best design thinking case study

50+ Design Thinking Case Study Examples

Design Thinking Case Studies demonstrate the value of the Design Thinking methodology. They show how this Design Thinking methodology helps creatively solve problems and improve the success rate of innovation and increase collaboration in corporations, education, social impact work and the public sector by focusing on the needs of humans.

There are many Design Thinking Case Study examples on the web, but few meet the criteria for a robust case study: a clear description of the methodology, steps undertaken, experimentation through rapid prototypes and testing with people and finally documented results from the process. In this section, we have been selective about the design thinking case study examples that we highlight. We look for Design Thinking Case Studies that demonstrate how a problem was tackled and wherever possible the results or effect that the project produced. Our goal in curating this section of Design Thinking Case Study examples is quality over quantity.

Browse this page to view all Design Thinking Case Study examples, or if you are looking for Design Thinking Case Studies in a specific industry or marketing vertical, then rather start with the Design Thinking Case Studies Index .

If you have an interesting application of Design Thinking that you have a case study for, we would be happy to publish it.

Submit your Design Thinking Case Study for publication here.

Design Thinking Case Study Index

Welcome to the Design Thinking Case Study Index. There are many Design Thinking Case Studies on the internet. Many are retrofitted descriptions of what occurred, rather than evidence of the Design Thinking process in action. In order to bring a higher standard to the practice of Design Thinking, we require stronger evidence and rigor. Only members can post and must provide strong evidence in the Design Thinking Case Study that the Design Thinking process was used to create the original idea for the product or service solution. The criteria that needs to be proved to make your project a Design Thinking Case Study are:

The Guardian: Benefits of Design Thinking

Design thinking helped The Guardian newspaper and publishing group change their funding model, boost revenue and adapt their culture and engage on an emotional level with their readers. In this case study, Alex Breuer, Executive Creative Director and Tara Herman, Executive Editor, Design explain how design thinking was able to achieve these goals for The Guardian.

Read more...

Tackling the Opioid Crisis at the Human and Systems Levels

How the Lummi Tribal clinic used design to address opioid overdoses

Applying Design Thinking Internally

Applying Design Thinking internally, within a group, community or to ourselves. This is a new application of the Design Thinking Methodology.

An internal application in this sense can have two meanings. First, the internal application of design thinking tactics within a group, organization or community, and second, the internal application of design thinking to one’s own self and life.

Can Design Thinking help you solve your own problems?

The Use of Design Thinking in MNCH Programs, Ghana

Responding to growing interest among designers, global health practitioners, and funders in understanding the potential benefits of applying design thinking methods and tools to solving complex social problems, the Innovations for Maternal, Newborn, and Child Health (MNCH) Initiative (Innovations) developed and piloted innovative interventions to address common barriers to improving the effectiveness of basic MNCH health services in low-resource settings.

Société Générale's Time Tracking Nightmare Solved

In 2017, employees, managers, and partners of Société Générale Global Solution Centre agreed that invoices based on time tracking and project allocation were a chronic and painful challenge.

At SG-GSC, customers were billed for the time each assigned employee worked. The process of collecting the time worked by those employees (HCC) was a complicated and difficult ordeal. It consumed 21 days per month for senior employees. These employees had to navigate different systems, many types of contracts, high staff mobility, and a variety of processes between business lines.

How to Stimulate Innovation in Your Organization With Design Thinking

In this use case the cities of Aalborg and Rotterdam share their findings obtained from design thinking initiatives. This is based on empirical research as part of an evaluation. The use case is written for other professionals in the field of design in public organizations.

One of the main targets of the Interreg NSR project Like! is to create a digital innovative culture in which citizens are engaged, and more inclusive services are build. To reach this the municipalities started several initiatives with design thinking. In these initiatives one of the objectives was to find out how design thinking can help us to develop innovative and inclusive services. To research what design thinking contributed, we evaluated the pilots with participants.

The Impact of Design Thinking on Innovation: A Case Study at Scania IT

Organizational culture represents a crucial factor for the introduction of innovation throughout the organization via Design Thinking and agile way of working. Thus, the organization must establish a culture that encompasses a shared vision with values that create a commitment to learn, experiment and accept failure.

Oral B - Putting the User At the Center of Innovation

Oral B wanted to integrate digital technology into their electric toothbrush. The Brands first thoughts were to help users to track how well they were brushing their teeth. Future Facility, a product design firm in the UK suggested a different approach. Focus on the pain points of electric toothbrush users.

This case study discusses the importance of placing the user at the center of your innovation activities.

Design Thinking at Innogy

eCarSharing:   Energy Solutions for the New Generation

In 2015, Itai Ben-Jacob pitched his own ideas for a viable business model and developed the idea for innogy’s eCarSharing project in a design thinking workshop. His goal was to explore one of innogy’s innovation focus areas, ‘urban mobility.’

Together with fellow innovation hub members he organized a series of design thinking workshops to wade through the expansive topic of urban concepts – one of them focusing on mobility: “ We wanted to understand urban mobility – what does it actually entail? What type of business should we start? “

Building Cape Town’s Resilience Qualities Through Design Thinking.

This case study focuses on a Design Thinking Workshop for primary school learners. The aim of the workshops was to provide learners with a new set of skills which they can employ when problem solving for real world challenges.

Building resilience is essential for cities that face increasing uncertainty and new challenges that threaten the well-being of its citizens. This is especially important when looking at the diversity and complexity of potential shocks and stresses. 

Cape Town’s efforts to build skills in design thinking supports the creation of locally-relevant and innovative solutions that contribute to building resilient individuals and communities in Cape Town.

Designing Waste Out of the Food System

The average American  wastes  enough food each month to feed another person for 19 days. Through a number of projects with The Rockefeller Foundation and other organizations, IDEO designers from across the U.S. devised novel ways to tackle food waste.

B2B Design Thinking: Product Innovation when the User is a Network

When B2B companies talk about user experience, they are really considering the aggregated needs of multiple people and roles in a large ecosystem. But what happens when those objectives are vastly different for every individual?

“Humans don’t stop being humans just because they entered an office building.”

Self-Checkout: Improving Scan Accuracy Through Design

In this unique applied research study, academics and designers partnered with four of ECR’s Retailer members to immerse themselves in the self-checkout experience, understanding from the perspectives of the shopper and self-checkout supervisors, their journey from entry to exit, and their design challenges and frustrations.

Co-designing OTP Bank’s Strategic Plan for Growth

This is an example of accelerating a transformation through co-design. Eighty-two professionals gathered, representing OTP’s whole organization. Together, they were able to achieve months of work in just three days.

OTP Bank Romania (OTP) was at a key turning point in late 2018. The organization was undergoing changes in its leadership team. This new team helped them develop an ambitious goal:

OTP Bank will double its market share in 5 years.

They gathered for two Discovery sessions in December 2018. In these sessions, a carefully selected senior team chose three market segments to focus on. Then they built these segments into Personas.

IDEO: Journey to Mastery

While this is not a case study as such, it sits in our case study section as it is an important piece of information from a consultancy that played a large part in popularizing Design Thinking. In their Journey to Mastery section, IDEO discuss and shine a light on the shortcomings of the design thinking term and how it has been applied. I.e that it is not designing and that just knowing and using the practice does not in itself produce amazing solutions to problems.

It is worth a read to understand some of the nuance that is important to successful design thinking work.

Singapore Government: Building Service Platforms Around Moments in Life

In 2017, the product development team at Singapore’s Government Technology Agency (GovTech) was tasked to develop a tool to consolidate citizen-facing services previously delivered by different government agencies onto a single platform. The initiative, Moments of Life, sought to make it easier for citizens to discover and access relevant services during important changes in their lives by reducing fragmentation and being more anticipatory in the delivery of those services.

Organizing the delivery of services around a citizen’s journey, rather than fitting their delivery to existing processes, required extensive interagency collaboration beyond functional silos.

Mayo Clinic: Design Thinking in Health Care – Case Study

In the early 2000s, Mayo Clinic physician Nicholas LaRusso asked himself a question: if we can test new drugs in clinical trials, can we in a similarly rigorous way test new kinds of doctor-patient interactions?  

Consequently, the Mayo Clinic set up a skunkworks outpatient lab called SPARC. Within 6 years it had grown to an enterprise wide department called the Center for Innovation a dedicated research and design-oriented institute that studies the processes of health care provision, from the initial phone call, to the clinic visit, to the diagnosis and treatment of the problem, to follow-up and preventive care.

Design Thinking and Participation in Switzerland: Lessons Learned from Three Government Case Studies

Olivier Glassey, Jean-Henry Morin, Patrick Genoud, Giorgio Pauletto

This paper examines how design thinking and serious game approaches can be used to support participation.

In these case studies the authors discovered the following results.

Perceived usefulness. Based on informal discussions and debriefing sessions following all workshops, it is clear that the vast majority of workshop participants explicitly stated that both the actual outcome of the workshop and the methods used would significantly contribute to enhancing their performance in their work. Some workshops have actually led to follow up workshops or concrete actions based on the outcome.

Asili: Addressing an Entire Ecosystem of Need in a Rural Community

Design Thinking in HR at Deutche Telekom

Reza Moussavian, a senior HR and IT executive at Deutsch Telekom explains the company's journey and how important Design Thinking is as a business strategy for HR. Reza Moussavian's presentation provides great examples of issues tackled in HR and the results achieved. The presenter claims that there is not a singe issue that Deutche Telekom tackles in HR now that does not start with a Design Thinking methodology.

"Design Thinking solves 5% of our problems." says Reza Moussavian, "What we found out was that the magic was really in the implementation phase. We had to learn how to keep the momentum, the spirit and the fire from the co-creation workshops alive through the long implementation phase. Success is really about technology, transformation and leadership skills."

Design Thinking in Education: Perspectives, Opportunities and Challenges

This very informative article discusses design thinking as a process and mindset for collaboratively finding solutions for wicked problems in a variety of educational settings. Through a systematic literature review the article organizes case studies, reports, theoretical reflections, and other scholarly work to enhance our understanding of the purposes, contexts, benefits, limitations, affordances, constraints, effects and outcomes of design thinking in education.

Specifically, the review pursues four questions:

Design Thinking in the Classroom: What can we do about Bullying?

As children move from kindergarten, through middle school, and to high school, instruction shifts from stories to facts, from speculation to specifics, and imagination fades from focus. Design Thinking provides an alternative model to traditional ways of learning academic content by challenging students to find answers to complex, nuanced problems with multiple solutions and by fostering students’ ability to act as change agents.

Design Thinking is all about building creative confidence — a sense that “I can change the world.” In the Bullies & Bystanders Design Challenge, the students discovered that changing themselves might be even more important.

Following One School District's Approach to Innovation for the 21st Century

In her doctoral paper Loraine Rossi de Campos explores the use of Design Thinking in a school district for a 4-5 grade school.

India: Using ‘Design Thinking’ to Enhance Urban Redevelopment.

The discourse on urban planning and development has evolved over the last century with top-down methods of planning urban spaces giving way to bottom-up approaches that involve residents and other stakeholders in the design process. While the notion of participation and user involvement is considered critical to the design of appropriate and acceptable urban forms, there is no clear consensus in the literature on the methodology to be used to involve users and stakeholders in the design process. In this paper, we propose that the use of ‘Design-Thinking’ – a methodology for Human-Centred Design that is often used in product design and related industries – may be an effective methodology for engaging stakeholders in the urban design domain.

E*Trade: From Idea to Investment in 5 Minutes

Why the Financial Services Sector Should Embrace Design Thinking. Financial institutions need to evolve rapidly or risk disruption at the hands of nimble Fintech start-up companies.

In this article Kunal Vaed, The Street, describes how E*Trade used design thinking to enable the company to help investors get smarter by going from the idea of investing to an investment in 5 minutes.

E*Trade's Adaptive Portfolio service offering provides a good example of the work and results that E*Trade achieved with Design Thinking.

Fidelity Labs: Optimizing near-term savings goals

Thanks to providers like Fidelity, people can rely on easy, convenient systems to stay on track with their retirement savings. But when it comes to saving for important near-term goals (think: vacation, house, or wedding), people tend to be less organized. 

Fidelity Labs tackled this problem and defined the challenge as: "How might we improve the experience of saving for near-term goals? How might we make it easier, faster, and better?"

Design for Action: MassMutual and Intercorp Group

How to use design thinking to make great things actually happen by Tim Brown and Roger L. Martin. In this great HBR article, the authors look at design thinking in Finance with two case studies, one from MassMutual and the other from Intercorp. Group of Peru.

In this article highlighting the development of the acceptance of Design Thinking, they discuss how Design Thinking helps to create the artifact that creates the new solution as well as the intervention/s that brings the artifact to life.

How to Use Design Thinking to Make Great Things Actually Happen

Ever since it became clear that smart design led to the success of many products, companies have been employing it in other areas, from customer experiences, to strategy, to business ecosystems. But as design is used in increasingly complex contexts, a new hurdle has emerged: gaining acceptance (for the new solutions).

4 Design Thinking Case Studies in Healthcare: Nursing

The 4 case studies by Penn Nursing illustrate how nurses can be really powerful collaborators and generators of solutions within Healthcare. The videos describe the main attributes that nurses bring to the problem solving table

Philips: Improving the Patient Experience

Philips Ambient Experience service offers hospitals a way to radically improve the patient experience and results that they can achieve from their CT scanning suites. The best way to understand what it is is to watch this video  and this video  discussing the latest addition to the service. The white paper from Philips is also a good source of information on the Ambient Experience Service.

IBM: Design Thinking Adaptation and Adoption at Scale

How IBM made sense of ‘generic design thinking’ for tens of thousands of people. 

Generic design thinking often faces heavy resistance from influential skeptics, gets misunderstood or not understood at all, or less dire, it gets picked up with an unreflected euphoria and is applied as a “silver bullet” to all kinds of problems and projects (the famous “methodology misfit” we also see with Scrum for example). The big hangover often comes after the first experimentation budgets are expended and at worst a blame game starts.

Design Thinking in Public Engagement: Two Case Studies

Dave Robertson presents two case studies with the British Columbia Government (Canada). One with the Ministry of Transportation discussing their (public servant centered website), the other solving the problem of finding a solution to where to place a power substation.

Dave shows how he was stuck working in the public sector as a consultant and how creativity expressed through the Design Thinking methodology helped him to see a different, more effective way of creating solutions.

Bank of America Helps Customers Keep the Change

How do you encourage new customers to open bank accounts? In 2004, Bank of America used the Design Thinking methodology to look at the problem from a human centered perspective when they assigned design agency IDEO to boost their enrollment numbers: a problem that at the time, lacked any user perspective on why it was so hard for customers to save.

Redesigning The Employment Pass Application in Singapore

The Ministry of Manpower’s Work Pass Division (WPD) used design thinking as a tool to develop better ways to support foreigners who choose Singapore as a destination to live, work and set up businesses. The case reveals: Design thinking can potentially transform the perception and meaning of public service.

The team found out that the service redesign process required a better understanding of the decision points of both users and non-users. This involved taking a closer look at the opportunities and difficulties facing users, including those who had succeeded and failed within it, or had encountered problems or avoided it.

The US Tax Forms Simplification Project

This case concerns one of the earliest attempts by design thinkers at designing a large, complex system. It shows that design approaches in the public sector can look back at a long history. And it reveals how design thinking within the organization must include members of the whole organization in the design process.

Design has a long tradition and a rich history in the public sector. Nearly 40 years ago, when the US Congress passed the Paperwork Reduction Act into law, the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) turned to designers in an effort to implement the new policy and to improve its relationship with taxpayers. 

A Tough Crowd: Using Design Thinking to Help Traditional German Butchers

Between 2004 and 2014, more than 4000 butcher shops were forced to shut down in Germany. When last was the butcher shop redesigned? The process started in the 1990s, as supermarkets became the favored spot for meat-shopping. As if a dramatic loss of market share was not enough, the industry as a whole started suffering from a serious image crisis. It was time to apply design Thinking to the traditional German Butcher Shop.

The initial problem statement read “Create the meat shop 2.0, an up-to-date version of the classic butcher business”. 

IDEO: Using Design Thinking to Create a Better Car

The challenge.

Remove roadblocks that can compromise the in-car experience for the Lincoln car company.

The final product, the Lincoln MKC luxury crossover, is credited with helping the Lincoln brand outpace growth in the luxury segment by more than two-to-one over competitors.

THE OUTCOME

A pop-up studio where IDEO designers helped departments communicate and collaborate more effectively.

Transforming Constructivist Learning into Action: Design Thinking in Education

In an ever changing society of the 21st century, there is a demand to equip students with meta competences going beyond cognitive knowledge. Education, therefore, needs a transition from transferring knowledge to developing individual potentials with the help of constructivist learning. A Scheer, C Noweski,  C Meinel , University of Potsdam, Germany.

Design Thinking is the most effective method of teaching constructivist learning.

Scaling Design Thinking in the Enterprise, a 5 Year Study

During Julie Baher's five years at  Citrix  between 2010 to 2015, she was fortunate to gain first-hand experience leading a transformation in product strategy to a customer-centered approach. It began when several senior executives attended the  design thinking boot camp  at Stanford’s d-school, returning with a new vision for the product development processes. Julie goes into detail about how they scaled up the customer centric methodology across the organizations 8,000 employees.

Developing Environmental Sustainability Strategies

Developing environmental sustainability strategies, the Double Diamond method of LCA and design thinking: a case study from aged care. Journal of Cleaner Production, 85, 67-82. Stephen J. Clune*, Simon Lockrey.

Developing an App for Type II Diabetes

Development and testing of a mobile application to support diabetes self-management for people with newly diagnosed type 2 diabetes: a design thinking case study. Numerous mobile applications have been developed to support diabetes-self-management. However, the majority of these applications lack a theoretical foundation and the involvement of people with diabetes during development. The aim of this study was to develop and test a mobile application (app) supporting diabetes self-management among people with newly diagnosed type 2 diabetes using design thinking. The article was written by Mira Petersen and Nana F. Hempler.

Improving UX in Public Transportation

In this case study the project leaders goal was to  improve the experience of bus users  on Madrid's EMT system by offering a technological solution to  increase the users’ satisfaction with regard to accessibility  during the bus trip as well as when waiting for the bus to arrive.

Transforming Life Insurance through Design Thinking

To some fintechs, non-insurance incumbents, and venture capitalists, the industry’s challenges suggest opportunity. The life insurance value chain is increasingly losing share to these players, who are chipping away at the profit pool. 

How might incumbent life insurers keep pace in today’s fast-moving competitive environment and meet customers’ changing needs?

Deploying the Design Thinking methodology in the insurance sector could be the key to helping save insurance from itself. Here's what McKinsey has to say about design thinking in insurance in their article "Transforming Life Insurance through Design Thinking".

"Better addressing the evolving needs of consumers can help incumbents win their loyalty—and protect against new competitors. 

Bringing Design Thinking to the Insurance World

Pancentric helped  Jelf kick-off a several-year digital transformation journey by getting to know not just their customers better, but their own staff, too. Jelf has dozens of offices around the UK, all with specialties in insuring different kinds of commercial businesses. For our project team trying to determine a roadmap of new developments, there was no easy overview of how each office operated or what the entire customer experience looked like.

The Features of Design Thinking in Fast Moving Consumer Goods Brand Development

This paper investigates what features of design thinking are employed in FMCG brand development via stakeholder interviews in three domains: agencies, companies, and retailers. This paper concludes with suggestions of how design thinking can be embraced in FMCG brand development.

A Chain of Innovation The Creation of Swiffer

This is a great case study that underlines the complexity of bringing game changing products to market. It helps to provide an understanding of just how much more is needed that a simple five step process of idea generation.

Read more from Continuum , the Design Firm responsible for the Swiffer

The Guardian: Using Design to Reaffirm Values

The Guardian's redesign, which launched in January 2018, illustrated the business impact when design is valued. The Guardian has a strong culture of design and increasingly, how design thinking can contribute to organizational change and development.

• Onsite training

3,000,000+ delegates

15,000+ clients

1,000+ locations

• KnowledgePass
• Log a ticket

01344203999 Available 24/7

10 Successful Design Thinking Case Study

Dive into the realm of Successful Design Thinking Case Studies to explore the power of this innovative problem-solving approach. Begin by understanding What is Design Thinking? and then embark on a journey through real-world success stories. Discover valuable lessons learned from these case studies and gain insights into how Design Thinking can transform your approach.

Exclusive 40% OFF

Training Outcomes Within Your Budget!

We ensure quality, budget-alignment, and timely delivery by our expert instructors.

Share this Resource

• Leadership Skills Training
• Instructional Design Training
• Design Thinking Course
• Business Development Training
• Leadership and Management Course

Design Thinking has emerged as a powerful problem-solving approach that places empathy, creativity, and innovation at the forefront. However, if you are not aware of the power that this approach holds, a Design Thinking Case Study is often used to help people address the complex challenges of this approach with a human-centred perspective. It allows organisations to unlock new opportunities and drive meaningful change. Read this blog on Design Thinking Case Study to learn how it enhances organisation’s growth and gain valuable insights on creative problem-solving.

Table of Contents   

1) What is Design Thinking?

2) Design Thinking process   

3) Successful Design Thinking Case Studies

      a) Airbnb

      b) Apple

      c) Netflix

      d) UberEats

      e) IBM

       f) OralB’s electric toothbrush

      g) IDEO

      h) Tesla

       i) GE Healthcare

       j) Nike

3) Lessons learned from Design Thinking Case Studies

4) Conclusion    

What is Design Thinking ?

Before jumping on Design Thinking Case Study, let’s first understand what it is. Design Thinking is a methodology for problem-solving that prioritises the understanding and addressing of individuals' unique needs.

This human-centric approach is creative and iterative, aiming to find innovative solutions to complex challenges. At its core, Design Thinking fosters empathy, encourages collaboration, and embraces experimentation.

This process revolves around comprehending the world from the user's perspective, identifying problems through this lens, and then generating and refining solutions that cater to these specific needs. Design Thinking places great importance on creativity and out-of-the-box thinking, seeking to break away from conventional problem-solving methods.

It is not confined to the realm of design but can be applied to various domains, from business and technology to healthcare and education. By putting the user or customer at the centre of the problem-solving journey, Design Thinking helps create products, services, and experiences that are more effective, user-friendly, and aligned with the genuine needs of the people they serve.  

Design Thinking process

Design Thinking is a problem-solving and innovation framework that helps individuals and teams create user-centred solutions. This process consists of five key phases that are as follows:  

To initiate the Design Thinking process, the first step is to practice empathy. In order to create products and services that are appealing, it is essential to comprehend the users and their requirements. What are their anticipations regarding the product you are designing? What issues and difficulties are they encountering within this particular context?

During the empathise phase, you spend time observing and engaging with real users. This might involve conducting interviews and seeing how they interact with an existing product. You should pay attention to facial expressions and body language. During the empathise phase in the Design Thinking Process , it's crucial to set aside assumptions and gain first-hand insights to design with real users in mind. That's the essence of Design Thinking.

During the second stage of the Design Thinking process, the goal is to identify the user’s problem. To accomplish this, collect all your observations from the empathise phase and begin to connect the dots.

Ask yourself: What consistent patterns or themes did you notice? What recurring user needs or challenges were identified? After synthesising your findings, you must create a problem statement, also known as a Point Of View (POV) statement, which outlines the issue or challenge you aim to address. By the end of the define stage, you will be able to craft a clear problem statement that will guide you throughout the design process, forming the basis of your ideas and potential solutions.

After completing the first two stages of the Design Thinking process, which involve defining the target users and identifying the problem statement, it is now time to move on to the third stage - ideation. This stage is all about brainstorming and coming up with various ideas and solutions to solve the problem statement. Through ideation, the team can explore different perspectives and possibilities and select the best ideas to move forward with.

During the ideation phase, it is important to create an environment where everyone feels comfortable sharing their ideas without fear of judgment. This phase is all about generating a large quantity of ideas, regardless of feasibility. This is done by encouraging the team to think outside the box and explore new angles. To maximise creativity, ideation sessions are often held in unconventional locations.

It’s time to transform the ideas from stage three into physical or digital prototypes. A prototype is a miniature model of a product or feature, which can be as simple as a paper model or as complex as an interactive digital representation.

During the Prototyping Stage , the primary objective is to transform your ideas into a tangible product that can be tested by actual users. This is crucial in maintaining a user-centric approach, as it enables you to obtain feedback before proceeding to develop the entire product. By doing so, you can ensure that the final design adequately addresses the user's problem and delivers an enjoyable user experience.

During the Design Thinking process, the fifth step involves testing your prototypes by exposing them to real users and evaluating their performance. Throughout this testing phase, you can observe how your target or prospective users engage with your prototype. Additionally, you can gather valuable feedback from your users about their experiences throughout the process.

Based on the feedback received during user testing, you can go back and make improvements to the design. It is important to remember that the Design Thinking process is iterative and non-linear. After the testing phase, it may be necessary to revisit the empathise stage or conduct additional ideation sessions before creating a successful prototype.

Unlock the power of Design Thinking – Sign up for our comprehensive Design Thinking for R&D Engineers Training Today!

Successful Design Thinking Case Studies  

Now that you have a foundational understanding of Design Thinking, let's explore how some of the world's most successful companies have leveraged this methodology to drive innovation and success:

Case Study 1: Airbnb  

Airbnb’s one of the popular Design Thinking Case Studies that you can aspire from. Airbnb disrupted the traditional hotel industry by applying Design Thinking principles to create a platform that connects travellers with unique accommodations worldwide. The founders of Airbnb, Brian Chesky, Joe Gebbia, and Nathan Blecharczyk, started by identifying a problem: the cost and lack of personalisation in traditional lodging.

They conducted in-depth user research by staying in their own listings and collecting feedback from both hosts and guests. This empathetic approach allowed them to design a platform that not only met the needs of travellers but also empowered hosts to provide personalised experiences. 

Airbnb's intuitive website and mobile app interface, along with its robust review and rating system, instil trust and transparency, making users feel comfortable choosing from a vast array of properties. Furthermore, the "Experiences" feature reflects Airbnb's commitment to immersive travel, allowing users to book unique activities hosted by locals. 

Case Study 2.  Apple    

Apple Inc. has consistently been a pioneer in  Design Thinking, which is evident in its products, such as the iPhone. One of the best Design Thinking Examples from Apple is the development of the iPhone's User Interface (UI). The team at Apple identified the need for a more intuitive and user-friendly smartphone experience. They conducted extensive research and usability testing to understand user behaviours, pain points, and desires.   

The result? A revolutionary touch interface that forever changed the smartphone industry. Apple's relentless focus on the user experience, combined with iterative prototyping and user feedback, exemplifies the power of  Design Thinking in creating groundbreaking products.    

Apple invests heavily in user research to  anticipate what customers want before they even realise it themselves. This empathetic approach to design has led to groundbreaking innovations like the iPhone, iPad, and MacBook, which have redefined the entire industry.  

Case Study 3. Netflix  

Netflix, the global streaming giant, has revolutionised the way people consume entertainment content. A major part of their success can be attributed to their effective use of Design Thinking principles.

What sets Netflix apart is its commitment to understanding its audience on a profound level. Netflix recognised that its success hinged on offering a personalised, enjoyable viewing experience. Through meticulous user research, data analysis, and a culture of innovation, Netflix constantly evolves its platform. Moreover, by gathering insights on viewing habits, content preferences, and even UI, the company tailors its recommendations, search algorithms, and original content to captivate viewers worldwide.

Furthermore, Netflix's iterative approach to Design Thinking allows it to adapt quickly to shifting market dynamics. This agility proved crucial when transitioning from a DVD rental service to a streaming platform. Netflix didn't just lead this revolution; it shaped it by keeping users' desires and behaviours front and centre. Netflix's commitment to Design Thinking has resulted in a highly user-centric platform that keeps subscribers engaged and satisfied, ultimately contributing to its global success.  

Case Study 4. Uber Eats     

Uber Eats, a subsidiary of Uber, has disrupted the food delivery industry by applying Design Thinking principles to enhance user experiences and create a seamless platform for food lovers and restaurants alike.  

One of  UberEats' key innovations lies in its user-centric approach. By conducting in-depth research and understanding the pain points of both consumers and restaurant partners, they crafted a solution that addresses real-world challenges. The user-friendly app offers a wide variety of cuisines, personalised recommendations, and real-time tracking, catering to the diverse preferences of customers.  

Moreover,  UberEats leverages technology and data-driven insights to optimise delivery routes and times, ensuring that hot and fresh food reaches customers promptly. The platform also empowers restaurant owners with tools to efficiently manage orders, track performance, and expand their customer base. 

Case Study  5 . IBM    

IBM is a prime example of a large corporation successfully adopting Design Thinking to drive innovation and transform its business. Historically known for its hardware and software innovations, IBM recognised the need to evolve its approach to remain competitive in the fast-paced technology landscape.   

IBM's Design Thinking journey began with a mission to reinvent its enterprise software solutions. The company transitioned from a product-centric focus to a user-centric one. Instead of solely relying on technical specifications, IBM started by empathising with its customers. They started to understand customer’s pain points, and envisioning solutions that genuinely addressed their needs. 

One of the key elements of IBM's Design Thinking success is its multidisciplinary teams. The company brought together designers, engineers, marketers, and end-users to collaborate throughout the product development cycle. This cross-functional approach encouraged diverse perspectives, fostering creativity and innovation. 

IBM's commitment to Design Thinking is evident in its flagship projects such as Watson, a cognitive computing system, and IBM Design Studios, where Design Thinking principles are deeply embedded into the company's culture. 

Elevate your Desing skills in Instructional Design – join our Instructional Design Training Course now!

Case Study 6. Oral-B’s electric toothbrush

Oral-B, a prominent brand under the Procter & Gamble umbrella, stands out as a remarkable example of how Design Thinking can be executed in a seemingly everyday product—Electric toothbrushes. By applying the Design Thinking approach, Oral-B has transformed the world of oral hygiene with its electric toothbrushes.  

Oral-B's journey with Design Thinking began by placing the user firmly at the centre of their Product Development process. Through extensive research and user feedback, the company gained invaluable insights into oral care habits, preferences, and pain points. This user-centric approach guided Oral-B in designing electric toothbrushes that not only cleaned teeth more effectively but also made the entire oral care routine more engaging and enjoyable.  

Another of Oral-B's crucial innovations is the integration of innovative technology into their toothbrushes. These devices now come equipped with features like real-time feedback, brushing timers, and even Bluetooth connectivity to sync with mobile apps. By embracing technology and user-centric design, Oral-B effectively transformed the act of brushing teeth into an interactive and informative experience. This has helped users maintain better oral hygiene.  

Oral-B's success story showcases how Design Thinking, combined with a deep understanding of user needs, can lead to significant advancements, ultimately improving both the product and user satisfaction.

Case Study 7. IDEO  

IDEO, a Global Design Consultancy, has been at the forefront of Design Thinking for decades. They have worked on diverse projects, from creating innovative medical devices to redesigning public services.

One of their most notable Design Thinking examples is the development of the "DeepDive" shopping cart for a major retailer. IDEO's team spent weeks observing shoppers, talking to store employees, and prototyping various cart designs. The result was a cart that not only improved the shopping experience but also increased sales. IDEO's human-centred approach, emphasis on empathy, and rapid prototyping techniques demonstrate how Design Thinking can drive innovation and solve real-world problems.   

Upgrade your creativity skills – register for our Creative Leader Training today!

Case Study  8 .  Tesla  

Tesla, led by Elon Musk, has redefined the automotive industry by applying Design Thinking to Electric Vehicles (EVs). Musk and his team identified the need for EVs to be not just eco-friendly but also desirable. They focused on designing EVs that are stylish, high-performing, and technologically advanced. Tesla's iterative approach, rapid prototyping, and constant refinement have resulted in groundbreaking EVs like the Model S, Model 3, and Model X.    

From the minimalist interior of their Model S to the autopilot self-driving system, every aspect is meticulously crafted with the end user in mind. The company actively seeks feedback from its user community, often implementing software updates based on customer suggestions. This iterative approach ensures that Tesla vehicles continually evolve to meet and exceed customer expectations .   

Moreover, Tesla's bold vision extends to sustainable energy solutions, exemplified by products like the Powerwall and solar roof tiles. These innovations  showcase Tesla's holistic approach to Design Thinking, addressing not only the automotive industry's challenges but also contributing to a greener, more sustainable future.   

Case Study 9. GE Healthcare 

GE Healthcare is a prominent player in the Healthcare industry, renowned for its relentless commitment to innovation and design excellence. Leveraging Design Thinking principles, GE Healthcare has consistently pushed the boundaries of medical technology, making a significant impact on patient care worldwide.  

One of the key areas where GE Healthcare has excelled is in the development of cutting-edge medical devices and diagnostic solutions. Their dedication to user-centred design has resulted in devices that are not only highly functional but also incredibly intuitive for healthcare professionals to operate. For example, their advanced Medical Imaging equipment, such as MRI and CT scanners, are designed with a focus on patient comfort, safety, and accurate diagnostics. This device reflects the company's dedication to improving healthcare outcomes.  

Moreover, GE Healthcare's commitment to design extends beyond the physical product. They have also ventured into software solutions that facilitate data analysis and Patient Management. Their user-friendly software interfaces and data visualisation tools have empowered healthcare providers to make more informed decisions, enhancing overall patient care and treatment planning.

Case Study 10. Nike 

Nike is a global powerhouse in the athletic apparel and Footwear industry. Nike's journey began with a simple running shoe, but its design-thinking approach transformed it into an iconic brand.

Nike's Design Thinking journey started with a deep understanding of athletes' needs and desires. They engaged in extensive user research, often collaborating with top athletes to gain insights that inform their product innovations. This customer-centric approach allowed Nike to develop ground breaking technologies, such as Nike Air and Flyknit, setting new standards in comfort, performance, and style.

Beyond product innovation, Nike's brand identity itself is a testament to Design Thinking. The iconic Swoosh logo, created by Graphic Designer Carolyn Davidson, epitomises simplicity and timelessness, reflecting the brand's ethos.  

Nike also excels in creating immersive retail experiences, using Design Thinking to craft spaces that engage and inspire customers. Their flagship stores around the world are showcases of innovative design, enhancing the overall brand perception.

Lessons learned from Design Thinking Case Studies

The Design Thinking process, as exemplified by the success stories of IBM, Netflix, Apple, and Nike, offers valuable takeaways for businesses of all sizes and industries. Here are three key lessons to learn from these Case Studies:  

1)   Consider the b ig p icture   

Design Thinking encourages organisations to zoom out and view the big picture. It's not just about solving a specific problem but understanding how that problem fits into the broader context of user needs and market dynamics. By taking a holistic approach, you can identify opportunities for innovation that extend beyond immediate challenges. IBM's example, for instance, involved a comprehensive evaluation of their clients' journeys, leading to more impactful solutions.  

2)  Think t hrough a lternative s olutions   

One of the basic principles of Design Thinking is ideation, which emphasises generating a wide range of creative solutions. Netflix's success in content recommendation, for instance, came from exploring multiple strategies to enhance user experience. When brainstorming ideas and solutions, don't limit yourself to the obvious choices. Encourage diverse perspectives and consider unconventional approaches that may lead to breakthrough innovations.  

3)  Research e ach c ompany’s c ompetitors   

Lastly, researching competitors is essential for staying competitive. Analyse what other companies in your industry are doing, both inside and outside the realm of Design Thinking. Learn from their successes and failures. GE Healthcare, for example, leveraged Design Thinking to improve medical equipment usability, giving them a competitive edge. By researching competitors, you can gain insights that inform your own Design Thinking initiatives and help you stand out in the market.  

Incorporating these takeaways into your approach to Design Thinking can enhance your problem-solving capabilities, foster innovation, and ultimately lead to more successful results.  

Conclusion    

Design Thinking is not limited to a specific industry or problem domain; it is a versatile approach that promotes innovation and problem-solving in various contexts. In this blog, we've examined successful Design Thinking Case Studies from industry giants like IBM, Netflix, Apple, Airbnb, Uber Eats, and Nike. These companies have demonstrated that Design Thinking is a powerful methodology that can drive innovation, enhance user experiences, and lead to exceptional business success.   

Start your journey towards creative problem-solving – register for our Design Thinking Training now!  

Frequently Asked Questions

Design Thinking Case Studies align with current market demands and user expectations by showcasing practical applications of user-centric problem-solving. These Studies highlight the success of empathetic approaches in meeting evolving customer needs.

By analysing various real-world examples, businesses can derive vital insights into dynamic market trends, creating innovative solutions, and enhancing user experiences. Design Thinking's emphasis on iterative prototyping and collaboration resonates with the contemporary demand for agility and adaptability.

Real-world examples of successful Design Thinking implementations can be found in various sources. For instance, you can explore several Case Study repositories on Design Thinking platforms like IDEO and Design Thinking Institute. Furthermore, you can also look for business publications, such as the Harvard Business Review as well as Fast Company, which often feature articles on successful Design Thinking applications.

The Knowledge Academy takes global learning to new heights, offering over 30,000 online courses across 490+ locations in 220 countries. This expansive reach ensures accessibility and convenience for learners worldwide.

Alongside our diverse Online Course Catalogue , encompassing 17 major categories, we go the extra mile by providing a plethora of free educational Online Resources like News updates, blogs, videos, webinars, and interview questions. Tailoring learning experiences further, professionals can maximise value with customisable Course Bundles of TKA .

The Knowledge Academy’s Knowledge Pass , a prepaid voucher, adds another layer of flexibility, allowing course bookings over a 12-month period. Join us on a journey where education knows no bounds.

The Knowledge Academy offers various Leadership Training Courses , including Leadership Skills Training, Design Thinking Course, and Creative and Analytical Thinking Training. These courses cater to different skill levels, providing comprehensive insights into Leadership Training methodologies. 

Our Leadership Training blogs covers a range of topics related to Design Thinking, offering valuable resources, best practices, and industry insights. Whether you are a beginner or looking to advance your Design Thinking skills, The Knowledge Academy's diverse courses and informative blogs have you covered.

Upcoming Business Skills Resources Batches & Dates

Fri 2nd Aug 2024

Fri 4th Oct 2024

Fri 6th Dec 2024

Get A Quote

WHO WILL BE FUNDING THE COURSE?

My employer

By submitting your details you agree to be contacted in order to respond to your enquiry

• Business Analysis
• Lean Six Sigma Certification

Share this course

Our biggest spring sale.

We cannot process your enquiry without contacting you, please tick to confirm your consent to us for contacting you about your enquiry.

By submitting your details you agree to be contacted in order to respond to your enquiry.

We may not have the course you’re looking for. If you enquire or give us a call on 01344203999 and speak to our training experts, we may still be able to help with your training requirements.

Or select from our popular topics

• ITIL® Certification
• Scrum Certification
• Change Management Certification
• Business Analysis Courses
• Microsoft Azure Certification
• Microsoft Excel Courses
• Microsoft Project
• Explore more courses

Press esc to close

Fill out your  contact details  below and our training experts will be in touch.

Fill out your   contact details   below

Thank you for your enquiry!

One of our training experts will be in touch shortly to go over your training requirements.

Back to Course Information

Fill out your contact details below so we can get in touch with you regarding your training requirements.

* WHO WILL BE FUNDING THE COURSE?

Preferred Contact Method

No preference

Back to course information

Fill out your  training details  below

Fill out your training details below so we have a better idea of what your training requirements are.

HOW MANY DELEGATES NEED TRAINING?

HOW DO YOU WANT THE COURSE DELIVERED?

Online Instructor-led

Online Self-paced

WHEN WOULD YOU LIKE TO TAKE THIS COURSE?

Next 2 - 4 months

WHAT IS YOUR REASON FOR ENQUIRING?

Looking for some information

Looking for a discount

I want to book but have questions

One of our training experts will be in touch shortly to go overy your training requirements.

Your privacy & cookies!

Like many websites we use cookies. We care about your data and experience, so to give you the best possible experience using our site, we store a very limited amount of your data. Continuing to use this site or clicking “Accept & close” means that you agree to our use of cookies. Learn more about our privacy policy and cookie policy cookie policy .

We use cookies that are essential for our site to work. Please visit our cookie policy for more information. To accept all cookies click 'Accept & close'.

Product Design Bundle and save

User Research New

Content Design

UX Design Fundamentals

Software and Coding Fundamentals for UX

• UX training for teams
• Hire our alumni
• Student Stories
• State of UX Hiring Report 2024
• Our mission
• Advisory Council

Education for every phase of your UX career

Professional Diploma

Learn the full user experience (UX) process from research to interaction design to prototyping.

Combine the UX Diploma with the UI Certificate to pursue a career as a product designer.

Professional Certificates

Learn how to plan, execute, analyse and communicate user research effectively.

Master content design and UX writing principles, from tone and style to writing for interfaces.

Understand the fundamentals of UI elements and design systems, as well as the role of UI in UX.

Short Courses

Gain a solid foundation in the philosophy, principles and methods of user experience design.

Learn the essentials of software development so you can work more effectively with developers.

Give your team the skills, knowledge and mindset to create great digital products.

Join our hiring programme and access our list of certified professionals.

Learn about our mission to set the global standard in UX education.

Meet our leadership team with UX and education expertise.

Members of the council connect us to the wider UX industry.

Our team are available to answer any of your questions.

Fresh insights from experts, alumni and the wider design community.

Success stories from our course alumni building thriving careers.

Discover a wealth of UX expertise on our YouTube channel.

Latest industry insights. A practical guide to landing a job in UX.

What is design thinking?

Discover what is design thinking and why it’s important, including the five stages of design thinking. Deep dive into a few case studies and learn how to apply design thinking.

Free course: Introduction to UX Design

What is UX? Why has it become so important? Could it be a career for you? Learn the answers, and more, with a free 7-lesson video course.

Design thinking is a mindset that breeds innovation. While it’s based on the design process, anyone in any profession can use it when they’re trying to come up with creative solutions to a problem. 

In this guide, we’ll walk you through what design thinking is and why it’s important, including the five stages of design thinking. Then we’ll present a couple of design thinking case studies and wrap up with a primer on how to apply design thinking. And don’t worry, this guide is broken down into easily digestible chunks, as follows:

Let’s get started!

What is design thinking? A definition

Design thinking is an approach used for problem-solving. Both practical and creative, it’s anchored by human-centred design.

Design thinking is extremely user-centric in that it focuses on your users before it focuses on things like technology or business metrics. 

Design thinking is also solution-based, looking for effective solutions to problems, not problem-based, which looks at the problem itself and tends to focus on limitations. 

Design thinking is all about getting hands-on with solutions. The aim is to quickly turn your ideas into testable products so you can see what works and what doesn’t.

[GET CERTIFIED IN UX]

Why is design thinking important? 

Design thinking is important because it challenges assumptions and fosters innovation. While many ways of thinking rely on the habits and experiences we’ve formed, they can limit us when it comes to thinking of design solutions. Design thinking, however, encourages us to explore new ideas. 

It’s an actionable technique that allows us to tackle “wicked problems,” or problems that are ill-defined. For example, achieving sustainable growth or maintaining your competitive edge in business count as wicked problems, and on a broader scale, poverty and climate change are wicked problems too. Design thinking uses empathy and human-centred thinking to tackle these kinds of problems.

Who uses design thinking?

The short answer? Everyone! Design thinking can help you in whatever your role or industry. People in business, government, entertainment, health care, and every other industry can benefit from using design thinking to come up with innovative solutions. 

The most important thing design thinking does is help people focus on their customers or end users. Instead of focusing on problems to fix, design thinking keeps things user-centric, which boosts customer engagement. 

What are the 5 stages of design thinking?

According to the Hasso Plattner Institute of Design at Stanford University (known as d-school), the five stages of design thinking are: 

Although these stages appear to be linear, following one after the other, design thinking isn’t a linear process. Stages are often run in parallel or out of order, or repeated when necessary.

Phase 1: Empathise 

Your goal here is to research your users’ needs to gain an empathic understanding of the problems they face. You’ll get to know your users and their wants and needs so you can make sure your solutions put them front and centre. This means setting aside your own assumptions and getting to know your users on a psychological and emotional level. You’ll observe, engage, watch and listen. 

Phase 2: Define

Here you state your users’ needs by compiling the information you gathered during the Empathise phase and then analysing it until you can define the core problem your team has identified. 

You do this by asking questions like: what patterns do you see in the data? What user issues need to be resolved? The conclusion of this phase comes when you’ve figured out a clear problem statement that is defined by the users’ needs. For example, “Bank customers in Glasgow need…”

You can learn more about how to write a problem statement in this guide.

Phase 3: Ideate

In this phase, you’ll generate ideas and solutions. You and your team will hold ideation sessions where you can come up with as many ideas as possible. No idea is too silly for this stage. The important thing is getting all ideas out on the table. There are a variety of techniques you can use, like brainstorming and mind mapping, to come up with solutions. This phase ends when you’ve managed to narrow down your ideas to just a few of the best ones.

Phase 4: Prototype

Your goal in this phase is to find the best solution to the problem by prototyping —that is, producing scaled down versions of the product or its features found in the previous phase. You’ll put each solution to the test by improving, redesigning, accepting, or rejecting it.

Phase 5: Test

Here you’ll try out the solutions you arrived at in the previous phases by user testing them. However, while this is the final stage of design thinking in theory, it’s rarely the final stage in reality. Design thinking often includes going back to previous phases to find other solutions or to further iterate or refine your existing solution.

[GET CERTIFIED IN USER RESEARCH]

Design thinking examples and case studies

Now that you understand the theory and process of design thinking, let’s look at some examples in action where design thinking had a real-world impact.

Case Study 1: American Family Insurance’s Moonrise App

American Family Insurance, a company that offers life, business, auto, and home insurance, came to design company IDEO with the goal of innovating in a way that would help working families. 

Stages 1 & 2: Empathise and Define

While American Family thought their customers might benefit from budgeting tools, IDEO found from their research in the Empathise phase that, actually, people needed a way to build up their savings against unforeseen needs.

They noticed a lot of people had meticulously planned budgets, which made budgeting tools a moot point. But they were living just within their means and an extra expense, like a doctor’s visit or kid’s basketball uniform, could throw their budget off. These people didn’t want to take on debt though, they wanted extra work so they could have a cushion.

Stages 3 & 4: Ideate and Prototype

IDEO took that idea and ran with it, creating Moonrise, an app that matches people looking for work with extra hours and income. Today’s businesses depend on on-demand work but the temp agencies they work with tend to want permanent placements. Moonrise does things differently. It enables companies to find people who are already employed elsewhere for short-term work through a simple text message interface. The employers can list shifts on the platform and workers are paid as soon as they finish their shifts.

Stage 5: Test

To test the app, 11 Moonrisers, six employers, and a team of designers and programmers were assembled for a one week period to work out the kinks in the platform. 

Based on the test’s success, American Family Insurance now owns the startup Moonrise, which launched in Chicago in 2018 and has since expanded to additional states. In 2018, over 7,000 shifts have been fulfilled and over $500,000 has been earned by people on the app.

Case Study 2: GE Healthcare’s Scanning Tools

GE Healthcare has cutting-edge diagnostic imaging tools at its disposal, but for kids they’re an unpleasant experience. 

“The room itself is kind of dark and has those flickering fluorescent lights…. That machine that I had designed basically looked like a brick with a hole in it,” explained Doug Dietz , a designer who worked for GE. How could they make the experience better for kids?

The team at GE began by observing and gaining empathy for children at a daycare centre and talking to specialists who knew what paediatric patients went through. The team then recruited experts from a children’s museum and doctors from two hospitals. This gave them a lot of insight into what children went through when they had to sit for these procedures and what could be done to lessen the children’s stress.

Stages 3, 4 & 5: Ideate, Prototype, and Test

The first prototype of the new and improved “Adventure Series” scanner was invented. Through research and pilot programs, the redesign made imaging machines more child-friendly, making sure they have other things to focus on than the scary looks and sounds of the machine. For example, the Coral City Adventure in the emergency room gives children an underwater experience where they get into a yellow submarine and listen to the sound of harps while their procedure takes place.

Patient satisfaction scores increased to 90% and children no longer suffer such anxiety about their scans. The children hold still for their procedures more easily, making repeats of the scans unnecessary. There’s also less need for anesthesiologists, which improved the bottom line for those hospitals that used the scanning machines because more patients could get scanned each day.

How to apply design thinking 

If you want to apply design thinking in your own work, follow these steps and best practices:

• Improve design thinking skills. Use training to explain, improve, and practically implement the phases of design thinking. You can do this in several ways such as workshops, online courses, or case studies shared with your team.
• Identify the correct problem. Listen to users and ask them unbiased questions in order to understand their perspectives. Engage with everyone and stay open-minded, so you can identify the correct problem, not the problem you or your organisation thinks users are having. 
• Have more debriefs. Be open about what went right and what went wrong in your process. Openly discuss why things succeeded or failed and why. View failure as learning, not as an excuse to give up.
• Iterate and iterate some more. The goal of design thinking is finding the best answer possible—and that probably won’t come in the first round of iteration. You’ll need to test and iterate as much as possible with new ways to solve the problem.

Design thinking is so popular—and so effective—because it places the user’s needs front and centre. For more user-centric design tips, learn how to incorporate user feedback in product design , get to grips with user research ethics , and learn how to conduct effective user interviews .

• design thinking

Subscribe to our newsletter

Get the best UX insights and career advice direct to your inbox each month.

Thanks for subscribing to our newsletter

You'll now get the best career advice, industry insights and UX community content, direct to your inbox every month.

Upcoming courses

Professional diploma in ux design.

Learn the full UX process, from research to design to prototyping.

Professional Certificate in UI Design

Master key concepts and techniques of UI design.

Certificate in Software and Coding Fundamentals for UX

Collaborate effectively with software developers.

Certificate in UX Design Fundamentals

Get a comprehensive introduction to UX design.

Professional Certificate in Content Design

Learn the skills you need to start a career in content design.

Professional Certificate in User Research

Master the research skills that make UX professionals so valuable.

Upcoming course

Build your UX career with a globally-recognised, industry-approved certification. Get the mindset, the skills and the confidence of UX designers.

You may also like

The importance of clear and consistent branding in Content Design (and how to achieve it)

Designing for voice interfaces: The opportunities and challenges of UX design

Build your UX career with a globally recognised, industry-approved qualification. Get the mindset, the confidence and the skills that make UX designers so valuable.

2 July 2024

COVID-19: The Ultimate Design Thinking Use Case

We are living in extraordinary times as COVID-19 continues to cause crises across the world. Could designers make use of design thinking to solve urgent problems and come up with innovative solutions?

By Miklos Philips

Miklos is a design leader, author, and speaker with more than 18 years of experience in the design field.

PREVIOUSLY AT

An emergency field hospital with tents customarily used for disaster relief has been opened in New York’s Central Park, and across the globe, “social distancing” has become part of our everyday behavior.

We are coming to grips with COVID-19, but it has caught us off guard. As most of the world’s population is under some form of lockdown, we find ourselves in the middle of an unprecedented social experiment with many people working remotely and entire families staying home.

A global pandemic of this scale was inevitable. For years, we have been warned of the possibility by hundreds of health experts, and in 2015, Bill Gates talked about how unprepared we are in his TED talk . He grimly warned: “If anything kills over 10 million people in the next few decades, it’s most likely to be a highly infectious virus rather than a war.” We are now faced with a challenge that has no parallel in peacetime this century.

While most people manage to “keep calm and carry on,” friction and frustration are inevitable living under such a crisis. But duress lays fertile ground for innovation, and during times such as these, eager designers and creatives can’t help but see opportunities for improvement.

If we approached COVID-19 as a design problem, could we find innovative ways to apply design thinking and human-centered design principles to help soothe everyday frustrations and mitigate the most pressing issues? Drawing parallels between the problems of the global pandemic and those of product and service design, the similarities are obvious.

At the intersection of the innovator’s mindset and creative thinking, we could explore ways to help the world deal with this and the next pandemic. Reaching into our designer’s toolkit, we could deploy the staples of our craft, including problem definition, ethnographic research, ideation, prototyping, and user testing. Taking advantage of recent innovations and the latest technology, we could run Design Sprints , focus on a specific problem, generate multiple solutions, build prototypes, and get rapid feedback.

The Design Thinking Process Applied to COVID-19

A global pandemic puts enormous stress on governments and healthcare services. Suddenly, there is a scramble to circulate the correct information and roll out products and services to deal with the crisis. These challenges bring together a blend of product design, experience design, and service design problems that are desperate for a solution, and design thinking can help.

Design thinking is a methodology that provides a solution-based approach to solving problems. It combines what’s desirable from a human point of view with what is technologically feasible and economically viable. It’s useful in tackling loosely defined, complex problems by understanding human needs.

Design thinking is unique compared with other forms of problem-solving methods in that it’s a non-linear process focused on delivering outcomes, rather than being focused on a precise problem definition. The design thinking process consists of five stages: empathize, define, ideate, prototype, and test . Each step needs to be given appropriate resources and the proper duration to create an end product that reliably meets user needs.

Information Clarity, Consistency, and Distribution

The flow of information is essential to curbing a pandemic. While the virus responsible for the COVID-19 pandemic was spreading, it took authorities several weeks to consolidate their messaging and make it consistent. With advanced technology, the distribution of information isn’t the problem. It’s transmitting the right information to the right people at the right time.

In times of crisis, there is an acute need for standardized, consistent, and effective information design. Principle four from the Nielsen Norman Group’s 10 Usability Heuristics for User Interface Design states: “Users should not have to wonder whether different words, situations, or actions mean the same thing.”

To contain the outbreak, the UK government quickly moved to design clear, consistent messaging, taking advantage of the rule of three : “ Stay at home. Protect the NHS. Save lives. ” It was widely distributed via the internet and media. People received texts, got emails, and saw posters on the street, all of which has proved to be very effective.

Unfortunately, not all governments are created equal, and too little came too late from too many. Particularly when lives are at stake, clear and consistent instructions from healthcare services and authorities need to be out sooner rather than later.

In an ideal scenario, an emergency “design commission” with an army of volunteer designers and content strategists could spring into action to rapidly craft and test various designs. Taking the design thinking phases of empathize, define, and ideate , this rapid response team of designers could assist authorities with formulating the right kind of messaging.

During the final phase of design thinking: implementation , governments could text millions of people with new rules around social distancing with the help of mobile operators. Getting information out rapidly over a variety of channels would ensure people receive the right kind of information promptly.

The primary goal of content strategists and information designers working with healthcare services is not only to convey vital information but to reduce people’s “cognitive load.” Borrowed from cognitive psychology, it is a frequently used term in UX and describes the process where, unable to process an overload of critical information, the brain shuts down.

Information designers can observe the Laws of UX and apply two of its “golden rules” to reduce cognitive load: Hick’s Law and Miller’s Law. Hick’s Law states that “the time it takes to make a decision increases with the number and complexity of choices,” so minimalist, uncomplicated designs are best when people need to make a decision. For example, it could be applied to an infographic outlining whether to use facial masks or not.

In an extreme scenario, both of these laws could be violated simultaneously by confusing pictograms meant to convey vital information, i.e., presenting too many choices and asking people to remember too many things.

The third UX principle that could be adopted for powerful information design is the Von Restorff Effect , which can help people recall information more easily. It states that “items that stand out from their peers are more memorable.” Designers can use the Von Restorff Effect to design effective, memorable information that needs to be conveyed quickly and convincingly.

The Psychology of Panic Buying

Experts say hoarding essential supplies despite reassurances from experts that shortages of everyday household goods are unlikely is motivated by a natural human reaction to stress and uncertainty.

When crises occur, people quite naturally want to regain control. We tend to run with the herd, thinking: “If everyone else is buying toilet paper, hand sanitizers, and pasta, I should probably do the same.”

How can stores prevent or at least get ahead of this kind of behavior? Reflecting on the principles of UX design, it’s about “knowing your user.” Becoming keenly aware of previous events, patterns, and behaviors that lead to the raiding of aisles in supermarkets and pharmacies could mitigate the problem.

Aligning the panic-shopping phenomenon with the user interface heuristic “visibility of system status,” clear signage throughout the shopping experience could curtail the rush to stock up on essentials. Governments could raise awareness through the media and send uniform signage to grocery stores to calm nerves and inform shoppers that there is plenty to go around.

If there is a principle that is sacred to UX designers, it's know your user. After all, how can we design something for people without in-depth, detailed knowledge of them? Don Norman , co-founder and Principal Emeritus of Nielsen Norman Group

Product and Service Design in the Age of COVID-19

Effective solutions are desperately needed to a myriad of problems foisted on the world by COVID-19. As a result, the pandemic is powering innovation on an atypical scale and pace not normally considered. Apart from PPEs (personal protective equipment), hospital beds, and face shields, ventilators are in short supply, which has sparked an astounding number of design breakthroughs. And that’s just one area where necessity has proved itself to be the mother of invention.

Innovation is now recognized as the single most important ingredient in any modern economy. Tom Kelley, IDEO Partner

Self-diagnosis at home, monitoring those who are infected, widespread testing, and contact tracing are just a few design problems that need solving. Dealing with emergent mental health issues, panic buying, and social distancing caused by lockdowns is another. Endless design problems with unique challenges present themselves during global crises, and exciting design opportunities abound.

Fusing advanced technology with design thinking, designers have an opportunity to bring forth many innovative products and services.

Design Thinking in Healthcare: Test, Trace, and Treat

In the battle to contain the contagion, employing the test, trace, and treat approach is unavoidable. Widespread testing and contact tracing are needed to identify and alert people who have come into contact with a person infected with the coronavirus.

Putting into practice the user-centered design process, designers could brainstorm new ideas with the “ how might we ” method. It would require us to accept that we don’t currently know the answer and foster a collaborative approach to solving it. IDEO calls it “ challenge mapping ,” which is very similar to the 5 Whys method for problem-solving (developed at Toyota in the 1930s).

For example, currently, home test kits are not reliable for testing for novel coronavirus infection. But the steps in the design thinking process could be applied to make them ready for the next one.

Under empathizing and defining , we can understand the problem; with ideation and prototyping, we can explore the most cost-effective way to make them; and with testing and implementation , we can refine and deliver an effective solution. In this way, millions of home test kits could be designed, prototyped, and tested .

Mobile apps and big data are ideal partners for contact tracing. When people develop symptoms, how can they know if it’s COVID-19? An AI-powered COVID-19 symptom checker app could “listen” to coughs and breathing, as well as measure body temperature and heart rate via an external wristband. Comparing results with large sets of previous data, it would come up with a diagnosis. Once the symptoms are confirmed, the app can then advise users on an appropriate course of action.

Looking at social distancing, apps could be designed that alert people if they’re getting too close to someone. It could be wearable tech, such as a chest camera, that would send an audible alert to their mobile device (or their earphones).

COVID-19 and Mental Health – Living in Isolation

As authorities race to stem the spread of the coronavirus by shuttering everything we take for granted, some experts fear the consequences on people’s mental health, and the longer a quarantine continues, the greater the effect.

Experts say that depression, anxiety, and suicides typically emerge from traumatic events, such as widespread lockdowns and the uncertainty of the pandemic. The impact is worse for those with existing mental health conditions, the elderly, the vulnerable, and the self-isolating.

Eight to 10 days after they were quarantined due to the spread of COVID-19, more than half the participants in a recent study reported the adverse psychological effects of the outbreak as “moderate or severe.” Can design thinking address people’s protracted isolation and look for ways to alleviate mental stress?

We can take steps from the design thinking process and approach problems from the user’s perspective: empathize with sufferers and ideate solutions. Healthcare services could support the availability of high-quality, remote counseling by therapists, psychiatric nurses, and doctors. However, the ease of use (usability) of these digital services is crucial, as well as the simplicity of making an appointment.

For many people, talking to friends and family over video calls helps. However, according to Jakob Nielsen of the Nielsen Norman Group, the elderly are typically not tech-savvy users and “need dramatically simplified software” that works with a push of a button. For them, making a video call needs to be almost as simple as using a lightswitch.

To help detect depression, Massachusetts Institute of Technology researchers have recently developed an AI system that can detect if a person is suffering from depression by analyzing their speech patterns. Such an AI system can power a mobile app that monitors a person’s speaking patterns, detects mental distress, and sends an alert to doctors. It could prove especially useful for those who can’t get to a doctor for an initial diagnosis due to distance, cost, or a lack of awareness that something may be wrong.

Designing Better Personal Protective Equipment (PPE)

When stepping out of home isolation, protection is on everyone’s mind. During lockdowns, people still need to get essential supplies, pick up medication, and get some exercise.

As designers approach the new norms and apply design thinking to personal protection, a window of opportunity opens up for design innovation. We can empathize, define, ideate, prototype, test, and implement . For example, designers could envision washable gloves made of comfortable material that offer sufficient protection and would become part of our daily protective wear.

For those with a smartwatch, using haptic vibration , apps could sound an alert as the wearer is about to touch their face. Fashionable face masks that are easy to manage yet block airborne viruses could be designed.

The lack of personal protective equipment for medical professionals is prompting design innovation at an unprecedented scale. In any healthcare system, there are not only the patients to consider but their families, the doctors, nurses, and other support personnel. A holistic system including all its components needs to be considered in order to see where design can help.

It’s putting the person, the human at the centre of what you do. Because no matter what industry or sector you’re in, there’s a human in there somewhere, so just anticipate and consider their needs. Kathryn Townsend, Head of Customer & Client Accessibility, Barclays UK

During the ideation phase in design thinking, it’s unlikely the ultimate solution to the problem will be discovered. The point is to come up with as many ideas as possible, sort through them to find the best ones (which will likely be some combination of user needs, practicality, cost-effectiveness, and other factors specific to the project), and then figure out which ideas should move on to the next step: prototyping .

Challenging assumptions is key to defining what is or isn’t a viable solution that can lead to innovative ideas. The idea is to try everything, even if some turn out to be duds.

I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work. Thomas Edison

As intensive care units are overwhelmed, there is an acute shortage of ventilators. Some ventilator manufacturers are forming partnerships with various firms and working around the clock to make them as fast as possible. Hope is also riding on smaller design labs that could make ventilators more quickly.

With ideation and prototyping , a team led by University of Oxford professors along with a student and professors from King’s College of London have defined a simple, safe, and scalable ventilator design that meets the strict specifications for use with patients. The design exploits off-the-shelf components and equipment with parts that can be produced using 3D printing, cutting costs dramatically.

“In less than two weeks, the students, researchers, and academics driving this project have developed into a highly structured and efficient team, brainstormed a prototype, and won government backing,” professor Mark Thompson of Oxford said.

Contactless Everything Is King

Naturally, people fear contact with anything when a tap on a screen or keypad can cause a fatal infection. Touch-based UIs are not favored, and paying with cash isn’t permitted in many grocery stores. Out are ATMs, supermarket keypads, and vending machines; in are contactless transportation passes and payment terminals where people can use contactless cards, ApplePay, and Google Pay.

And then there is radar tech like Google’s Project Soli for contactless interactions.

Project Soli is developing a new interaction sensor using radar technology. The sensor tracks sub-millimeter motions at high speed and accuracy. It fits onto a chip, can be produced at scale, and built into small devices and everyday objects. Soli is a miniature radar that understands human motions at various scales: from the tap of a finger to body movements.

Contactless payment terminals are already here, but soon, using radar-powered motion sensors, contactless UIs should be possible for everything from ATMs to vending machines. Interacting may be slower with these UIs, but “contactless-modes” will be safer to use. When there is no longer a need, systems can switch back to touch-based interactions.

Shopping for essentials in contactless stores would be a boon during global pandemics. Computer vision, sensor fusion, and deep learning systems can enable checkout-free shopping experiences. Are checkout-free stores like Amazon Go Grocery ahead of their time?

Data Visualization and Analysis

Putting cities under lockdown is not enough. Testing, contact tracing, home isolation, and rapid treatment are vital —all of which generate a lot of unstructured data. A sea of data coming in is good, but data alone doesn’t speak and doesn’t help make informed decisions. It’s tantamount to drinking from a firehose.

Policymakers and hospital leaders need to make informed decisions based on facts backed by data. For systems to function well, we not only need data but more importantly, robust data analysis and data visualization tools. Again, “ visibility of system status ” takes on vital importance. Patterns need to be identified, the spread of the virus visualized, and disease conditions monitored 24/7.

To facilitate better decision-making, researchers and startups are using artificial intelligence and other technologies to predict where the virus might appear next and how fast it will spread. These AI tools may use advanced technology and algorithms, but many of them suffer from poor usability. They need to be well-designed, present data efficiently, and communicate complexity with clarity through sophisticated data visualization.

UX designers have an opportunity to step in and make improvements. Once again, they can turn to the design thinking process: define the problem, ideate solutions, prototype, test , and implement the next generation of data visualization tools.

Closing Thoughts

The rapid spread of the coronavirus and the disorganized and erratic response of many governments demonstrates how unprepared we are in dealing with a global pandemic. No one looked at the COVID-19 outbreak as a design problem, but the crisis offers a chance to question the wisdom of old habits and to explore out-of-the-box thinking. Applying the design thinking process, designers and design thinkers can play a vital role in diagnosing the most pressing issues and come up with solutions.

Tumult and upheaval have altered history with wars, plagues, and chaos, sometimes leading to positive growth. We can look for a silver lining in the current calamity: COVID-19 is forcing the world to rethink its outmoded routines and power a remarkable pace of design innovation. Many design breakthroughs of the current crisis will be short-lived, but many will have staying power because they solve big problems. It’s up to designers to get to work.

Let us know what you think! Please leave your thoughts, comments, and feedback below.

Further Reading on the Toptal Blog:

• How to Work Remotely When It Matters Most
• Exploring the Reasons for Design Thinking Criticism
• The Value of Design Thinking in Business
• Breaking Down the Design Thinking Process

Understanding the basics

How do you describe service design.

Service design is the action of determining what elements of a service will provide the optimal experience for its users by examining the service’s communication, infrastructure, and material components as well as the users’ interactions with it.

Why is service design important?

Service design provides design tools and a structure that help companies get to know their customers, their needs and desires, and to provide them with a superior experience. It drives profits and offers companies ways to reduce cost as well as achieve a competitive advantage.

What are the benefits of service design?

Effective service design creates an optimal experience for users. It considers all stakeholders, fosters collaboration, creates consistency, offers cost reduction, and helps to keep companies agile by embracing change. Design thinking in service design can help.

What is the difference between misinformation and disinformation?

Misinformation is false information that’s given without malice, and disinformation is false information, such as government propaganda, that’s given with the intention to deceive.

What is design thinking not?

Design thinking is not about lightly updating existing designs and generating “alternative” solutions. A simplified approach to design thinking impedes real innovation. Many designers dislike the notion of design thinking because, to them, it tends to reduce the design process into an easy-to-follow formula.

• UserResearch
• InformationArchitecture
• Product Design

Miklos Philips

London, United Kingdom

Member since May 20, 2016

About the author

World-class articles, delivered weekly.

By entering your email, you are agreeing to our privacy policy .

Toptal Designers

• Adobe Creative Suite Experts
• Agile Designers
• AI Designers
• Art Direction Experts
• Augmented Reality Designers
• Axure Experts
• Brand Designers
• Creative Directors
• Dashboard Designers
• Digital Product Designers
• E-commerce Website Designers
• Full-Stack Designers
• Information Architecture Experts
• Interactive Designers
• Mobile App Designers
• Mockup Designers
• Presentation Designers
• Prototype Designers
• SaaS Designers
• Sketch Experts
• Squarespace Designers
• User Flow Designers
• User Research Designers
• Virtual Reality Designers
• Visual Designers
• Wireframing Experts
• View More Freelance Designers

Join the Toptal ® community.

• Harvard Business School →
• Faculty & Research →
• April 2021 (Revised June 2021)
• HBS Case Collection

IBM: Design Thinking

• Format: Print
• | Language: English
• | Pages: 21

About The Author

Srikant M. Datar

Related work.

• Faculty Research
• IBM: Design Thinking  By: Srikant M. Datar, Amram Migdal and Paul Hamilton

8 Great Design Thinking Examples

Wondering if design thinking works here’s a collection of design thinking case studies that show how organizations have applied design thinking..

Design thinking is imperative for companies to unleash their team’s full potential. Let us take a deep dive into 8 great Design Thinking Examples!

In the Harvard Business Review article “ Why Design Thinking Works ,” Jeanne Liedtka reveals the results of a seven-year study she did looking at 50 business projects in a range of sectors. What she found was this: “I have seen that…design thinking…has the potential to do for innovation exactly what TQM [total quality management] did for manufacturing: unleash people’s full creative energies, win their commitment, and radically improve processes .”

Design thinking is an undeniably powerful tool for companies, but what does it look like in practice?

Design thinking is an undeniably powerful tool for companies , but what does it look like in practice? How have organizations applied it and how does it work? Is design thinking training something your company needs? Read the following design thinking examples and case studies to discover how design thinking has been successfully applied by many companies. Bonus: learn the key foundations in design thinking to better solve problems and seize opportunities in our Design Thinking Foundations e-course –an excellent tool for the entire team.

How has design thinking been applied to different industries, challenges, and business sectors? Here are eight examples of how it has impacted real companies and teams.

Published in First Round Review, this article —  “How Design Thinking Transformed Airbnb from a Failing Startup to a Billion Dollar Business ” —outlines how the famed start-up went from $200 a week profit to the “ unicorn ” it is today.

Design thinking is a part of Airbnb’s success; in particular, they built a culture of experimentation: “It was only when they gave themselves permission to experiment with non-scalable changes to the business that they climbed out of what they called the ‘trough of sorrow.’”

2. PillPack

This case study describes how PillPack started as a startup-in-residence at IDEO Cambridge. Working with designers and using a human-centered approach, PillPack refined their brand vision, strategy, and identity across channels.

PillPack was called one of the best inventions of 2014 by Time Magazine and Amazon bought PillPack for $1 Billion in 2018. I think you could safely say that their design thinking approach was successful.

3. Clean Team

There are many great examples of how design thinking has been applied to the social sector . This case study describes Clean Team, which applied design thinking to provide in-home toilets for Ghana’s urban poor.

The case study describes the project and its success: “For the millions of Ghanaians without in-home toilets, there are few good options when it comes to our bodies’ most basic functions. Working with Unilever and Water and Sanitation for the Urban Poor (WSUP), and IDEO.org developed Clean Team , a comprehensive sanitation system that delivers and maintains toilets in the homes of subscribers. Clean Team now serves 5,000 people in Kumasi, Ghana, making lives cleaner, healthier, and more dignified.”

IBM is an example of a corporate giant who has deeply invested in design thinking and building a large internal design team . And, they’ve seen the work pay off — this article talks about how IBM has seen a 301% (!) ROI by banking on design thinking. Another impressive thing about IBM is that they’ve made their enterprise design thinking assets available to everyone through this open toolkit .

Facilitation Certification

Develop the skills you and your team need to facilitate transformative meetings, drive collaboration, and inspire innovation..

5. Stanford Hospital

Design thinking has even found its way into the world of medicine and is seen by many as fundamental to the future of wellness . This case study describes how design thinking was used in a two-day course by the Hasso Plattner Institute of Design at Stanford to explore ways to improve the patient experience in the emergency room.

Additionally, the article describes how Stanford administrators have been using design thinking to envision other new experiences for the hospital: “SHC staff used design thinking to complete a plan to redesign two nursing units in the current hospital to serve only patients with cancer.”

6. Uber Eats

This article by a former designer on the UberEATS team describes how they approach their food delivery service with a design thinking mindset. One of the top takeaways from the article is how empathy is essential to their practice: “To understand all our different markets and how our products fit into the physical conditions of each city, we constantly immerse ourselves in the places where our customers live, work, and eat. Sitting in our offices in San Francisco or New York, we can’t truly understand the experiences of a person on the streets of Bangkok or London.”

7. Golden Gate Regional Center

The Harvard Business Review article “Better Service, Faster: A Design Thinking Case Study ” describes how design thinking was used by the Golden Gate Regional Center (GGRC) , an organization that provides services and financial support to people with developmental disabilities in the San Francisco Bay Area.

GGRC worked with design students from Stanford to rethink their lengthy assessment process, which often took months. One outcome of the project was a culture change inside GGRC toward design thinking: “GGRC is now brainstorming improvement ideas and figuring out ways to prototype them on a regular basis.”

8. Bank of America

We’ll end with one of the classic design thinking examples, which comes from Bank of America. Invision’s case study shares how the bank partnered with design consultancy IDEO in 2004 to understand how to get more people to open bank accounts. They ultimately came up with the Keep the Change program. This highly successful banking initiative came out of the design thinking research the IDEO team did where they found savers were intentionally rounding up when writing checks.

To learn more about how to apply the design thinking process to business, go here . If you want to build your own toolkit of design thinking tools, check out our resources.If you’re ready to start using design thinking, sign up for our online course.

Join Our Facilitation Lab

Sharpen your facilitation skills to improve the quality of meetings at our free virtual community meet-ups., related articles.

Brainstorming in Design Thinking: Best Practices & Challenges

Explore the transformative power of brainstorming in design thinking, a pivotal phase that drives innovation and creates impactful user-centric solutions. This comprehensive guide delves into best practices for fostering an environment where creativity flourishes and diverse ideas converge to solve complex problems. Emphasizing the importance of psychological safety, it reveals how design-led companies have significantly outperformed market averages by prioritizing inclusive and dynamic brainstorming sessions. Learn effective techniques like encouraging diverse participation, deferring judgment, and setting clear roles to enhance ideation. Additionally, discover tools and strategies to overcome common challenges like groupthink and dominant voices, ensuring every brainstorming session is a fertile ground for groundbreaking ideas and solutions.

Fostering Co-creation and Collaboration in Design Thinking

Co-creation projects boast a 30% higher success rate, harnessing diverse skills and viewpoints to enhance solution creativity and utility. This article dives into co-creation's role in design thinking, advocating for collaborative environments that breed innovation. In design thinking, co-creation merges creator and consumer roles, fostering user-aligned innovation. The benefits are substantial: user-centric solutions enhance customer loyalty, stakeholder buy-in increases advocacy, and shared ownership boosts engagement. Effective stakeholder engagement is pivotal, requiring inclusive workshops and continuous communication. Fostering a collaborative team culture is crucial, emphasizing openness, active listening, and diversity. The article outlines participatory design workshops, ideation sessions, and prototyping as key co-creation methods, stressing regular feedback and digital collaboration tools' importance. Overcoming co-creation challenges—like managing diverse perspectives and ensuring equal participation—is essential for leveraging collective intelligence in design thinking, promising more impactful and sustainable solutions.

Unveiling the Core of Design Thinking: Mastering Synthesis and Insight Generation

Design thinking transcends ordinary problem-solving, focusing on user-centric solutions. Central to this approach is synthesis, a transformative process turning scattered observations into actionable insights. This blog explores synthesis's pivotal role in converting empathetic research into innovative actions, emphasizing its necessity across various design thinking stages. Synthesis integrates diverse data forms, guiding the journey from understanding to innovation. It leverages deductive, inductive, and abductive thinking to analyze and generate insights, ensuring solutions are grounded in real user contexts. Illustrating with IDEO's thematic analysis and McKinsey's insights on design-led success, the post emphasizes structured, empathetic, and insightful methodologies. The blog also details synthesis stages—learning, theme identification, and insight generation—each vital for profound user understanding. Effective synthesis combines diverse perspectives, structured analysis, and iterative refinement, overcoming superficiality and biases to foster impactful design solutions. Through these insights, designers navigate from empathy to ideation, prototyping innovations that resonate deeply with users, underlining the synthesis's crucial role in informed, empathetic design thinking.

Copyright © 2023 Voltage Control. All Rights Reserved.

Ready to take your career to the next level?

Join our free introduction to facilitation workshop to learn collaborative leadership skills, the next live session is july 11th, 3-4:30 pm.

Uh oh, something went wrong! Try again. If the problem persists, contact us

You're signed up! Keep an eye on your email for more info.

Get new articles to your inbox!

The latest insights on innovation & design sprints sent monthly..

• Business Essentials
• Leadership & Management
• Credential of Leadership, Impact, and Management in Business (CLIMB)
• Entrepreneurship & Innovation
• Digital Transformation
• Finance & Accounting
• Business in Society
• For Organizations
• Support Portal
• Media Coverage
• Founding Donors
• Leadership Team

• Harvard Business School →
• HBS Online →
• Business Insights →

Business Insights

Harvard Business School Online's Business Insights Blog provides the career insights you need to achieve your goals and gain confidence in your business skills.

• Career Development
• Communication
• Decision-Making
• Earning Your MBA
• Negotiation
• News & Events
• Productivity
• Staff Spotlight
• Student Profiles
• Work-Life Balance
• AI Essentials for Business
• Alternative Investments
• Business Analytics
• Business Strategy
• Business and Climate Change
• Design Thinking and Innovation
• Digital Marketing Strategy
• Disruptive Strategy
• Economics for Managers
• Entrepreneurship Essentials
• Financial Accounting
• Global Business
• Launching Tech Ventures
• Leadership Principles
• Leadership, Ethics, and Corporate Accountability
• Leading Change and Organizational Renewal
• Leading with Finance
• Management Essentials
• Negotiation Mastery
• Organizational Leadership
• Power and Influence for Positive Impact
• Strategy Execution
• Sustainable Business Strategy
• Sustainable Investing
• Winning with Digital Platforms

5 Examples of Design Thinking in Business

• 22 Feb 2022

Design thinking has become a business buzzword that’s changed how companies approach problem-solving . Countless brands, including GE Healthcare, Netflix, and UberEats, have utilized design thinking to develop effective solutions to challenges.

Access your free e-book today.

What Is Design Thinking?

Design thinking is a user-centric, solutions-based approach to problem-solving that can be described in four stages :

• Clarify: This phase involves observing a situation without bias. It leans into design thinking’s user-centric element and requires empathizing with those affected by a problem, asking them questions about their pain points, and identifying what they solved. You can then use what you learn to create a problem statement or question that drives the rest of the design thinking process.
• Ideate: Begin brainstorming potential solutions. Take your problem statement or question and ideate based on patterns or observations collected in the clarify phase. This is the time to let your imagination and creativity run wild.
• Develop: Develop potential solutions using the ideas you generate, then test, experiment with, and reiterate to determine which are successful and which aren’t. Be ready to return to the ideation or clarification stage based on your results. Stepping back in the process is common—and encouraged—in design thinking.
• Implement: Finally, implement the solution you’ve developed. Again, it’s likely you’ll have to take a few steps back and reiterate your final solution, but that’s a central part of this phase. After several tests and edits, you’ll have a solution that can yield positive results.

Examples of Design Thinking

What does a properly executed design thinking process look like? Examining real-world examples is an effective way to answer that question. Here are five examples of well-known brands that have leveraged design thinking to solve business problems.

1. GE Healthcare

GE Healthcare is an example of a company that focused on user-centricity to improve a product that seemingly had no problems.

Diagnostic imaging has revolutionized healthcare, yet GE Healthcare saw a problem in how pediatric patients reacted to procedures. Many children were observed crying during long procedures in cold, dark rooms with flickering fluorescent lights. Considering this, GE Healthcare’s team observed children in various environments, spoke to experts, and interviewed hospital staff to gain more insight into their experiences.

After extensive user research, hospital pilots, and reiteration, GE Healthcare launched the “Adventure Series.” This redesign initiative focused on making magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) machines more child-friendly.

For example, the “Pirate Adventure” transforms MRI machines from dark, black holes to pirate ships with scenery of beaches, sandcastles, and the ocean. By empathizing with children’s pain points, GE Healthcare was able to craft a creative solution that was not only fun but increased patient satisfaction scores by 90 percent. This also yielded unexpected successes, including improved scan quality of pediatric patients, and ultimately saved customers time and resources.

Design thinking not only succeeds at finding effective solutions for companies but also at putting initiatives to the test before implementation.

When Oral B wanted to upgrade its electric toothbrush, it enlisted designers Kim Colin and Sam Hecht to help. The company’s request was to add more functions for electric toothbrush users, such as tracking brushing frequency, observing gum sensitivity, and playing music.

While clarifying the problem, however, Colin and Hecht pointed out that brushing teeth was a neurotic act for many people. Users didn’t want additional functionality and, in many cases, thought it could potentially cause more stress. Instead, they recommended two solutions that could improve user experience without adding gimmicks.

Their first recommendation was to make the toothbrush easier to charge, especially while users were on the road. Another was making it more convenient for users to order replacement heads by allowing toothbrushes to connect to phones and send reminder notifications. Both proposals were successful because they focused on what users wanted rather than what the company wanted to roll out.

Although many companies have successfully used design thinking, Netflix has repeatedly leveraged it to become an industry giant. During the company’s inception, its main competitor, Blockbuster, required customers to drive to brick-and-mortar stores to rent DVDs. The process was the same for returns, which was a major pain point for many. Netflix eliminated that inconvenience by delivering DVDs directly to customers’ homes with a subscription model.

While this revolutionized the movie industry, Netflix’s real success has been in its innovation over the years. For example, when the company realized DVDs were becoming outdated, it created an on-demand streaming service to stay ahead of the curve. This also inadvertently eliminated the inconvenience of having to wait for DVDs.

Subsequently, in 2011, Netflix took its design thinking one step further and responded to customers’ need for original, provocative content that wasn’t airing on traditional networks. Later, in 2016, it improved its user experience by adding short trailers to its interface. Each of Netflix’s major updates was in response to customers’ needs and driven by an effective design thinking process.

Another household name, Airbnb , started by only making around $200 a week. After some observation, its founders recognized that the advertising pictures hosts were posting online weren’t of a high enough quality, which often deterred customers from renting rooms.

To empathize with customers, the founders spent time traveling to each location, imagining what users look for in a temporary place to stay. Their solution? Invest in a high-quality camera and take pictures of what customers want to see, based on their travel observations. For example, showing every room rather than a select few, listing special features like a hot tub or pool in the description, and highlighting the neighborhood or areas in close proximity to the residence. The result? A week later, Airbnb’s revenue doubled.

Instead of focusing on reaching a bigger audience, Airbnb’s founders used design thinking to determine why their existing audience wasn’t utilizing their services. They realized that rather than focusing on traditional business values, like scalability, they needed to simply put themselves in users’ shoes to solve business problems.

5. UberEats

The go-to food delivery service app UberEats attributes its success to its ability to reiterate quickly and empathize with customers.

A prime example of this is UberEats’s Walkabout Program , where designers observe cities in which the company operates. Some elements they inspect are food culture, cuisine, infrastructure, delivery processes, and transportation. One of the innovations that came from their immersive research is the driver app, which focuses on delivery partners’ pain points around parking in highly populated urban areas. To address this, the driver app provides step-by-step directions from restaurant to customer to ensure smoother delivery processes.

Understanding that pain points vary between geographic locations helps UberEats implement effective upgrades to its service that solve problems in specific locations.

Practice Design Thinking

While these examples illustrate the kind of success design thinking can yield, you need to learn how to practice and use it before implementing it into your business model. Here are several ways to do so:

• Consider the Big Picture

In the examples above, it’s easy to say the solutions are obvious. Yet, try taking a step back to reflect on how each company thought about its customer base’s perspective and recognized where to employ empathy.

• Think Through Alternative Solutions

This is a useful exercise you can do with the examples above. Consider the problem each company faced and think through alternative solutions each could have tried. This can enable you to practice both empathy and ideation.

• Research Each Company’s Competitors

Another helpful exercise is to look at each company’s competitors. Did those competitors have similar problems? Did they find similar solutions? How would you compete? Remember to walk through the four design thinking phases.

Design thinking is a powerful tool you can use to solve difficult business problems. To use it successfully, however, you need to apply it to problems both big and small.

If you want to learn more about design thinking, explore our online course Design Thinking and Innovation —one of our online entrepreneurship and innovation courses —for more real-world case studies and opportunities to practice innovative problem-solving in your career.

About the Author

5 Game-Changing Examples of Design Thinking (and What We Can Learn from Them)

Design thinking is a powerful framework with the capacity to revolutionize your approach to just about anything.

Over the last decade, the practice of design thinking has made its way into a variety of other disciplines and industries. In the past, employers may have thought of design as something only for artists or other creative professionals. Nowadays, CEO’s and hiring managers across many disciplines are calling on designers to improve their products or services.

From consumer products, healthcare, travel, non-profit community programs, and even self-improvement, design thinking has proven a useful problem-solving tool for innovators and entrepreneurs alike.

We’ve rounded up five examples of how design thinking can have incredible effects on a company’s success as well as a huge impact on the world around us. For each example, we’ll go over how each organization used the design process to improve their services and what we can learn from their experience. Here’s what we’ll cover:

• What is design thinking?

Braun/Oral B Electric Toothbrush

The good kitchen, bernard roth’s “the achievement habit”.

• Key takeaways

1. What is design thinking?

A designer’s biggest task is to identify and solve existing problems with a product and leave users happier than they were before. At times this task can seem overwhelming and hard to grasp. The process of design thinking consists of five steps that designers use to organize their information and find meaningful and successful solutions to a problem. The design thinking steps go like this:

• Empathize: Understanding the user and the problems they face through conducting user interviews, creating empathy maps, and listening to user stories.
• Define: Organizing and analyzing the research information to produce a concise problem statement and possible solution or hypothesis.
• Ideate: The brainstorming phase. Designers think of a wide variety of possible solutions and evaluate each one.
• Prototype: Turning ideas into a physical representation of the product that will solve the user’s needs, slowly adding greater detail and complexity as designers move between testing and iteration.
• Test: Putting the prototype in the hands of the user and determining whether the product has solved the problem at hand and reduced friction or frustration.

The idea behind design thinking is to keep the user in mind from beginning to end. With the user at the forefront, designers can move between these five design thinking steps to create problem solving products with the potential to change industry standards and even lives.

2. Five awesome examples of design thinking

In 2016, Braun and Oral B recruited the expertise of designers Kim Colin and Sam Hecht, founders of the London-based design studio Industrial Facility, to create a smarter electric toothbrush.

When they initially partnered with Braun and Oral B, the manufacturers suggested Colin and Hecht design an electric toothbrush with a variety of sophisticated data-tracking features including a music player, ways to sense how well the users were brushing every single tooth, and even how sensitive their gums were.

However, Hecht and Colin quickly advised them to think more about the customer’s experience as opposed to their own vision for the product. They suggested how a few simple additions to the brush could solve many of the frictions their users were reporting. Hecht and Colin added on-the-go, USB charging and made it easier for users to order replacement brush heads, both problems that Braun and Oral B consumers had already expressed.

The result was an exceptional product that took user feedback into consideration to boost sales and increase customer loyalty.

Using the design thinking process to find better ways to serve a community can have profound effects on the lives of its members. Take Danish design agency Hatch and Bloom’s creation of The Good Kitchen as an example.

In 2007, Denmark had over 125,000 elderly citizens relying on government-sponsored meals. Hatch and Bloom were called upon by the Municipality of Holstebro to design a new and improved meal delivery service for these citizens. What came to fruition was a service with greater quality, more freedom of meal choice, and more flexibility for not only the elderly citizens receiving the meals but also the chefs and other employees responsible for cooking and delivering them.

How did they create such a superior service? One of the most notable actions Hatch and Bloom took was the decision to interview and prototype with both consumers and chefs. They found the things that meal recipients were desiring were similar to what the chefs requested as well—a more dignified service with a greater variety of food options.

By listening to their concerns, hearing their pain points, and testing out new options, Hatch and Bloom found ways to keep both their customers and employees happy and healthy.

It’s hard to believe that the ever-successful start-up Airbnb was once making less than $200 per week. What grew their revenue and transformed Airbnb into a billion-dollar business? Lots of experimentation, risk, and thinking outside of the norm.

Joe Gebbia and Paul Graham, co-founders of Airbnb, remember going over numerous charts, graphs, and codes with their design team trying to find some clue as to why their growth was nearly zero.

It wasn’t until Gebbia began moving through the app like a user that he realized why no one was wanting to book a stay—the pictures looked terrible! Without any data to back their next decision, Graham and Gebbia decided to rent a camera, travel to New York, and spend some time with their customers to replace the amateur photos with more professional-looking ones.

A week later, their revenue nearly doubled. By taking a risk on a non-scalable solution, Graham and Gebbia witnessed their dwindling start-up transform into a thriving enterprise that revolutionized the travel industry.

The design team at UberEats is constantly accessing design thinking principles to fuse modern, state-of-art technology with the antiquated and fundamental act of enjoying a meal.  And it’s safe to say that they’ve had a pretty successful project.

One thing that really stands out about the UberEats design team is their adherence to the design thinking process. They seek to empathize with their user’s experience so much that they’ve implemented The Walkabout Program—a quarterly event where UberEats designers are sent to a city to learn about it’s transportation infrastructure, delivery and restaurant industry, and it’s overall food culture.

In addition to this immersive design technique, UberEats designers iterate quickly and innovate constantly. They participate in rapid field testing, where designers are interviewing and prototyping with the people who will be using the product the most: restaurant workers, delivery drivers, and meal recipients.

The UberEats team also holds innovation workshops where team members from many disciplines gather to brainstorm possible improvements. These same designers also attend numerous out-of-office conferences, meetups, and talks related to the restaurant industry, cuisine trends, and food technology.

You can even apply design thinking to your own personal development!

In this book by Bernard Roth, academic director and professor of Engineering at the Hasso Plattner Institute Design at Stanford University, the design thinking process is used to encourage individuals to accomplish the things they’ve always wanted to but never could.

Whether you need help breaking bad habits or creating positive ones, Roth says the design process can help people make meaningful changes in their lives. Many individuals have attested to this method with their success stories using the design thinking process to lose weight, battle anxiety, or even start a new business.

Roth encourages people wanting to make a change in their lives to first empathize with themselves and ask questions like, “How would I feel if I solved this problem? What would it do for me?” He then says to use the answers to these questions to define the problem at hand, much like the second step in the design thinking process.

Next, Roth urges people to brainstorm solutions to their problem and not to be shy when trying them out. Instead of just thinking about your problem and how it could be solved, Roth encourages the use of the design thinking process to turn your ideas into actions and enter into an iterative cycle within your own life—tweaking and testing solutions until you find what works for you.

3. Key takeaways

These examples of design thinking show just how impactful this methodology can be when solving problems.

Whether it’s a new app, a community service, or a physical product, the best thing you can do to innovate successfully is to keep your user in mind at every step in the design process. It can be tempting to create a flashy, high-tech product.

Instead, focus on what your users are asking for.

It’s easy for designers to become disconnected from their user. Don’t be afraid to take risks and immerse yourself in the lives of the people who will actually interact with your product. Then implement their feedback and test your results. Eventually, you’ll land on that final iteration with the potential to change the world around you.

If you’d like to learn more about design thinking, check out these other articles:

• 5 design thinking exercises every UX designer should know
• How to get a design thinking certification: the best programs and courses
• How to run an awesome design thinking workshop
• 3 Examples of interaction design at its best

Learn / Guides / Design thinking guide

Back to guides

4 inspiring design thinking examples and the valuable lessons they teach

Design thinking is a powerful tool for product teams, but what does it look like in practice? How have successful companies applied it—and why does it work?

Last updated

Reading time.

From tech products, healthcare, travel, and even non-profit community programs, design thinking has proven to be a useful problem-solving tool for innovators and entrepreneurs alike.

We’ve rounded up four design thinking examples that show the incredible effects this methodology can have on a company’s success. In these examples, we examine how each organization used the design thinking process to improve their product—and what you can learn from their experience.

The tools you need to design a product customers love

Use Hotjar to understand how real users experience your product—so you can improve it for them and keep them coming back for more.

Why design thinking works

Design thinking has made its way into various industries in the past decade. As a creative approach to innovation and problem-solving that focuses on users , the practice of design thinking covers everything from physical consumer products like smartphones and laptops, to digital systems built by SaaS brands, and even community-oriented projects in wellness, banking, and self-improvement.

Today, probably every tech company you can think of is using design thinking in one way or another. Some of the world’s leading brands—think Apple, Google, IBM, and Samsung—have adopted the design thinking approach, and the methodology is being taught at leading universities around the world, including Stanford d.school, Harvard, and MIT. 

Why does it work for every one of them? The answer is pretty straightforward: design thinking helps product teams understand not only what will make a great product, but also how and if they should do it. It can (and has) transformed the way businesses across industries solve problems and meet customer needs.

The power of this methodology is to quickly test whether an idea, solution, or enhancement can bring real results to customers. This creative and experimental approach helps teams better understand how to create products that are not only usable, but above all, useful.

☝️ Fact: design-led companies consistently outperform their competitors

This user-first approach, coupled with early and frequent testing, helps minimize risk, drive customer engagement, and ultimately boost the bottom line. In fact, design thinking offers a proven competitive advantage .

According to a recent five-year study by McKinsey & Company, companies that consistently followed design thinking practices generated roughly 32% more revenue and 56% higher returns for shareholders than those that did not. This higher success rate was true across banking, consumer goods, and med tech industries. 

4 examples of design thinking to inspire you

Right now, you may think: “This is great, but how will it help bring my product to life faster?” To make your vision more tangible, let’s look at four exceptional examples of design thinking done right. 

Remember: at one point, these companies were standing exactly where you are. The more you know about successful design processes, the more you can take some of their best aspects and use them to enhance your own products.

Airbnb knows a thing or two about design—as they should, considering two of the company’s founders are designers. In 2008, they teamed up with an engineer to solve one essential travel problem: where to stay.

How Airbnb uses design thinking

To do that, they knew they had to get into the heads of the people who were going to use Airbnb and see what they were actually looking for. Their solution involved traveling to New York, renting a camera, and spending time with customers in their homes to take good pictures of the houses. It wasn’t scalable or very technical, and they did it with no preliminary study—they were only guided by intuition.

The team took a chance, skipped what they had learned at school about how a business should work, and followed the steps of the design thinking methodology: empathize, define, design, prototype, and test. Then, they doubled their income overnight.

Today, design thinking is still part of Airbnb’s DNA and is embedded in everything they do: it’s how they foster creative culture, iterate on their product, and make meaningful connections with a global community of travelers— all by putting the human experience at the center . Here are a few design-led projects that have happened over the years at Airbnb:

The “Snow White” project : a user journey visualization that illustrates the critical moments of truth within the host, guest, and hiring processes in three stories.

Empathy travel : a program that immerses team members into the customer experience. Every new employee has to take a trip in their first or second week at Airbnb and document it.

Design Language System : design teams often struggle to reach a cadence that balances the creative process and cycles of continuous innovation. This process led to the development of Airbnb’s new Design Language System, a collection of components defined by shared principles and patterns, as well as a suite of internal and third-party tools that allow their teams to work smarter and with more alignment.

Design is fundamentally about making decisions through the lens of what will be useful and engaging to people.

What Airbnb has achieved through design thinking 

Their unusual and more creative approach paid off. By implementing design thinking principles, Airbnb has singlehandedly defined the experience economy and set themselves apart as an industry leader. 

From a program that listens and responds to hosts' feedback, to encouraging gestures that create customer delight at moments where the product experience might break, Airbnb has used design thinking to solve incredibly complex and interesting challenges , including:

Dealing with a unique global inventory of homes and experiences

Understanding how people get inspired and plan travel

Creating tremendous freedom for bold, creative thinking and making for employees

As for revenue, the company has gone from $200 a week to revolutionizing tourism and achieving a valuation of $110 billion . Guests have booked over 1 billion stays, and there are 5.6 million global listings in 100,000 cities and over 200,000 regions.

 What you can learn from Airbnb  

Put the human experience at the center: product teams at Airbnb know that their work is about building a software-enabled trust system, so people can safely share their homes, their passions, and their time with travelers. Trust is what brings together what is desirable from a human point of view, with what is technologically feasible and economically viable . Alex Schleifer, Chief Design Officer at Airbnb, shared that their teams always ground themselves in real human behaviors and needs through research, whether they’re dealing with machine learning or a new emerging interface.

Never stop experimenting and iterating : while Airbnb is data-driven, they don’t let data push them around. Instead of developing reactively to metrics, the team works proactively, often starting with a creative hypothesis, implementing a change, reviewing how it impacts the business, and then repeating that process.

Take measured, productive risks : individual team members at Airbnb make small bets on new features, and then measure if there’s a meaningful return on the bet. If there’s a payoff, they send more resources in that direction. If not, there’s a lot to learn from failure .

💡Pro tip: combine quantitative metrics with qualitative feedback to inform designs and keep users at the center of your work. 

Airbnb doesn’t rely on (big) data analytics and A/B testing alone. Instead, they combine quantitative insights with people’s ability to synthesize and make sense of data from all sources .

Sasha Lubomirsky, former Head of User Research at Airbnb, said that “a lot of design thinking is about being creative [but it is also] about looking at what we know, triangulating information that we have, and having that inspire creativity.”

You don’t have to collect, analyze, and distribute UX research data manually. Use Hotjar ’s product experience insights tools to collect and analyze different kinds of information, then use what you learn to enhance the user experience.

Hotjar’s tools combine behavioral and attitudinal research methods through a blend of quantitative and qualitative data. Use Hotjar Surveys and Feedback widgets to collect voice-of-customer (VoC) feedback, and Heatmaps and Session Recordings to round out the picture with behavioral insights.

 2. UberEats

UberEats’ use of design thinking is nothing short of inspiring. Their evolution shows that creating the future of an industry takes empathy, innovation, and an appetite for complex logistical challenges —elements that make design thinking a successful problem-solving approach.

How UberEats uses design thinking

The design team at UberEats constantly uses design thinking principles to fuse modern, state-of-the-art technology with the fundamental act of enjoying a meal. And it’s safe to say they've had a successful implementation.

Immersion, iteration, and innovation power the UberEats design team on their mission to make eating effortless. Their approach allows them to solve complex logistical challenges with new technology that complements people’s deep connection to food. Let’s take a closer look at some actionable design thinking projects:

→ Immersion 

The Walkabout Program : UberEats designers are routinely sent to a city to learn about its transportation infrastructure, delivery and restaurant industry, and overall food culture.

Fireside Chats : they invite delivery partners, restaurant workers, and customers to gain feedback on the app.

Order Shadowing : they test their prototypes by watching their customers’ real world experiences while using it.

To understand all our different markets and how our products fit into the physical conditions of each city, we constantly immerse ourselves in the places where our customers live, work, and eat.

→ Iteration 

Swift iteration : UberEats product teams know they need to rapidly build products so their customer base can grow quickly. Swift iteration allows them to move fast and ensure they get the design just right.

Rapid field testing : researchers and designers take mock-ups and prototypes into restaurants, inside delivery vehicles, and into people’s homes to test products in the places they’ll be used.

Multivariate testing : the team simultaneously tests multiple versions of a feature to quickly determine which performs the best. Shipping multiple options at once, rather than sequentially iterating on one version, helps them find the best-performing design faster.

Operations team experiments : they test concepts and designs in a single city to quickly gauge opportunity. For example, the first version of the “Most Popular Items” category in UberEats menus started as an operations team experiment in Toronto before later iterations were released to all users in all cities.

→ Innovation

Innovating on experiences: the UberEats product team always takes the opportunity to innovate on user experience and evolve from the traditional model of food delivery. This includes providing drivers with the option to do both rides and deliveries so they can stay busier and earn more money while online with Uber, designing a restaurant sales dashboard to let chefs monitor the demand of individual dishes and tweak recipes to improve their menus, and creating the “Under 30 Minutes” menu for people who want to leverage the speed of Uber to get food fast.

Workshops, conferences, meetups, and talks: they routinely gather representatives and use the design thinking methodology to look at challenges in new ways. They share experiences from similar services to generate insights and inspiration, then run creative exercises to generate a wide range of ideas. These same designers also attend numerous out-of-office conferences, meetups, and talks related to the restaurant industry, cuisine trends, and food technology.

Insights from other food innovators: the team stays inspired by observing how other companies are shaping the future of food. Seeing how others innovate in similar problem spaces helps their product teams think differently and generate new ideas about their products and services.

What UberEats has achieved through design thinking

Today, UberEats is the fastest growing delivery service, with a $2.8 trillion addressable market, making up 22% of the company’s total bookings in 2019. They’ve already:

Expanded to over 80 cities worldwide 

Provided restaurants with new ways to reach customers and build their businesses

Created another, often easier option for delivery partners to earn money with Uber

Invented new ways for hungry people to find and enjoy the food they love

Now focused on growth into new markets and growing from 3% to nearly 25% of Uber's revenue, the UberEats design team hasn't had time to slow down. 

What you can learn from UberEats 

The UberEats design thinking experience is a valuable lesson for a brand’s ability to move quickly, build empathy with customers, and make complex services run smoothly . Here’s how you can apply these lessons to your own product:

Empathize with the user experience: UberEats designers are constantly interviewing and prototyping with the people who will be using the product the most: restaurant workers, delivery drivers, and meal recipients. Once you find your target, you can observe, create design thinking problem statement examples, and iterate as soon as you identify opportunities to reduce assumptions and improve your design. 

Observe the design in use: UberEats takes every opportunity to hear from users directly. They follow partners on deliveries, visit restaurants during the rush, and sit in people’s homes while they order dinner. Watching how your product is used in the wild helps you better understand the needs of your customers, how well your designs address those needs, and what challenges exist in the real world that you can’t replicate in the office.

Iterate quickly and innovate constantly: the UberEats team uses design thinking to stimulate novel solutions to the problems and opportunities their product addresses. If you’re in your own ideation phase, take note of the UberEats innovation workshops, where team members from many disciplines gather to brainstorm possible improvements. These structured brainstorms shake up the mindset of the team, push their creativity, and spawn innovative ideas.

💡Pro tip: you don’t need to travel to your customers’ homes to get their feedback. Use Hotjar to talk directly to them or watch them interact with your product. 

Heatmaps help you identify click and scroll patterns, and Session Recordings let you track the entire user journey within your product. Deploy Feedback widgets to learn what users think while browsing, and understand blocks in navigation. 

These tools help your design team see what your customers see, which is crucial at the testing stage, when you’re often too close to the design to understand the experience from the outside.

An example of a Hotjar Session Recording

Design thinking can do (and has done) wonders for tech products and their users. But that’s not all it can do. For Citrix, a cloud company that enables mobile work styles, the change was felt more on an internal level, by building a culture of design thinking.

How Citrix uses design thinking 

Reweaving the Citrix corporate DNA meant harnessing the creative capability of their employees by developing design thinking leaders . 

It began when several senior executives attended the design thinking boot camp at Stanford’s d.school . They returned from the boot camp with a new vision for product development processes. One complete overhaul of internal processes later—and rethinking how the company innovated and built products—and Citrix had become a leader of design-driven excellence and innovation.

Since then, Citrix has developed an internal team that works to empower all divisions of the company—from executives to individual contributors—to make innovation and customer focus central to their thinking. Often referred to as a ‘center of excellence’ for design-driven innovation, this new organization brings design thinking and doing to the highest levels of executive leadership.

Through several programs, the customer became the center of our focus, from how we set the product roadmap to how we tuned the existing product set. We challenged ourselves to push beyond the status quo. 

The new Business Design team started to infuse design thinking into the organization from multiple directions: 

Top-down : by continuing to enlist VPs and key employees in the Stanford programs, which helps key stakeholders understand the language and tools of design thinking, gain an external perspective on their work, and be motivated to support design thinking initiatives.

Sideways : by holding design thinking workshops for mid-level managers and individual contributors, empowering them with a means of tackling key challenges.

Bottom-up : by leveraging various employee touch-points—such as global meetings, the company intranet, and new-hire training—to disseminate key messages about what it means to have a design thinking approach.

What Citrix has achieved through design thinking

Citrix teams have already run more than 50 projects using the design thinking methodology, focusing both on the employee experience and the customer experience. The customer has become the center of their focus, from how they set the product roadmap to how they tune the existing product set. 

At a company level, this has meant almost 4000 employees who have participated in a form of hands-on design training, an improved learning experience for customers, better use of product data to improve customers' support experience, and a successful legal compliance training workshop redesign.

Across the industry, results include:

Return on investment: on the compliance training project alone, Citrix calculated a conservative estimate of $3 million savings over the first four years. By streamlining the course rollout process, reminders, and curricula, they estimated savings of 3,600 hours of employee time in 2013, and over 9,000 hours in 2014.

Respect and recognition: Citrix products have won more than 20 awards since they adopted a design-focused approach. The organization has been recognized as one of Forbes’ Most Innovative Companies. Stanford’s Hasso Plattner Institute has also selected Citrix as a partner in cutting edge research on evaluation tools for innovation.

What you can learn from Citrix 

Design thinking beyond buzzwords : while Citrix teams practice design thinking every day, those outside of this methodology might see it as some form of magical thinking. To make others care about the practice behind the buzzword, relate it back to the business and highlight relevant examples of design thinking’s business impact. Then, make the connection between examples from other companies and the challenges facing your organization.

Highlighting the value of design thinking to your team: often, as companies scale, many employees have limited or no contact with the user, especially for people in non-design or leadership roles. Luckily, through structured activities, you can teach people to focus on the problems that matter to customers and improve the bottom line. As employees evaluate and explore ideas earlier, you’ll waste less money on the wrong issues.

Pitching to (and getting buy-in from) leadership : leaders need to know two things—what design thinking is and how it meets business goals. At Citrix, the strategy for obtaining executive buy-in was to get a few senior leaders on board, first. Once they bought in, other leaders started showing up, wanting to learn more and engage their teams. Following this example, draw up a list of the key leaders and influencers in your organization. Ask yourself: where do you see seeds of innovation popping up? Who is looking to engage more with your customers?

No list of exceptional design thinking examples would be complete without mentioning Apple's approach to innovation, management, and design. 

Today, the company may be most known for its physical products—like the iconic iPhone, iPad, and MacBook—but it was their iOS platform strategy that started their journey as an industry innovator .

They designed the initial product as a platform, with an architecture that could accommodate the development and production of the derivative products. Decades later, this decision allowed for innovations that put the user’s needs at the center —like facial recognition software, an intuitive user experience, a transformed music-listening experience, and more.

How Apple uses design thinking

From its product designs to Apple stores, everything is founded on design thinking principles. 

After Steve Jobs returned to Apple in 1997, he started to apply the design thinking characteristics that reflected his vision for Apple products:

Focusing on real people’s needs and desires, rather than only the needs of the business

Building empathy by helping people learn to love Apple products

Prioritizing the design, rather than the engineering work, by having designers consider both the form and function of the product

Building simple yet user-friendly products, rather than complex hard-to-use ones

Apple makes no secret of what drives everything that happens inside its massive compound in Cupertino, California: its users. From the smallest detail of Apple packaging to what the company calls its ''largest product'' (Apple stores), the user experience is never far from Apple employees' minds .

Their operating system was built by focusing on what consumers wanted, and then figuring out how to achieve it on the technical side. Apple’s products start with design, based on what people need and want, and are not limited by technology. The engineers are then pushed to use the same kind of creativity and innovation to make it happen.

The company puts a premium on design thinking in all its products, from digital to physical. That starts with figuring out what customers really want , developing products based on identified needs , and then creating prototypes and testing them to see how successful they are.

Our products are all about the people who use them. What drives us is making products that give people the ability to do things they couldn't do before.

What Apple has achieved through design thinking

Apple’s entire product development process may be one of the most successful design thinking examples ever implemented. With a valuation exceeding $2 trillion , there’s a lot that designers can learn from Apple and introduce into their own design environments.

Their dedication to continuous discovery and innovation has produced a series of user-centered technological hardware, operating systems, software, and services that set an industry standard. Examples include tools you (probably) use everyday—like the Apple TV, iMac, iPad, iPhone, MacBook, Apple Watch, AirPods, Bridge OS, iOS, App Store, FaceTime, iTunes, and iCloud.

What you can learn from Apple 

Apple’s history with innovation provides a clear lesson about how design and innovation can turn company failure into market success and a leading position in a competitive market. Here are a few actions you can apply to your own design thinking strategy:

Integrating customer experience into the product: customer experience has always been integrated into Apple’s product design and development. A lot of it empirically drives with iterative customer involvement into the design and development stages, through a constant testing and feedback process. Usability testing and improvement through user feedback should become an important step in your product development process.

Constant iteration of the product: the defining trait of an Apple product is that it continually evolves. Apple understands and promotes the importance of design as a motivation for continued innovation, rather than a static approach that assumes a single conclusion.

💡Pro tip: stay on the continuous discovery track by integrating Hotjar into your routine.

Continuous discovery allows your product team to question assumptions, learn how users really think, and constantly improve the products you deliver.  

Using tools like Hotjar gives you a constant stream of information on what your customers are feeling, how they're experiencing your product, and what their specific needs are.

Integrating Hotjar product experience tools into your routine can help you:

Discover opportunities to optimize by watching recordings of users during the sign up flow or after a feature launch

Spot unforeseen problems by creating a routine where you check feedback regularly

Gather new product ideas on an ongoing basis by using surveys

3 key takeaways to implement design thinking into your workflow

There’s a lot more that can be said about design thinking, but it’s actually a very straightforward concept. Implementing this methodology into your workflow becomes easier when you follow these core tenets:

1. Focus on customer problems first

It can be tempting to focus on creating a flashy, high-tech product. Instead, focus on what your users are asking for . Run user interviews and use Hotjar Surveys and Feedback widgets to send out a mix of full-scale surveys and quick questions on the fly. Watch Recordings to see what your users see and identify their pain points.

Whether it’s a new app, a community service, or a physical product, the best thing you can do to innovate successfully is keep your user in mind at every step in the design process. 

2. Generate and iterate on ideas 

When you understand the problem, the ideas will follow, and the way to a solution is more straightforward. It’s your job to refine these ideas through rapid prototypes and iterations that can lead to breakthrough outcomes.

As you interact closely with your customers and start to have great ideas for products, don’t be afraid to put together a round of product experimentation to prove the value. Run usability , A/B , and split testing with dedicated focus groups of target users. Use surveys and carefully-placed widgets to gather opinions on design elements and the overall product experience (PX).

Remember that design thinking is not a formal step-by-step process, but a framework and mindset. It’s focused on a bias towards action, a human-centered viewpoint, and continual experimentation. The core idea is that by deeply understanding customer needs, opportunities for innovation will emerge.  

3. Use feedback to focus and refine ideas

Listening to and working with customers can help you move quickly from ideas to useful solutions.

As a designer, it’s easy to disconnect from your users. Don’t be afraid to take risks and immerse yourself in the experience of those who will actually interact with your product . Then, implement their feedback and test your results. Eventually, you’ll land on that final iteration with the potential to change the world around you.

For a full picture of the product experience, collect voice-of-customer (VoC) insights to learn what users think in their own words. Complement this qualitative data with neutral observations of user behavior.

Start by using tools like Hotjar’s Heatmaps to observe users' scroll and click patterns. Then, watch Session Recordings to follow the entire user journey across your site or product, and use Feedback tools to ask users what’s behind their decisions.

FAQs about design thinking examples

What can you learn from design thinking examples.

The value of examples lies in the ways they show how design thinking can transform products and services. Analyzing stories of success will help you understand:

How design thinking impacts businesses in various industries, and

How to craft your change strategy from idea to results.

As a product designer, highlighting relatable examples of design thinking’s business impact can also help you get peer and executive buy-in. Then, make the connection between examples from other companies and the challenges facing your organization, and demonstrate how similar companies or industries used design thinking to solve that problem (include numbers to prove results).

How can you start with design thinking?

To successfully implement design thinking across your own organization, start by aligning with or creating a design thinking process for execution and collection of results. Then, quantify those results. These key questions help guide the discussion towards actionable insights:

Why do you think this challenge is worth tackling? Why now?

Who are your target users? Who might benefit inside the company?

What constraints (technology, timing, budget) will the team face? 

How will you measure success?

How does design thinking work for product teams?

By focusing on user insights, product teams gain invaluable feedback to proactively improve their products—feedback that can be cultivated during every stage of the design thinking process.

The core tenets of design thinking are simple: focus on customer problems, iterate on ideas, ask for feedback to refine those ideas, and re-start the process all over again, from the beginning.

By leveraging the design thinking framework, product teams can more quickly and efficiently:

Discover the truly unmet needs of customers

Reduce risk associated with launching new products

Generate solutions that are disruptive, rather than incremental

Align teams across the organization

Design thinking methodology

Previous chapter

Design thinking problem statements

Next chapter

About this site

Design thinking in context, design thinking today.

• Designer's Mindset
• Adoption and Integration
• Teaching and Learning
• New Applications
• Privacy Policy

Design Thinking Defined

—tim brown, executive chair of ideo.

Thinking like a designer can transform the way organizations develop products, services, processes, and strategy. This approach, which is known as design thinking, brings together what is desirable from a human point of view with what is technologically feasible and economically viable. It also allows people who aren't trained as designers to use creative tools to address a vast range of challenges.

IDEO did not invent design thinking, but we have become known for practicing it and applying it to solving problems small and large. It’s fair to say that we were in the right place at the right time. When we looked back over our shoulder, we discovered that there was a revolutionary movement behind us.

This design thinking site is just one small part of the IDEO network. There’s much more, including full online courses we've developed on many topics related to design thinking and its applications. We fundamentally believe in the power of design thinking as a methodology for creating positive impact in the world—and we bring that belief into our client engagements as well as into creating open resources such as this.

At IDEO, we’re often asked to share what we know about design thinking. We’ve developed this website in response to that request. Here, we introduce design thinking, how it came to be, how it is being used, and steps and tools for mastering it. You’ll find our particular take on design thinking, as well as the perspectives of others. Everything on this site is free for you to use and share with proper attribution .

(From 2008-2018, designthinking.ideo.com was the home of IDEO's design thinking blog, written by our CEO, Tim Brown . You can find that blog here .)

We live and work in a world of interlocking systems, where many of the problems we face are dynamic, multifaceted, and inherently human. Think of some of the big questions being asked by businesses, government, educational and social organizations: How will we navigate the disruptive forces of the day, including technology and globalism? How will we grow and improve in response to rapid change? How can we effectively support individuals while simultaneously changing big systems? For us, design thinking offers an approach for addressing these and other big questions.

There’s no single definition for design thinking. It’s an idea, a strategy, a method, and a way of seeing the world. It’s grown beyond the confines of any individual person, organization or website. And as it matures, its history deepens and its impact evolves. For IDEO, design thinking is a way to solve problems through creativity. Certainly, it isn’t a fail-safe approach; nor is it the only approach. But based on the impact we are seeing in our work, the relevance of design thinking has never been greater.

Design thinking is maturing. It’s moving from a nascent practice to an established one, and with that comes interest and critique. People are debating its definition, pedigree, and value. As a leading and committed practitioner of design thinking, IDEO has a stake in this conversation—and a responsibility to contextualize its value in the present moment and, importantly, in the future.

We’ve learned a lot over the years, and we’d like to share our insights. We’ve seen design thinking transform lives and organizations, and on occasion we’ve seen it fall short when approached superficially, or without a solid foundation of study. Design thinking takes practice; and as a community of designers, entrepreneurs, engineers, teachers, researchers, and more, we’ve followed the journey to mastery, and developed maps that can guide others.

Designer's mindset

At IDEO, we are a community of designers who naturally share a mindset due to our profession. Our teams include people who've trained in applied fields such as industrial design, environmental architecture, graphic design, and engineering; as well as people from law, psychology, anthropology, and many other areas. Together, we have rallied around design thinking as a way of explaining design's applications and utility so that others can practice it, too. Design thinking uses creative activities to foster collaboration and solve problems in human-centered ways. We adopt a “beginner’s mind,” with the intent to remain open and curious, to assume nothing, and to see ambiguity as an opportunity.

To think like a designer requires dreaming up wild ideas, taking time to tinker and test, and being willing to fail early and often. The designer's mindset embraces empathy, optimism, iteration, creativity, and ambiguity. And most critically, design thinking keeps people at the center of every process. A human-centered designer knows that as long as you stay focused on the people you're designing for—and listen to them directly—you can arrive at optimal solutions that meet their needs.

Anyone can approach the world like a designer. But to unlock greater potential and to learn how to work as a dynamic problem solver, creative confidence is key. For IDEO founder David Kelley, creative confidence is the belief that everyone is creative, and that creativity isn’t the ability to draw or compose or sculpt, but a way of understanding the world.

12 Great Design Thinking Examples You Can Use to Seek Inspiration

Introduction

Design thinking is a crucial aspect of Creative Leadership. Leaders and entrepreneurs of today, who believe in carving their own way instead of following a standard path, rely on design thinking to re-imagine the future. 

According to a study by Parsons New School, 75% of organizations self-report that they are engaged in design thinking. This article lists top design thinking examples to illustrate the success of the design thinking in such organizations that have aligned their problem-solving approach to the design thinking process to come up with creative solutions for their business problems. Through design thinking, professionals and creative leaders in any vertical can stretch their minds, think out of the box, gather inspiration, and create innovative solutions. 

Let’s take a look at the best design thinking examples by going through the case studies of various companies that have implemented the design thinking process to build better, unique, and user-centric products and solutions. Here is the list of our top ten examples-

• AT Kingwood Trust UK
• Bank of America
• Designing for the Homeless 
• Stanford Hospital

Some Design Thinking Examples to Understand ‘Leadership Through Creativity’ Better!

Here are some design thinking examples in real life for some inspiration:   

1. AT Kingwood Trust UK

Some of the most fantastic design thinking examples can be found at AT Kingwood Trust UK. Here, a design team member got in touch with Pete, a non-verbal, autistic patient. She observed that he had destructive tendencies, such as picking on expensive sofas and rubbing indents into the wall. The designer started to document Pete’s behavior. She observed that such action generally accompanied a rise in the overall psychological health of the subject. The ruined sofa and walls were perceived as interesting and fun.

Documenting the details led to a better design of the care facility that would enhance the subject’s pleasure. Such a design thinking process example demonstrates how understanding your customer, or subject, in this case, can completely change the perception towards a problem.

2. Burberry

Another one of the best design thinking examples is the case of Burberry. Burberry’s business model was disrupted by the advent of the digital era. It was already being written off as the fashion brand of the bygone era. Instead of being intimidated and unaccepting of the change, it’s leadership decided to appeal to the Gen X users’ sentiments and behavior. Thus, the company invested heavily in its social media strategy. It invited users to collaborate on its design processes. By doing this, it increased its appeal and connection with the audience. The brand was able to leverage digital to post record revenue growths.  

Uber is another famous design thinking example. With the help of design thinking and a user-focused approach, it eliminated simple problems that had been plaguing customers in the past. It introduced features such as cashless payments, another great design thinking process example, to make transactions straightforward and reduce the chances of fraudulent activities. By providing the power to give ratings for both drivers and users, it increased the incentive for good behavior. Simple design tweaks, aided by a substantial user understanding, helped Uber pivot itself to the behemoth it has become today. It is one of the best design thinking problem statement examples.

Airbnb’s success story is also one of the best design thinking examples. The unicorn startup’s design thinking approach involved curating a unique experience that appeals to the expectations and demands of the global audience, while also ensuring an authentic and safe homestay for renters. 

5. Bank of America

It is a huge corporation that is applying the principles of design thinking to an industry that is not renowned for focusing on the design aspects. They made observations of the savings habits of its target audience. By closely observing various human behavior patterns, Bank of America came up with the innovative “Keep The Change” program that was a huge hit.

6. Designing for the Homeless

‘Designing for the Homeless’ is a collaborative social program that is attempting to design shelter homes and better community townships for homeless people across the USA. The design thinking approach helps to closely understand the problems that the dwellers face and design innovative solutions to fight the challenges plaguing the homeless residents.

7. Clean Team

Working with Unilever & Water and Sanitation for The Urban Poor, Clean Team is helping to design dignified and clean sanitation systems for people in Kumasi, Ghana. They are helping to make lives cleaner, healthier, and more dignified. By integrating design thinking principles, the team worked closely to understand the full waste ecosystem and how the people responded to the challenges they faced. Today, Clean Team has constructed over 600 toilets and is working with over 4,500 people to design and deliver a sanitary toilet system.

8. Pillpack

It epitomizes a great design thinking project example. Pillpack is an online pharmacy that delivers prescription drugs. The company followed a design thinking approach while crafting its brand strategy, creatives, and overall design that really appealed to its consumer base. This approach paid off as Pillpack received rave reviews for its business model and recorded impressive growth numbers. In 2014, Time Magazine called Pillpack that year’s best invention. Moreover, in 2018, it was acquired by Amazon for $1 billion.

When people think of IBM, the first thing that comes into their mind is technology, business, and computers. As their former CEO Thomas Watson Jr. declared, “Good design is good business”, IBM has invested heavily in design thinking. They started holding empathy map sessions and kept users in mind while designing processes and products. Consequently, they have witnessed significant ROIs with this change in approach. They have also made it openly available. 

10. Stanford Hospital

The hospital has been using design thinking principles to design better hospital wards and emergency rooms. They kept the interest and specific needs of the patients in mind, which boosted patients’ well-being and psychology. It is another great example of how design thinking is spreading beyond the field of traditional business strategy.

11. Netflix

In 1997, Reed Hasting came up with the idea to stream movies to people’s homes through the internet, and that’s when it all began. Netflix is a prime  design thinking example  because it used the approach throughout its journey to determine what its customers wanted and needed and then changed its business model to meet those needs.  

Almost $10 million a year was spent by Reed Hastings in 2001 to research streaming. In addition, he kept testing quickly and experimenting to see if he could make streaming video work. Netflix started giving it away as part of DVD subscriptions so people could see it. In this way, he made people get used to streaming while he kept adding to his library.

This option was finally made available in 2010, after 10 years of testing and experimenting. It was half the price of Netflix’s regular movie-rental service at the time. Thus, it took over the market when broadband and internet services began to grow quickly.  

They kept using design thinking to come up with new ideas. As time went on, it became obvious that customers were looking for more interesting content. Network Netflix made some changes to the way it looks and works in 2016 to make it even better for its users. There’s no sign Netflix will stop, it keeps changing the way people use the service by using Design Thinking.

Nike combined sports and design in the 1980s with the launch of Air Force One, the first sneaker with pressurized air technology designed to help athletes perform at their best. It quickly became a New York fashion sensation. Just one example of Nike’s use of design to improve the user experience by gaining an understanding of their needs. ‘

Another  design thinking example  is NIKE’s way to re-designed the Dunk Hi shoe with a transparent panel, allowing the wearer to express their individuality through the socks they choose to wear underneath.

The experimental collaborations begin at Nike Lab. Nike keeps looking for partners who can help them gain insights from their customers, which in turn inspires the company’s designers. This allows Nike to focus on the need and better serve its most loyal customers.

How to Start With Design Thinking?

These design thinking examples that showcase how businesses can achieve success with creative leadership. The different design thinking problem examples mentioned in the article did not only help in saving costs from ideation to successful product roll-out but also increased customer retention and recurring revenue. You can also use these successful design thinking examples as inspiration for your product innovations. By following these examples, you can notice how they have executed a transformative product and innovation strategy by tweaking their processes a bit; and you must understand that the key to a successful design-thinking is customer-centricity and always thinking from the shoes of your target audience to uncover their needs, desires and pain points. 

If design innovation thinking is something that grabs your attention, you can check out our Postgraduate Certificate Program in Design, Innovation and Strategy , which focuses on building the Creative Leaders of tomorrow.

Fill in the details to know more

PEOPLE ALSO READ

Related Articles

Critical Thinking Questions 2021: Everything You Need to Know!

August 5, 2021

3 Types of Thinking: Lateral, Divergent And Convergent Thinking – An Easy Guide

January 29, 2021

Types of Innovation – A Simple Guide In Just 4 Points

Interaction Design: A Basic Guide in 5 Easy Points

Everything To Know About Innovation Management In 4 Easy Points

December 16, 2020

Top 14 Design Thinking Books

Are you ready to build your own career?

Query? Ask Us

Enter Your Details ×

11 Inspiring UX Case Studies That Every Designer Should Study

A UX case study is a sort of detailed overview of a designer's work. They are often part of a UX designer's portfolio and showcase the designer's skill in managing tasks and problems. From a recruiter's perspective, such a UX portfolio shows the skill, insights, knowledge, and talent of the designer.

Therefore, UX case studies play an important role in the recruitment and demand for designers.

What Makes a Powerful Case Study

Building a UX case study includes showing the design process through compelling stories. They will use plain language to demonstrate how they handled key design issues, offering a comprehensive view of their process. Well done case studies often include:

• A  problem statement and solutions with real applications.
• Relevant numbers, data, or testimonials to demonstrate the work and efforts.
• A story that directly connects the problem to the solution.

Any competent UX professional will know that creating a stunning UX case study is about the little details.

11 Best UX Case Studies for Designers

The best way to understand what a good case study looks like is to go over other examples. Each of these UX case study examples shows a designer's insights, basic skills, and other designers' lessons learned through their experience.

1. Promo.com web editor

For this video-creation platform , UX designer Sascha was brought on to revamp v2.0, adding new features that could work alongside the existing UX design. The point was to work on interface details that would help create a user friendly platform, and that users could find simple enough to use.

User personas mapped by the UX designer revealed the most common confusion to be the process of inserting particular features into the video, such as subtitles. The designer's goal, therefore, was to create a platform with improved editor controls.

The designer then used a common text-editor layout to include top and side navigation bars that made it easy to access and implement text editing.

Key Learnings from Promo.com

This case study focuses on addressing a particular problem that customers were currently facing. Its main theme is to show a problem, and how the product designer addressed this problem. Its strength points include:

• clearly highlighting the problem (i.e. inaccessible and limited video-text editor options)
• conduction research to understand the nature of the problem and the kind of solutions customers want
• implementing research insights into the redesign to create a platform that actively served customer needs

2. Productivity tracker app

The main concept behind this UX case study is to address a pre-existing problem through the design of the app. Immediately from the start, the study highlights a common pain point among users: that of a lack of productivity due to device usage.

This UX case study example addressed some of the main problems within existing productivity apps included:a poor UI and UX that made navigation difficult

• a poorly-built information architecture
• limited functions on the mobile application

Key Learnings from the Productivity app case study

The case study highlights the simple design process that was then used to build the app. Wireframes were created, a moldboard developed, and finally, individual pages of the app were designed in line with the initial goals.

3. Postmates Unlimited

This case study clearly identifies the improvements made to the Postmates app in a simple overview before jumping into greater detail. The redesign goal, which it achieved, was to improve the experience and other interface details of the app.

The problems identified included:

• usability that led to high support ticket volume.
• technical app infrastructure issues that prevented scalability.
• lack of efficient product management, such as batching orders.

A UX research course can help understand the kind of research needed for a case study. The app redesign involved bringing couriers in and running usability testing on improvements. The final model, therefore, had input from real users on what worked and what caused issues.

Key Learnings from Postmates

The Postmates redesign works as a great UX case study for the simple way it approaches problem-solving. Following an overview of the work, it addresses the problems faced by users of the app. It then establishes research processes and highlights how changes were made to reduce these issues.

4. TV Guide

Addressing the fragmentation of content across channels, this case study sought to redesign how people consume media. The key problems identified included:

• the overabundance of content across various TV and streaming platforms
• the difficulty in discovering and managing content across all platforms

To deliver on the key goals of content personalization, smart recommendations, and offering cross-platform content search, the design process included conducting interviews, surveys, and checking customer reviews.

The design of TV Guide enables users to get custom recommendations sourced from friends' and family's watchlists.

Key Learnings from TV Guide

Like previous UX design case studies, this one tackled the issue head-on. Describing the research process, it goes into detail regarding the approach used by the UX designers to create the app. It takes readers on a journey, from identifying pain points, to testing solutions, and implementing the final version.

5. The FlexBox Inspector

Designer Victoria discusses how she developed the investigator tool for the Mozilla Firefox browser. Surveys into understanding the problems with the existing CSS Flexbox tool revealed a need for a user-friendly design. Interviews with a senior designer and other designers helped developers understand the features design-focused tools ought to have. A feature analysis revealed what most users look for in such tools.

The final result of the development process was a design that incorporated several new features, including:

• a new layout
• color-coded design
• multiple entry points to make workflow management efficient

Key Learnings from the Flexbox

This UX design case study starts with a clear goal, then addresses multiple user needs. It clearly defines the design process behind each feature developed by the time, and the reasoning for including that feature. To give a complete picture, it also discusses why certain features or processes were excluded.

6. The Current State of Checkouts

This Baymard UX design case study looks into the checkout process in over 70 e-commerce websites. Through competitive analysis, it isolates problem points in the UX design, which, if addressed, could improve the customer's checkout process.

The study found at least 31 common issues that were easily preventable. The study was designed and conducted on a large scale, over 12 years, to incorporate changing design patterns into the review.

Recommendations based on findings include:

• prominent guest checkout option
• simple password requirements
• specific delivery period
• price comparison tool for shipping vs store pickup

Key Learnings from Checkout Case Study

Each identified issue is backed up by data and research to highlight its importance. Further research backs up each recommendation made within the case study, with usability testing to support the idea. As far as UX case studies go, this one provides practical insight into an existing, widely used e-commerce feature, and offers practical solutions.

7. New York Times App

Using a creative illustration website, the designers proposed a landing page feature "Timely" that could counter the problems faced by the NYT app . Its major issues included too much irrelevant content, low usage, and undesirable coverage of content.

The goal behind Timely was to improve user incentives, build long-term loyalty, and encourage reading. Design mapping for the app covered:

• identifying the problem
• understanding audience needs
• creating wireframes
• designing and prototyping

The end result was an app that could help readers get notifications regarding news of interest at convenient moments (at breakfast, before bed). This encouraged interaction and improved readability with short-form articles.

Key Learnings from NYT App

The UX case study proposes a problem solution that works with an existing information architecture, instead adding custom graphics to the mobile app. It leads from a simple problem statement to discuss the project that could address these issues without changing was customers already loved.

UX case studies focused on redesign include the FitBit redesign, which started off by understanding personas and what users expect from a fitness tracker. Developing use cases and personas, Guerilla usability testing was employed to assess pain points.

These pain points were then ranked based on their importance to users and to app performance. They were addressed through:

• Highlighting essential parts and features of the app
• Changing easily missed icons to more recognizable icons
• relabelling tracking options to guide users better to its usage

Key Learnings from Fitbit

While the case study maps user experiences and offers solutions, it does not begin with an intensive research-based approach. The prototype is successful in testing, but problem factors are not identified with research-based statistics, meaning key factors could have been ignored.

9. Rating System UX

The designer behind the rating system UX redesign sought to solve issues with the 5-star rating system. Highlighted issues included:

• the lack of subjective accuracy of a 5-point rating system
• the issue of calculating the average of a zero-star rating
• average ratings are misleading

Better alternatives include:

• 5-star emoticon rating that relates the user experience
• Like/dislike buttons that make approval/disapproval simple

The final design incorporated both these styles to make full use of the rating system.

Key Learnings from Rating System UX

The UX case study stemmed from insight into the limitations of the existing rating system. The new design addressed old issues and incorporated better efficiencies.

The Intuit redesign was focused on making content readable, more engaging, and accessible. Looking into product personalization, the content was found to be lacking aesthetic value, as well as being hard to find. The goal was to create content that was easy to find, clear, and consistent.

The implemented solutions included:

• increased readability with increased body text and header spacing
• table of contents on the sidebar for easier navigation
• visible and prominent search bar
• illustrations and designs for pretty visuals

Key Learnings from Intuit

The Intuit case study approaches the problem from a practical point of view. It begins with isolating problems with the interface, in particular with the content. This is an example of a case study that breaks down problems into broader categories, and solves each problem with a practical solution.

This UX case study about a social platform tackles a commonly-faced problem from existing platforms. It addresses the issue of recognizing non-monetary user engagement, to help creators identify their user base.

The case study addresses the problem statement and establishes the design process (building wireframes and prototypes) as well as conducting user testing. The final result is to develop "Discover" pages, engaging layouts, and animated interactions to increase usability.

Key Learnings from Jambb

The study goes into detail regarding problem identification, then moves on to propose solutions that take into account the perspective of all stakeholders involved. It then explains why each design decision was made, and proves its efficacy through testing and prototyping.

Key Takeaways

Developing good UX case studies examples is as much about the details you include as the ones you leave out. Going over UX courses can give you a better understanding of what your case study should look like. A good case study should provide an overview of the problem, include numbers and statistics, and offer practical solutions that directly address the problem. The above-discussed UX case studies provide a good example of the dos and don'ts of a well-structured UX design case study that should be part of every UX portfolio .

Additional Resources

Check out these resources to learn more about UX case studies:

8 UX Case Studies to Read

UX Design Case Study

Frequently Asked Questions

Upskill your design team effectively.

Equip your design team with the best-in-class design training that sticks.

Do you know your design team skill level? Send them this quick test & see where their skills stand among 300K+ designers worldwide.

Level up your design career

Get step-by-step guide how to build or advance your UX design career.

Do you know your design skills level? Take a quick test & see where you stand among 300K+ designers worldwide.

Continue reading

Top 7 resources for ux/ui designers for meaningful design inspiration, how to write a ux case study in 10 steps, the impact of ux design on application success: exploring costs and trends, cookie settings 🍪.

• Interactive UX learning for all levels
• 20+ UX courses and career paths
• Personalized learning & practice

Design-first companies are training their design teams. Are you?

• Measure & identify team skill gaps
• Tailor learning for your team’s needs
• Unlock extensive learning library
• Visualize team growth over time
• Retain your designers

More From Forbes

New essential: 92% of leaders expect employees to have design skills.

• Share to Facebook
• Share to Twitter
• Share to Linkedin

Young professional in creative office working on graphic tablet

As the skills required for success are continually shifting, communication and design are getting more attention, as a striking trend shows that 92% of business leaders now expect employees to have design skills based on Canva ’s Visual Economy Report. This expectation extends beyond traditional design roles, encompassing creativity, design thinking, and visual communication as essential competencies across all positions.

The Broadening Scope of Design Skills

Traditionally, design skills were associated with specific graphic and product design roles. Today, the definition has expanded significantly. Design skills now include a range of abilities, such as creative problem-solving, user-centric thinking, and the ability to visualize and communicate ideas effectively. These competencies are valuable across various functions, from marketing and sales to human resources and operations. Design thinking , for instance, is a methodology that involves empathizing with users, defining problems, ideating solutions, prototyping, and testing. It is being used widely to foster innovation and improve business outcomes in a more structured way.

The Rise of Visual Communication

Communicating assertively is one of the most important skills being coached to leaders to help them express their ideas, set clear boundaries, and make decisions confidently. When combined with strong visual communication and design skills, assertiveness becomes even more powerful. Visual communication enhances the clarity and impact of a leader's message, making sure that key points are easily understood and remembered by the audience. This synergy allows assertive leaders to effectively convey their vision, motivate their team, and drive engagement, which is particularly important in today's fast-paced environment where attention spans are shorter and clear, impactful communication is essential.

Attention Spans and Information Overload

Studies show a decreased average human attention span, particularly among younger generations who are constantly bombarded with information. Microsoft’s 2015 study found that the average attention span dropped from 12 seconds in 2000 to 8 seconds in 2015. Besides, particularly Millennials and Gen Z, have grown up with digital technologies. They are digital natives who are accustomed to consuming visual content from platforms like Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube.

Amy Schultz, Global Head of Talent Acquisition at Canva says “The overwhelming amount of content we consume in our personal lives on visual-first platforms like Instagram, YouTube, and TikTok are shaping our communication expectations in the workplace as well. Amid shrinking attention spans, effective communication requires presenting information through compelling visuals like presentations, infographics, and even videos. We all need to be content creators at work, and with that, the demand for design literacy across all roles is surging.”

Samsung Issues Critical Update For Millions Of Galaxy Users

Today s nyt connections hints and answers for thursday june 6, adam levine is returning to ‘the voice’—meet the season 27 coaches.

Therefore, visual communication is crucial for real-time collaboration, engagement, effective communication, and workflow efficiency.

Canva's Visual Economy Report, based on insights from over 3,700 global business leaders, highlights the importance of visual communication.

• 77% say visual communication tools have increased business performance. From accelerating content creation and team collaboration to stronger audience engagement, visual-first communication helps organizations save time and money.
• 82% of leaders are exploring AI-powered tools as options to accelerate their content production needs and reduce costs.
• 92% expect non-designer employees to possess some design acumen to communicate in their organizations effectively.
• 68% are now training those not in design roles to meet a certain threshold of design competency.

Integrating Design Skills into the Workforce

Companies need to find ways to integrate design skills into the employee experience. Schultz recommends “Team managers to lead by example, ensuring their colleagues have access to the right technology and design resources.”

Below are some actions companies can take:

1. Invest in Training and Development:

Provide employees with training programs that teach design thinking, creativity, and visual communication. Companies should leverage visual aids like infographics, videos, and interactive media in training programs to maintain engagement and improve retention.

2. Foster a Creative Culture:

Encourage a workplace culture that highly values creativity and innovation. Companies are evolving rapidly, and it's crucial for employees to be more autonomous and creative to bridge the gap.

3. Leverage AI Tools:

Utilize AI-powered tools that significantly enhance creativity and productivity. These tools play a key role in generating ideas, streamlining workflows, and improving collaboration.

4. Emphasize Visual Communication:

Integrating visuals in presentations, emails, and reports can help convey complex information quickly and clearly, as visual elements can increase comprehension and recall.

Showcasing your Design Skills

One last thing to mention is how to best showcase your design skills to stand out from other candidates or employees. Amy Schultz recommends to showcase them right on your resume “Given the high volume of applications we receive at Canva, we love seeing candidates’ personalities and creative thinking shine through. We’ve had candidates who sent video resumes, built interactive websites, and even created hype reels that showcase their work or careers. Small quirks and an original approach can go a long way in helping you stand out in a crowded market.”

The expectation for employees to have design skills reflects a fundamental shift in the business landscape. Design and visual communication skills are no longer optional - they are essential for success in today’s competitive environment. By embracing these skills and leveraging AI to enhance creativity and productivity, businesses can foster innovation, improve collaboration, and streamline workflows. As the workplace continues to evolve, the ability to think creatively, be assertive and communicate visually will be crucial in shaping a future that is agile, innovative, and customer-centric.

• Editorial Standards
• Reprints & Permissions

Join The Conversation

One Community. Many Voices. Create a free account to share your thoughts. 

Forbes Community Guidelines

Our community is about connecting people through open and thoughtful conversations. We want our readers to share their views and exchange ideas and facts in a safe space.

In order to do so, please follow the posting rules in our site's  Terms of Service.   We've summarized some of those key rules below. Simply put, keep it civil.

Your post will be rejected if we notice that it seems to contain:

• False or intentionally out-of-context or misleading information
• Insults, profanity, incoherent, obscene or inflammatory language or threats of any kind
• Attacks on the identity of other commenters or the article's author
• Content that otherwise violates our site's  terms.

User accounts will be blocked if we notice or believe that users are engaged in:

• Continuous attempts to re-post comments that have been previously moderated/rejected
• Racist, sexist, homophobic or other discriminatory comments
• Attempts or tactics that put the site security at risk
• Actions that otherwise violate our site's  terms.

So, how can you be a power user?

• Stay on topic and share your insights
• Feel free to be clear and thoughtful to get your point across
• ‘Like’ or ‘Dislike’ to show your point of view.
• Protect your community.
• Use the report tool to alert us when someone breaks the rules.

Thanks for reading our community guidelines. Please read the full list of posting rules found in our site's  Terms of Service.

• SUGGESTED TOPICS
• The Magazine
• Newsletters
• Managing Yourself
• Managing Teams
• Work-life Balance
• The Big Idea
• Data & Visuals
• Reading Lists
• Case Selections
• HBR Learning
• Topic Feeds
• Account Settings
• Email Preferences

Why Design Thinking Works

• Jeanne Liedtka

While we know a lot about practices that stimulate new ideas, innovation teams often struggle to apply them. Why? Because people’s biases and entrenched behaviors get in the way. In this article a Darden professor explains how design thinking helps people overcome this problem and unleash their creativity.

Though ostensibly geared to understanding and molding the experiences of customers, design thinking also profoundly reshapes the experiences of the innovators themselves. For example, immersive customer research helps them set aside their own views and recognize needs customers haven’t expressed. Carefully planned dialogues help teams build on their diverse ideas, not just negotiate compromises when differences arise. And experiments with new solutions reduce all stakeholders’ fear of change.

At every phase—customer discovery, idea generation, and testing—a clear structure makes people more comfortable trying new things, and processes increase collaboration. Because it combines practical tools and human insight, design thinking is a social technology —one that the author predicts will have an impact as large as an earlier social technology: total quality management.

It addresses the biases and behaviors that hamper innovation.

Idea in Brief

The problem.

While we know a lot about what practices stimulate new ideas and creative solutions, most innovation teams struggle to realize their benefits.

People’s intrinsic biases and behavioral habits inhibit the exercise of the imagination and protect unspoken assumptions about what will or will not work.

The Solution

Design thinking provides a structured process that helps innovators break free of counterproductive tendencies that thwart innovation. Like TQM, it is a social technology that blends practical tools with insights into human nature.

Occasionally, a new way of organizing work leads to extraordinary improvements. Total quality management did that in manufacturing in the 1980s by combining a set of tools—kanban cards, quality circles, and so on—with the insight that people on the shop floor could do much higher level work than they usually were asked to. That blend of tools and insight, applied to a work process, can be thought of as a social technology.

• JL Jeanne Liedtka is a professor of business administration at the University of Virginia’s Darden School of Business.

Partner Center

• Top products
• BIM Collaborate Pro
• Fusion extensions
• Flow Capture
• Flow Production Tracking
• View all products
• View Mobile Apps
• Collections
• Architecture, Engineering & Construction
• Product Design & Manufacturing
• Media & Entertainment
• Buying with Autodesk
• Pay as you go with Flex
• Special offers
• Industry solutions
• Educational access
• Product support
• System requirements
• Download your software
• File viewers
• Students and educators
• Installation
• Account management support
• Educational support
• Partner Finder
• Autodesk consulting
• Contact support
• Certification
• Autodesk University
• Conferences and events
• Success planning
• Autodesk Community
• Developer Network
• Autodesk Customer Value
• ASEAN (English)
• Canada (English)
• Canada (Français)
• Deutschland
• Europe (English)
• Hong Kong (English)
• India (English)
• Latinoamérica
• Magyarország
• Middle East (English)
• New Zealand
• Singapore (English)
• South Africa (English)
• United Kingdom
• United States

Integrated BIM tools, including Revit, AutoCAD, and Civil 3D

Professional CAD/CAM tools built on Inventor and AutoCAD

Entertainment content creation tools, including 3ds Max and Maya

• Certification overview
• Architecture, engineering, and construction
• Design and manufacturing
• Media and entertainment
• Support & policies
• My dashboard

Looking for Autodesk Learning?  Browse here .

Show off your skills

Autodesk certification.

Autodesk certifications highlight advanced skills in your industry. Get hired, stand out in your career, and add your digital badge to your public profiles. 

Autodesk certification benefits

Validate design and make skills to get hired, advance your career, and accelerate your business. 

Industry validated

Deeply researched with industry partners, Autodesk certifications measure the skills required for design and make workflows​. 

Career advantage

Whether starting out or looking to expand to new roles, Autodesk certifications provide recognition of expertise to accelerate careers.

Business growth

Future-focused certifications help organizations differentiate talent and innovate with new technologies, skills, and productivity.

Architecture, engineering, and construction certifications

AEC professionals and students can earn Autodesk certifications to highlight their knowledge and skills in CAD and BIM tools.

Product design and manufacturing certifications

Product design and manufacturing professionals and students can earn Autodesk certifications to showcase their skills in CAD, CAM, design-to-manufacture workflows, and more.

Media and entertainment certifications

Media and entertainment professionals and students can earn certifications demonstrating their knowledge and take their careers to the next level.

Four levels of Autodesk certification

Autodesk Certified User

Developed for secondary students and non-English speakers in all industries, this certification validates and highlights foundational Autodesk software skills and knowledge.

Autodesk Certified Associate

Designed for students in higher education and others with essential knowledge and skills in Autodesk software who are ready to enter the job market or pursue a new career path. 

Autodesk Certified Professional

For candidates with advanced skills and can solve complex challenges, this certification helps candidates stand out and succeed in a competitive job market.

Autodesk Certified Expert

For candidates to showcase their in-depth knowledge, the expert-level certification signals leadership and commitment to mastering skills in leading-edge workflows.

Earn badges and source talent

Autodesk partners with Credly to offer digital credentials to showcase your achievement or discover and verify talent for your organization.

Be the first to access our newest certification exams

When you participate in a beta exam, you become an early adopter of industry-validated certifications and enjoy exclusive benefits.

Additional certification resources

Build, validate, and showcase in-demand skills to succeed in today’s evolving industries. Whether you’re starting your career or expanding your skillset, take immediate steps toward your goals with Autodesk certification resources.

Certification prep courses

Set yourself up for success by taking a prep course with practice tests. Courses cover the core skills and knowledge you need to succeed in the exam.

Autodesk learning

Find the learning content that’s right for you, track your progress, and discover the next steps on your learning journey.

Autodesk Learning Partners

Autodesk Learning Partners (ALPs) are available to help provide vouchers for certification exams in bulk and prepare groups for certification success.

FAQ: Autodesk Certification

For more FAQs, visit our Support & Policies page.

How long is my certification valid for?

Certifications are valid for 2 or 3 years, depending on which certification you earn. For example, Fusion 360 certifications are valid for 2 years, while other certifications are valid for three years. See the certification details for each of the certifying validity periods and other information.

How much does an exam cost?

Autodesk is pleased to offer ACA, ACP and ACE certifications. Standard Retail Prices for each of our exam tiers are as follows: 

*All exams are priced according to currency values in specific countries and regions. Exam prices are subject to change. In some countries and regions, additional taxes may apply. 

How do I get certification from Autodesk?

Choose which Autodesk Certification you would like to earn from the available certifications by industry above.

For Autodesk Certified User exams:

Selecting an ACU exam will transfer you to our testing partner Certiport. You can complete the sign up and scheduling process from Certiport's site.

For Autodesk Certified Associate, Professional, and Expert exams:

Select a certification to find out details and select the "Get certified" button to start your exam application. If you haven't already, you will be asked to sign in to your Autodesk Account. Fill out the exam application and submit it. From there you will be able to select from your Certification Dashboard an action to sign up for an exam appointment either in-person at a Pearson Vue testing center or for an online exam. Note you will need to provide proof of identity at exam time.

Ready for your exam?

For more information, please see our Support and Policies page. 

Privacy | Do not sell or share my personal information | Cookie preferences | Report noncompliance | Terms of use | Legal  |  © 2024 Autodesk Inc. All rights reserved

• Skip to main content
• Skip to search
• Skip to footer

Products and Services

Cisco Secure Firewall

Do you have a firewall fit for today's challenges.

Does it harmonize your network, workload, and application security? Does it protect apps and employees in your hybrid or multicloud environment? Make sure you're covered.

Anticipate, act, and simplify with Secure Firewall

With workers, data, and offices located across the country and around the world, your firewall must be ready for anything. Secure Firewall helps you plan, prioritize, close gaps, and recover from disaster—stronger.

Lean on AI that simplifies policy management

Streamlining workflows. Finding misconfigurations. Auto-generating rules. With thousands of policies to manage and threats pouring in, Cisco AI Assistant saves time by simplifying how you manage firewall policy.

Achieve superior visibility

Regain visibility and control of your encrypted traffic and application environments. See more and detect more with Cisco Talos, while leveraging billions of signals across your infrastructure with security resilience.

Drive efficiency at scale

Secure Firewall supports advanced clustering, high availability, and multi-instance capabilities, enabling you to bring scalability, reliability, and productivity across your teams and hybrid network environments.

Make zero trust practical

Secure Firewall makes a zero-trust posture achievable and cost-effective with network, microsegmentation, and app security integrations. Automate access and anticipate what comes next.

Cisco AI Assistant for Security demo

Find the ideal firewall for your business.

1000 Series

Best for smaller businesses and branch offices.

1200 Series

Consolidate advanced security and networking of distributed enterprise branches with a compact, high-performing, SD-WAN firewall.

3100 Series

Enhanced for medium-sized enterprises, with the flexibility to grow in the future.

4100 Series

Security, speed, and scalability for a powerful data center.

4200 Series

Experience faster threat detection with greater visibility and the agility to safeguard large enterprise data center and campus networks.

9300 Series

Optimized for service providers and high-performance data centers.

Secure Firewall Threat Defense Virtual

Virtual firewalls for consistent policies across physical, cloud, and hyperconverged environments.

Secure Firewall ISA3000

Rugged design for manufacturing, industrial, and operational technology environments.

Secure WAF and bot protection

Enhance application security and resilience for today’s digital enterprise with Secure WAF and bot protection.

DDoS protection

Defend against attacks that flood your network with traffic, impacting access to apps and business-critical services.

Why migrate?

Level up your security posture with the latest capabilities for unified network and workload micro-segmentation protection.

Experience Firewall Management Center in action

See how you can centralize and simplify your firewall admin and intrusion prevention. With visibility across ever-changing and global networks, you can manage modern applications and malware outbreaks in real time.

Get 3 vital protections in a single step

You don't have to trade security for productivity. The Cisco Security Step-Up promotion deploys three powerful lines of defense that are simple, secure, and resilient for your business. Defend every critical attack vector–email, web traffic, and user credentials—in one easy step.

Add value to security solutions

Cisco Security Enterprise Agreement

Instant savings

Experience security software buying flexibility with one easy-to-manage agreement.

Services for security

Let the experts secure your business

Get more from your investments and enable constant vigilance to protect your organization.

Customer stories and insights

Powering fuel providers.

Ampol's global business includes refineries, fueling stations, and corporate offices. The company's infrastructure and retail operations are protected and connected with Cisco technology.

Ampol Limited

Reducing cybersecurity risk

A zero-trust approach to security protects the privacy of patients' personal data at this Ohio children's hospital.

Dayton Children’s

Better wireless access and security

A Texas school district turned to Cisco technology to bring ubiquitous, reliable wireless access to students while assuring proactive network monitoring capabilities.

Protecting networks and assets

A Michigan-based credit union protects the digital security of its hybrid workforce, customers, and assets with help from Cisco.

Lake Trust Credit Union

Boosting visibility and security

This Indiana university provides reliable and safe network access with Cisco's unified security ecosystem as its foundation for zero trust.

Marian University

The NFL relies on Cisco

From the draft to Super Bowl Sunday, the NFL relies on Cisco to protect billions of devices, endpoints, and users from cyber threats. What does that look like on game day? Watch the video on the story page to find out.

National Football League

Simple, visible, and unified

Unify security across your high-performing data centers, providing superior visibility and efficiency. Then watch it work with ease.

Press Herald

Account Subscription: ACTIVE

Questions about your account? Our customer service team can be reached at [email protected] during business hours at (207) 791-6000 .

• Local & State

Resurgam festival, a massive yard sale and more things to do this weekend

Comedian Dave Attell is in town, Zephyr Ice is serving up cool treats and food trucks are out in force (there's an app that will tell you where).

You are able to gift 5 more articles this month.

Anyone can access the link you share with no account required. Learn more .

With a Press Herald subscription, you can gift 5 articles each month.

It looks like you do not have any active subscriptions. To get one, go to the subscriptions page .

Loading....

We’re not entirely sure how the weekend weather is going to shake out, but either way there’s a whole lot going on, so let’s get to it.

Maine Roller Derby skaters competing at Happy Wheels Skate Center in Westbrook. Photo by Jim Vernier

On Saturday and Sunday, Maine Roller Derby’s first international tournament happens at Happy Wheels Skate Center in Westbrook. There will be several exciting flat-track bouts, and if you’re a Mainer, tickets are half off.

Get a discount on tickets to Maine Roller Derby’s international tournament

Max Abraham runs through Moon Tide Park while performing with the band Corpus Chicanery at last year’s Resurgam festival. Shawn Patrick Ouellette/Staff Photographer

The Resurgam Music and Arts Festival is Sunday from 11:30 a.m. to 7 p.m. at Ocean Gateway marine terminal and surrounding areas. The list of performers is about 17 miles long and includes Oshima Brothers Band and professional hula hoop and circus artist Nettie Loops.

Resurgam festival returns this weekend with music, arts and more

Local musician Toby McAllister, pictured here at The Press Room in Portsmouth, would of course play at a local venue on his perfect day. Photo by Corey Fitzgerald and courtesy of Toby McAllister

Another musician you can see at Resurgam is Toby McAllister from Sparks The Rescue. McAllister unpacked his perfect Maine day for us, and it includes a hike in Grafton Notch and a stop at Puzzle Mountain Bakery in Newry for cookies.

My Perfect Day: Hiking Old Speck, eating tacos and sweets, playing a show – for musician Toby McAllister, it all strikes a chord

Comic Dave Attell plays the State Theatre in Portland, June 8. Photo courtesy of the State Theatre

There’s plenty else cooking this weekend , including Yoga in the Park on Saturday and the Walk the Working Waterfront tour. Both are in Portland. Or you can shop till you drop at Maine’s Ultimate Spring Yard Sale Saturday at Cumberland Fairgrounds. Need a few laughs? Grab a ticket to see comic Dave Attell at the State Theatre Saturday.

Waterfront tour, giant yard sale, comic Dave Attell

Zephyr proudly tells its customers that everything is made in house with real fruit and no dyes. Photo by Megan Gray

Satisfy your sweet tooth with something a little different this weekend. Zephyr Ice in Portland serves shaved ice atop a scoop of regular or vegan ice cream. Choose from a variety of syrup flavors, all made in-house with real fruit.

For cool, customizable treats, breeze on in to Zephyr Ice

Mainely Burgers food truck. Shawn Patrick Ouellette/Staff Photographer

Should you fancy a food truck fix, check out our massive, always growing food truck guide and get busy chowing down.

A guide to 87 food trucks rolling through Maine

A Foodtruckalico Instagram post featuring the Ugly Dumpling food truck. Photo by Justin Velgos

For even more food truck fodder, we suggest heading to Food Truckalico on Instagram . A couple of times a week, the account shares details about where and when you can find trucks in the Portland area.

Follow the food trucks with Food Truckalico on Instagram

A newspaper article about a Comegato sighting from web series “Tracking the Comegato.” Photo courtesy of Kate Kaminski

If the weather does indeed relegate you to the indoors, curl up on the couch and fire up the new web series “Tracking the Comegato” about a beastly human-weasel hybrid that may or may not exist.

Could this human-weasel hybrid from Maine join the ranks of Bigfoot?

Success. Please wait for the page to reload. If the page does not reload within 5 seconds, please refresh the page.

Enter your email and password to access comments.

Forgot Password?

Don't have a commenting profile? Create one.

Hi, to comment on stories you must create a commenting profile . This profile is in addition to your subscription and website login. Already have a commenting profile? Login .

Invalid username/password.

Please check your email to confirm and complete your registration.

Create a commenting profile by providing an email address, password and display name. You will receive an email to complete the registration. Please note the display name will appear on screen when you participate.

Already registered? Log in to join the discussion.

Only subscribers are eligible to post comments. Please subscribe or login first for digital access. Here’s why .

Use the form below to reset your password. When you've submitted your account email, we will send an email with a reset code.

Send questions/comments to the editors.

Member Log In

Please enter your username and password below. Already a subscriber but don't have one? Click here .

Not a subscriber? Click here to see your options