The Design Thinking process I established at the Prudential Financial Customer Office...
1) Empathize – with our users
Really get to really know your users needs and wants. Sit with stakeholders, ask big questions and challenge assumptions.
Conduct surveys, interviews, and use qualitative user testing to understand behaviors and needs were trying to improve. Compare those against marketing insights gained from site data.
2) Define – your users’ needs, their problem, and your insights
Based on user testing, observation and analysis collect and compile observations to create a very specific problem statement that can be targeted to solve.
3) Ideate – by challenging assumptions and creating ideas for innovative solutions
Transition from identifying problems to collaboratively creating solutions for users. Sketch, brainstorm and ideating in phases that should diverge in thinking, go way out there out there pushing traditional norms, use different mediums and tools to break out of habits. Then bring it back as a team applying best ideas to the problem statement to be solved.
4) Protoype – click able images, sketches, or high fidelity code
Whatever fidelity works for testing with users is what should be created. Sometimes high fidelity coded comps are needed, sometimes it's wires or paper prototypes. It really depends on what phase of the project that your in, what time you have, and what your trying to learn with user testing.
5) Test – to gather insights with users
Conduct user testing in many environments, guerrilla testing in the field or lunch room, online testing with usertesting.com. Sometimes we used a volunteer panel of employees to test in our state of the art user testing lab that we built last year. We use affinity diagraming to gather insights from the team that is observing testing session.
Gather insights from testing as a full team activity helps to rapidly iterate on the experience designs to improve them. Read my article about how I helped build a world class design team at Prudential Financial.
This process works for small and large projects, it needs to be flexible and constantly tweaked and adjusted to meet various project, marketing and team needs.