agile methodology have many aspects in common, like aiming to get faster delivery while at the same time achieving highest customer satisfaction. The core of design thinking is iterative prototyping whereas agile focuses on what is the next step to be taken.

Figure 1.

User-Centric Design Thinking Methodology

The Figure 1, depicts the influence of the end-user in all the phases of software development life cycle. It shows that the design thinking technique is mainly influenced and driven by the end users. The end user has a say in all the phases, and these phases are driven by thinking from end user’s perspective.

Background Work

Design thinking is a problem-solving technique evolved in different fields like architecture, engineering and business. The key element to the success of designing a software system lies in user participation. Therefore, it was basically developed to derive a solution by understanding the user’s need. Design thinking can be defined as “an approach that uses creative designers’ sensibility and methods to understand the problems that people and society are dealing with” (Newman et al. 2015). The powerful methodology for innovation is design thinking. Design thinking distinguishes between innovative and existing real time activities, but not between artistic creation and engineering (Johansson-Skoldberg et al. 2013). The problem forming, solving and design can be accomplished by integrating human, business and technological factors with its use. Inventively, it is possible to deal with the ambiguity in wicked problems by applying design thinking. In this way, for non-deterministic nature of wicked problems, it is imperative for the architect to ground any plan within the setting in which it is conveyed (Plattner et al. 2013).

The core concepts involved in thinking is to understand, explore, porotype and evaluate. While exploring the problem, design thinking knowledge by understanding that can be done by observing the user scenarios. The evolved ideas in problem exploration are transformed into tangible representatives by sketching and prototyping techniques, thus opening an opportunity for exploring the solution space. After these problem and solution exploration phases, the built ideas and concepts can be communicated not only with the design team, but also with all the stakeholders involved in the entire process of designing the system. Thereby leading to innovative and suitable solutions for the social system. Converting design thinking into an action come with its own hurdles and obstruction and hence it is fundamental to educate and convey well-trained individuals, superior strategies as well as organizational back (Plattner et al. n.d.).