The Design Thinking Process can help you come up with creative, user-centric solutions to complex problems. But how does it work exactly?

In this article, I will explain what the Design Thinking Process is and break down the five phases behind it. We will explore how this process was applied to the freeCodeCamp organization.

What is the Design Thinking Process and why is it important?

The Design Thinking Process was first mentioned in Herbert A. Simon's book The Sciences of the Artificial. As a cognitive scientist, Simon explored the decision making process humans go through.

As a result, Simon's ideas contributed a lot to the current model of the Design Thinking Process and provided companies with a different approach to understanding their users.

The Design Thinking Process focuses on studying the user's needs and coming up with solutions to develop better products and services for them.

This process encourages innovative thinking and creative problem solving which leads to better businesses and nonprofit organizations.  

The five phases of the Design Thinking Process are:

  1. Empathize
  2. Define
  3. Ideate
  4. Prototype
  5. Test

Let's take a closer look at this process and how it works in a real world organization like freeCodeCamp.

Empathize

When Quincy Larson started learning how to code, he bounced around from one free online source to another struggling to find a structured path. Even though he was able to land a developer job, the process of learning how to code was a lonely and frustrating one.

After speaking with many other self-taught developers, he realized he wasn't the only one with this story. So Quincy started researching and learning about those embarking on the self taught journey.

Quincy started to empathize with others struggling to learn how to code and sought to understand their needs, wants, and goals. Throughout this extensive research, he discovered a key problem.

Define

When Quincy started freeCodeCamp in 2014, his goal was to address an important issue: a lack of access to high quality education by most people wanting to learn around the world.

At the time, if you wanted to study programming, you would either attend college or a bootcamp. But Quincy realized there were issues concerning access for both of those options.

College is a wonderful opportunity for students to learn and gain an education, but not everyone has the funds or time to go through a 3-4 year degree program.

Bootcamps were an alternative to gain the skills needed to start an entry level job. But through extensive research,  Quincy realized that most bootcamps were very expensive, and were attended by American white males in their mid 20's who had college degrees.

So the question became, "What about everyone else?"

What if someone wanted to learn how to code but there wasn't a high quality structured resource that was also free?

Ideate

In this article detailing the first month of freeCodeCamp, Quincy laid out the goals and mission for the organization.

The world needed a coding bootcamp that helped everyone else.
That meant:

It should be fully online so that busy people with families, and people outside of the US, could participate.

It should be inclusive rather than “selective”, and open to everyone regardless age, sex, race, country of origin, or English proficiency.

There was only one for sure way to remove socio-economic considerations: make it 100% free.

Quincy Larson set out to create freeCodeCamp which provided a free structured learning environment that can be done in the browser and was completely self-paced.

This meant that anyone around the world could learn for free on any device available to them and not have to worry about downloading a whole bunch of software.

The idea was to create an online platform filled with dozens of interactive challenges and projects for the users to build and add to their portfolios.

He also wanted to create an online chat for developers to come together and discuss their learning and help each other along the way. This addressed the core issue that many self taught developers felt trying to code alone in isolation.  

Prototype

Quincy Larson built the first prototype version of freeCodeCamp in a few days and starting publicizing it on his social media channels. This early version had a few challenges for users to go through and a chat room for learners to connect online.

The prototype phase was important because it led into the final phase of the Design Thinking process: user testing.

Testing

Within the first few months, people were starting to join the platform and go through the challenges.

Since the project is open source, it allowed people to provide feedback and make changes to the early version of the curriculum.

This initial phase allowed Quincy and his small team to identify usability issues and observe how users were interacting with the platform. From there, they were able to listen to feedback and start implementing those changes.

Conclusion

The Design Thinking Process focuses on studying the user's needs and coming up with solutions to develop better products and services for them.

This process encourages innovative thinking and creative problem solving which leads to better businesses and nonprofit organizations.  

The five phases of the Design Thinking Process are:

  1. Empathize
  2. Define
  3. Ideate
  4. Prototype
  5. Test

freeCodeCamp used this process to come up with a creative solution to teaching people all around the world how to code for free.

If you want to learn more about the Design Thinking process, you can look into taking this Design Thinking for Innovation course.