In game design, it’s one thing to create a game we think is fun; it’s another to create a game that truly resonates with players. Design Thinking helps bridge that gap by focusing on understanding the people we are designing for. While the Scientific Method and the Creative Process provide structured ways to test ideas and generate solutions, Design Thinking adds a human-centered perspective that ensures those solutions meet real needs.
Design Thinking
Design Thinking is an iterative and non-linear approach to problem-solving that emphasizes empathy, creativity, and experimentation. According to the Interaction Design Foundation, it typically cycles through five key phases: Empathize, Define, Ideate, Prototype, and Test. This framework helps designers explore problems deeply, generate diverse solutions, and refine them based on feedback.
Design Thinking is commonly broken into five stages. These stages form a cycle, encouraging continuous iteration:
- Empathize – Understand the users or stakeholders. Conduct interviews, observe behaviors, or engage in activities that reveal how people think, feel, and interact with the system or product.
- Define – Identify the core problem or opportunity. Analyze insights to create clear, actionable statements, such as, “Users need a way to organize tasks efficiently without feeling overwhelmed.”
- Ideate – Generate a wide range of ideas. Brainstorm potential solutions, approaches, or features that could address the defined problem.
- Prototype – Build tangible versions of your ideas. This can be a low-fidelity mock-up, a digital model, a storyboard, or a small-scale version of the solution.
- Test – Share the prototype with users or stakeholders to gather feedback. Observe reactions, identify pain points, and refine the design accordingly.
Empathizing With Stakeholders
A key feature of Design Thinking is the first phase: Empathize. Here, designers focus on the people affected by or invested in the project, commonly called stakeholders. Stakeholders can be anyone with an interest in, influence over, or who will benefit from a project, such as players, team members, publishers, or communities.
Scientific Method and Stakeholders
Even in a Scientific Method approach, stakeholders are involved, and experiments are ultimately designed to answer questions that benefit someone.
Empathy goes beyond simply knowing what someone wants. It’s about truly understanding their experiences, motivations, and emotions, and seeing the world from their perspective. This deeper understanding is what design thinking relies on to create solutions that genuinely resonate.
Understanding, Sympathizing, and Empathizing
The idea of empathy is sometimes misunderstood and often confused with simply understanding or sympathizing with someone. To better grasp this concept, it helps to break down three levels of connecting with someone’s experience. For example, imagine a friend says they’re stressed about an upcoming exam.
- Understand (Identify the Problem): You recognize the problem; they are stressed about studying. You can state the issue clearly: “My friend is worried about the test.”
- Sympathize: You feel concern for them. You might say, “That sounds stressful! I hope it goes okay.” You acknowledge their feelings, but don’t fully connect with their experience.
- Empathize: You put yourself in their shoes. You imagine what it’s like to balance studying, other classes, and maybe part-time work. You feel the pressure and frustration they feel. With empathy, you might suggest concrete ways to help, like studying together or sharing study tips, because you truly understand why this situation matters to them.
Design Thinking emphasizes that before we can clearly define a problem or purpose, we must first understand the perspectives and needs of these stakeholders. By empathizing with them, designers ensure that solutions are grounded in real human experiences rather than assumptions.
User-centered Design and Design Thinking
This approach is similar to user-centered design (UCD), which focuses on making sure the solution fits the user’s stated needs and wants—it answers the question the user is asking. Design Thinking, on the other hand, focuses on finding the right problem to solve, uncovering what users truly need or want, which may not always match the question they initially ask.
Designing a New Coffee-Maker
When designers are tasked with creating a new coffee maker, the approaches would differ:
- User-centered design approach: ask users what features they want and build those exactly, like a larger water tank, a timer, or stronger brewing options. They are optimizing the product based on the user’s explicit requests.
- Design thinking approach: ask why users want a new coffee maker. Through observation and interviews, they might discover that users want faster mornings, less cleanup, or more consistency. With this insight, the solution might not just be a bigger coffee maker; it could be a single-serve pod system or an automatic cleaning feature. The final design solves the underlying problem rather than only the requested one.
In short, user-centered design refines the solution the user asks for; design thinking ensures you are solving the right problem, which may lead to different or innovative solutions.
Non-Linear Stages
Another key difference between Design Thinking and other approaches is its non-linear nature. This flexibility allows designers to better understand users by moving fluidly between phases. For example, designers might quickly build a prototype to test what users say they want, then use testing to uncover their actual needs, and jump back to ideation or problem definition to adjust the solution. This iterative, flexible approach ensures that the design evolves based on real insights rather than assumptions.
End Goal of Design Thinking
Though Design Thinking involves observing and empathizing with users, these insights often reveal deep desires, frustrations, or goals that inspire ambitious solutions, ideas that might be technically difficult, expensive, or challenging to implement. Without grounding, such imaginative solutions can remain conceptual rather than achievable.
Robot Coffemaker
In the case of our Coffee Maker redesign, the design thinking approach identifies that what users really want is faster mornings, perfectly brewed coffee, and minimal cleanup.
So, let’s make a robotic coffee maker that can grind, brew, clean itself, and even deliver coffee to the user’s desk. While this idea meets user desires, it might be technically difficult, extremely expensive, and impractical for production, making this more of a fantasy than a real solution.
This is why every step in the process is aimed at designing solutions that meet three essential criteria: Desirable, Feasible, and Viable. These pillars ensure that ideas are not only creative but also practical and impactful.
- Desirable: The solution meets the needs and desires of users or stakeholders. It is meaningful, engaging, and solves a real problem..
- Feasible: The solution can be built with the resources, technology, and skills available. It is technically possible and implementable.
- Viable: The solution is sustainable, financially, operationally, or socially. It aligns with business goals, budgets, or broader objectives.
By keeping these criteria in mind, designers ensure that Design Thinking produces solutions that are innovative, practical, and impactful. This framework also provides a grounding point for the mindset and behaviors needed to implement the process effectively.
Method and Mindset
Design Thinking is not just a process; it’s both a method and a mindset. While the five phases (Empathize, Define, Ideate, Prototype, Test) provide a practical framework for solving problems, the mindset is what allows designers to use the method effectively. This mindset combines empathy, creative confidence, optimism, and a willingness to learn from failure, enabling designers to uncover the real problems and generate innovative solutions.
- Empathy: Understanding the perspectives, needs, and experiences of users or stakeholders.
- Creative confidence: Trusting in your ability to generate ideas and explore unconventional solutions.
- Learning from failure: Using prototypes and tests as experiments to gain insight rather than seeing mistakes as setbacks.
- Optimism: Believing that every problem has a solution and that constraints can inspire innovation.
Adopting this mindset encourages a beginner’s mind, as described by Michael Lewrick, Patrick Link, and Larry Leifer in The Design Thinking Toolbox:
- Let go of prejudices: Don’t assume you know how things work or what the solution should be.
- Set aside expectations: Avoid being constrained by preconceived outcomes.
- Cultivate curiosity: Seek to understand the problem deeply and from multiple perspectives.
- Open up to new possibilities: Consider unconventional or unexpected solutions.
- Ask simple questions: Break the problem down into its most fundamental elements.
- Try and learn: Experiment with ideas early, learn from failures, and iterate.
In practice, this mindset is applied throughout the Design Thinking phases: empathizing with users, defining the right problem, ideating broadly, prototyping quickly, and testing iteratively. By combining method with mindset, designers can continuously question assumptions, uncover real needs, and develop solutions grounded in human experience.
Applying Design Thinking to Game Design
When applied to game design, design thinking emphasizes starting with players’ needs and motivations before deciding what to build. Empathizing with players helps reveal what kinds of experiences they value—such as cooperation, competition, or creativity—and this insight guides what to prototype and test.
This approach flows directly into playcentric design, which applies design thinking specifically to games by focusing on the player experience. While design thinking broadly ensures we’re solving the right problem, playcentric design asks whether the game itself produces the intended experiences for players.
Design thinking is important in game design because it shifts the focus from what designers think is fun to what players actually need and want. By starting with empathy and iterating through prototyping and testing, it ensures that creative ideas are not only imaginative but also meaningful, practical, and engaging. This mindset helps teams avoid assumptions, uncover unexpected opportunities, and ultimately build games that resonate with real players, laying the foundation for approaches like playcentric design that refine and elevate the player experience.
This article provides a clear and insightful overview of Design Thinking, effectively explaining its principles and how empathy plays a crucial role in creating user-centered solutions. The examples, particularly the coffee maker scenario, make the concepts relatable and easy to grasp.