Empathy is the centerpiece of a human-centered design process. The Empathize mode is the work you do to understand people, within the context of your design challenge. It is your effort to understand the way they do things and why, their physical and emotional needs, how they think about world, and what is meaningful to them.*

​

Persona creation based on customer data and Empathy Map creation. Primary Persona - Role, Facts, Pain Points, Needs/Goals

The Define mode of the design process is all about bringing clarity and focus to the design space. It is your chance, and responsibility, as a design thinker to define the challenge you are taking on, based on what you have learned about your user and about the context. After becoming an instant-expert on the subject and gaining invaluable empathy for the person you are designing for, this stage is about making sense of the widespread information you have gathered. The goal of the Define mode is to craft a meaningful and actionable problem statement – this is what we call a point-of-view. This should be a guiding statement that focuses on insights and needs of a particular user, or composite character. Insights don’t often just jump in your lap; rather they emerge from a process of synthesizing*

Ideate is the mode of the design process in which you concentrate on idea generation. Mentally it represents a process of “going wide” in terms of concepts and outcomes. Ideation provides both the fuel and also the source material for building prototypes and getting innovative solutions into the hands of your users.*

Rapid Prototyping is an incredibly effective way to make ideas tangible, to learn through making, and to quickly get key feedback from the people you’re designing for. Because prototypes are meant only to convey an idea—not to be perfect—you can quickly move through a variety of iterations, building on what you’ve learned from the people you’re designing for. Rapid Prototyping makes sure that you’re building only enough to test your idea, and that you’re right back in there making it better once you’ve gotten the feedback you need.*

Your idea will have lots of testable components, so be clear about what you need to learn and which components will give you the necessary answers. Prototyping isn’t about being precious. Make simple, scrappy prototypes to not only save time, but to focus testing on just the critical elements. You might be trying to learn something like, “How big should this be?” or “What should the uniforms of the social enterprise look like?” At this stage you should have a lot of questions about how your idea should work. This is a great way to begin answering them.*

A Live Prototype is a chance to run your solution for a couple weeks out in the real world. Gathering Feedback from the people you’re designing for is a never-ending process and it’s critical as you push your idea forward. As you run Live Prototypes, Pilot your idea, and determine how to Define Success and Measure and Evaluate your work, you’ll want to have team members dedicated to getting feedback from key partners and the people you’re looking to serve.* 

Integrating the feedback you hear from the people you’re designing for is one of the essential elements of human-centered design. You learned from people in the Inspiration Phase, and in the Ideation Phase one of the best ways to keep learning from them is to show them what you’ve made and find out what they think. Integrating their feedback into your work and then coming up with another prototype is the best way to refine your idea until it’s something that’s bound to be adopted and embraced.*

Align your team: design, technical resources, business stakeholders, marketing, sales and consumer insights.

You’ve got a concept you feel great about and you’ve tested it in the world. Now you’ll need to create a plan for how you’re going to implement it. A Roadmap helps you gather the key stakeholders in your project and collectively figure out a timeline, who is responsible for which elements of the project, and establishes key milestones. Rely on your work on the Capabilities Quicksheet and Staff Your Project to give you a full picture of how to build your Roadmap.*

In the course of the Implementation Phase you’ll think about Staffing your Project, creating a Funding Strategy, and making a Roadmap of your project timeline, and this is an opportunity to figure out what success looks like. You’ll determine important milestones in the life of your solution and come to understand what succeeding looks like. Think about a variety of time horizons. What is success in the next two months, in the next year, in five years? Imagine success in terms of both your organization and the people you’re designing for. What does success look like in terms of how you’ve affected them?*

​

Gif: https://www.reddit.com/r/gifs/comments/1ympn6/rocket_man/

Continue soliciting feedback from users, analyze performance data, identify trends, pain points and opportunities, and feed this data back into step 1 to continually improve and evolve ; D