Complete Design Thinking Masterclass | eBook included

Explore design thinking as a human-centered approach to creative problem solving that balances customer insights with business goals, delivering value through iterative design, synthesis, and tangible artifacts.

As businesses grow, interaction channels multiply, creating silos and inconsistent customer experiences. Design thinking centers on customer centricity, clarifying stakeholders, profiles, and personas to address daily design challenges.

Explore six areas of business impact in design thinking and learn to create new value for existing customers, attract new segments, and improve profitability.

Transform commodities into competitive restaurant experiences through design thinking by connecting ingredients and chefs to service, seating, music, smell, and pricing to shape customer decisions.

Explore a seven-step, iterative design thinking process that merges business context with customer insights to define a design challenge. Generate ideas, prototype, test, and deliver impact through validated solutions.

Explore the business context of a restaurant through the design thinking process. Analyze a mid-sized city, coastal, tourist-friendly venue aiming to attract visitors with fresh products and local appeal.

Learn how to form a diverse executive team for design thinking workshops, define the design vision, establish business goals, map stakeholders, and develop a comprehensive business hypothesis.

Define and illustrate a design vision that makes your brand tangible in the marketplace and shapes customer perception, using Ford, Harley Davidson, Honda, Apple, and Microsoft as guiding examples.

Use the magazine cover tool to define a long-term vision 10–20 years ahead, guiding executives through images, brands, quotes, and nature associations to synthesize a single future-focused statement.

Synthesize the restaurant design vision by clustering customer and employee insights, brand references, and guiding themes into a single, actionable tagline and cohesive vision.

Quantify a design vision into concrete goals using smart goals, assign responsibility, and align short- and long-term targets—monthly, quarterly, yearly—to steer valuable outcomes.

Explore the smarter framework for setting concrete business goals by defining specific areas, measurable targets, assignable ownership, realistic resources, timeframes, exciting outcomes, and recording, all aligned to the design vision.

Define time-bound business goals for the restaurant design thinking project, including 20% young customers within 12 months and 40% social media chatter within six months, with department assignments.

Identify internal and external stakeholders who influence your design thinking goals, from customers and employees to partners, influencers, competitors, authorities, and institutions, to guide business strategy.

Learn how to map and prioritize stakeholders against a chosen business goal, placing each on a horizontal axis on the wall to identify the top stakeholder and avoid data overload.

Practice stakeholder mapping for a restaurant using a defined framework to structure and prioritize diverse stakeholders, then subdivide groups into meaningful categories and move toward archetypes.

Break down archetype creation by refining stakeholders into numbered, diverse profiles with specific ages, ranges, locations, and needs to capture motivations and guide research through testable hypotheses.

Create an archetype for a teen stakeholder group aged 13–17 in a harbor city of 500,000, who study centrally, spend time outdoors, and stay socially connected while pursuing artistic inspiration.

Explore business hypothesis mapping by listing activities across a customer lifecycle, assess stakeholder impact, cluster actions, and build a visual, goal-aligned framework.

Map restaurant business hypotheses through activities like social media promotions, online ordering, pricing strategies, loyalty programs, and guest experiences such as live music and comfy seating.

Recaps aligning the design vision with business goals, identifying key stakeholders, mapping activities to experiences, and shaping the design challenge for validation in the customer perspective phase.

Explore the customer perspective in design thinking by defining stakeholder groups, integrating the executive team in research, and aligning recruitment, scenarios, and synthesis to validate business hypotheses.

Design robust recruitment by aligning incentives with respondent needs and detailing a recruitment profile and recruitment riff, ensuring legal compliance, time management, and pre-interview quality checks for qualitative research.

Apply design thinking by deriving open-ended questions from the hypothesis map, prioritize activity impact, and use qualitative in-depth interviews before online questionnaires to validate the customer experience.

Explore how design teams validate activities and hypotheses by asking questions about social media promotions, dining decisions, waiter timing, and fresh ingredients to uncover emotions and contextual insights.

Compare qualitative and quantitative research methods to validate business hypotheses, and choose the right method for the job by considering questions answered, respondent count, time, and incentives.

Explore two core research methods—qualitative in-depth interviews and quantitative online questionnaires—learn simple, daily-use practices, insights extraction, and how to maximize response conversion.

Match research methods to the business hypothesis map, using in-depth interviews for the highest experienced peaks and online questionnaires to validate remaining parts, with five to seven participants per area.

Master validating hypothesis elements with in-depth interviews, covering pre interview recruitment, consent, interview structure, five times why, and observer considerations.

Craft engaging questionnaires with a welcoming start, context, and time expectations; offer incentives and mix question types, including multiple choice, short/long text, picture choice, scales, using Typeform or Google Forms.

Turn raw research data from surveys and interviews into actionable insights by linking observations to experience map activities on the hypothesis map, then quantify patterns to create design personas.

Quantify design personas by averaging experience values across respondents and map insights to the as-is customer experience, validating the business hypothesis and linking activities on the experience map.

Conclude design thinking by synthesizing recruitment process insights into personas, using qualitative and quantitative methods, mapping results to the business hypothesis via a customer experience map to define the challenge.

Engage design and executive teams to diagnose root causes from the customer perspective using the validated as-is experience map, then organize and prioritize design challenges.

Combine multiple experience maps for design personas to reveal overlapping activities and priorities across lifecycle areas, using a root cause tool and verbal problem representations to prioritize issues.

Apply the root cause tool five whys to identify the underlying reason behind problems by asking why, tracing from physical, human, and organizational factors to informed, actionable design improvements.

Define a design challenge as a stakeholder need within a context, using a one-sentence card to transform root causes into actionable, positive aspirations for the team.

Prioritize design challenges by mapping them to customer relevance and business goals, assessing impact, and selecting top-right opportunities, while discarding lower-value ideas.

Integrate business hypotheses with customer perspectives, overlap experience maps, identify root causes, and prioritize design challenges to prepare for the next chapter of generating solutions.

Ideation introduces who should participate and how to generate diverse solutions for design challenges. Include executives, design teams, customers, and external experts to plan workshops that prioritize ideas for prototyping.

Generate many design solutions using two ideation methods: a gap-bridging approach that creates blank spaces, and the brain writing method, to help your team bridge gaps and build effective ideas.

Apply the transformation method to reimagine challenges by removing elements, then exploring what would restore wholeness; this sparks unique, disruptive solutions for business models.

Engage in brainwriting method to generate ideas for design challenge in a workshop, using flip chart paper and markers to write three ideas per person, pass papers in timed rounds.

Prioritize design solutions with a two-axis approach, weighing customer experience and delivery ease, using solution cards and evaluating physical, human, and organizational constraints and implementation versus maintenance.

We identify high-impact design challenges and generate ideas aligned with customer needs and business goals. We prioritize solutions by expected performance and effort, guiding design work and prototyping.

Prototyping brings ideas to life to validate the solution and define its key values. Low fidelity conveys basics quickly; high fidelity tests detailed interactions along a specific path.

Adopt a prototyping mindset that prioritizes the target experience over the product, using low-fidelity, rapid prototypes to validate concepts with customers and emphasize value in context.

Discover prototyping tools that accelerate from low-fidelity methods to refined visual storyboards, enabling faster, clearer validation of the customer journey and solution value.

Use photographs to storyboard your prototype, naming each image to describe its essence, detailing key features in scene descriptions, and processing photos through Prisma to standardize color and composition.

Use SJP scenes pre-made storyboard kits to visualize conversations, assemble environments and characters, and prototype features, downloading in PDF or PowerPoint, printing, cutting, and iterating as a team.

Create meaningful prototypes using low-fidelity and high-fidelity storyboards, validate approaches with customers, and test to assess and improve solutions for tangible impact.

Validate usefulness and value of prototypes in a design thinking masterclass by coordinating customer stakeholders and the executive team through recruitment, testing, evaluation, and synthesis, with clear improvement recommendations.

Adopt a testing mindset by defining questions for each prototype and choosing validation methods. Use a separate team to validate ideas, kill weak concepts, and iterate until viable solutions advance.

Design thinking testing scenarios guide validating prototype features against customer experience, scoring impacts from zero to huge, and crafting open-ended questions to choose effective research methods.

Master field testing by applying observations, shadowing, guerilla interviews, and coached workshops to validate prototypes, assess the experience map, and refine service prototypes and storyboards.

Apply the observation method to test prototypes by recording what users do, securing consent, and gathering real-world feedback through discreet observation and guerilla interviews.

Master the shadowing method to test prototypes in real business environments with real customers, guided by a tester who observes and facilitates use. Record with consent to analyze what works.

Guerilla interviews bridge observation and shadowing by delivering quick, concise post-prototype questions to validate why a feature isn’t clear, complementing observation within five to ten minutes.

Lead a lab-based validation workshop with customers, executives, and design teams to validate ideas, gather feedback, and explore redesigns through prototype scenarios and open discussion.

Assess each feature on the prototype assessment experience map after testing, list improvements and recommendations for every element, and prioritize changes by customer value to validate assumptions.

Iterate prototypes through multiple tests and research scenarios, assess feature quality, and validate with real customers, then move validated solutions into impact delivery and the to be customer experience map.

Impact delivery introduces collaboration between the design team and the executive team to summarize insights into a customer experience map, while assessing risks, a KPI layer, and readiness for implementation.

Review the complete design thinking process, from refining the business hypothesis and stakeholder insights to designing, prototyping, testing, and readying the customer experience map for market implementation.

Transform the understanding phase into a to-be customer experience map by integrating validated solutions with the as-is map, assessing each feature through prototype insights, and aligning with business strategy.

Add a business goals layer to the to-be experience map, bind long-term vision to the stakeholder group, and assess activity impact with a heat map and scale in design thinking.

Define and monitor KPI indicators on a to-be experience map, linking metrics to activities like social media, influencers, and schools, to track progress toward a 20 percent target.

Identify and mitigate risks in the to-be experience map for implementing and maintaining new solutions, using the Eric framework—eliminate, reduce, inform, and control—through cross-functional perspectives.

Assess organization readiness for to-be experience map and change management by examining physical, human, and organizational constraints, and specify actions such as recruitment, training, system updates, and floor plan redesign.

Turn the design vision into reality by mapping the to-be customer experience, assessing impact on customers, and identifying indicators with ERIC risk management for implementation and maintenance.