Design thinking: Process, tools, and frameworks for innovation teams

When you hear “design thinking,” it's easy to picture sticky note walls, glass rooms, and crowded whiteboards.
But behind many products and services we regularly use, there are teams doing something more disciplined. Think of the app that just understands what you're trying to do, the checkout flow that doesn't get in your way, or the service that feels pleasantly human—even when it's mostly software. Those teams sit with real customers to understand their needs, sketch rough ideas, try them, and adjust until things finally click. That is design thinking at work.

In this article, we'll walk through:

• What design thinking really is
• The five-stage design thinking process
• Practical tools and frameworks you can use at each stage
• How to make the work visual so your team can see the problem, the ideas, and the experiments in one shared space
   

What is design thinking?

Design thinking is a non-linear, iterative problem-solving approach that asks companies to focus on end users when creating products, processes, or services.
Instead of starting from internal ideas, market trends, or technologies, you start from people. You explore their context, needs, and constraints, then cycle through ideas and experiments until you land on solutions that work in the real world.

There are three ideas that design thinking focuses on:

• Empathy: A deep understanding of the people you are designing for
• Experimentation: Trying multiple ideas early on
• Iteration: Learning from multiple tests and refining solutions
   

Key stages of the design thinking process

There are many variations of the design thinking framework that teams follow. In this article, we'll use the five-stage model. These stages do not always run in a straight line; teams often loop back, overlap steps, or go through parts of the process multiple times.

1. Empathize
Teams observe, interview, and immerse themselves in the user’s world to understand their needs. The focus is on behaviors, pain points, workarounds, and motivations—not just what people say in surveys.

2. Define
The team synthesizes research into insights and turns them into clear problem statements. The main goal is to frame the right problem that users face.

3. Ideate
Teams generate a wide range of ideas, often through structured brainstorming, mind mapping, or other techniques that push them beyond obvious answers. At this stage, quantity matters more than perfect solutions.

4. Prototype
Teams build simplified versions of their ideas. These can be sketches, clickable wireframes, or basic service mock-ups. The point is to create something tangible that users can react to.

5. Test
Teams share prototypes with real users, collect feedback, and look for patterns. Insights from this stage can refine the solution, change the problem framing, or spark new ideas altogether.

Design thinking tools for every stage of the process

For a design thinking session, you don't need a huge library of templates. A focused set of visual frameworks can carry you through most projects. Let's look at some of these tools that can be used in a wide range of apps and platforms.

Empathize

Goal: To get a rich, grounded picture of the needs of the people you're designing for

Research wall 
A large physical wall or a digital canvas like Vani where you pin interview quotes, observations, screenshots, and data points. You can cluster them by theme, scenario, or user type. 
Build this from scratch or start from structure-driven templates, like a customer journey map or customer touchpoint map, and use them to organize your notes.

Empathy map
A simple framework that captures what users say, do, think, and feel in one place. It helps the team translate raw notes into a more structured view.
To keep empathy grounded in real people, you can pair this with persona templates such as buyer personas or user personas. Build the empathy map on one side of the canvas and the persona on the other so the team sees both at once.

“Day in the life” customer journey map
A simple timeline that shows how a user’s day flows, with key tasks, touchpoints, and emotions. You can treat this as a lighter version of a customer journey map.

Define

Goal: To turn messy research into clear, actionable focus

Problem-framing canvas
A one-page template that captures the user, context, needs, constraints, and success metrics. 

Opportunity map
A board where you turn key insights into opportunity areas and then decide how to turn them into solutions.
You can also use 5 Whys or root cause analysis templates to dig into why a problem exists and a vision board to capture what you're aiming for.

Ideate

Goal: To generate a broad set of solutions before you narrow down

Mind maps
Start with a core problem or user outcome in the center and branch into themes, approaches, and solution ideas. Mind maps help surface unexpected connections.

Idea boards
A large space divided into regions such as quick wins, experiments, bold bets, and future ideas. As ideas appear, you place them in the right region. This can be charts, boards, or tables. 
Impact effort matrices, rose-bud-thorn perspectives, and tier list makers are some examples of structured idea boards.

Idea cards
Small cards with fields or questions. They force clarity and make ideas easier to compare.

Prototype

Goal: To make ideas concrete enough that people can experience them

Wireflows or user flows
Diagrams that show screens or steps, decisions, and alternative paths for a key journey such as onboarding or checkout.

Service blueprints
For services that involve many internal teams or systems, a blueprint maps user actions, frontstage touchpoints, backstage processes, and supporting systems together.

Storyboards
A sequence of frames showing a user moving through a scenario. Storyboards are ideal early on, when the experience is still flexible.

Test

Goal: To turn user feedback into learning

Experiment board
A canvas where each experiment has a room for the hypothesis, assumptions, test design, metrics, and results. It helps shift conversations from opinions to evidence.

Feedback map
A board where you cluster feedback from tests under themes like usability, value, clarity, and trust.

Learning log
A timeline or table that records what you changed after each experiment and why so future decisions are grounded in past learning.

Design thinking made visual: Why visual tools matter for innovation teams

Making design thinking visual instead of a set of meetings and documents changes how the work behaves inside an organization.

Shared visual context 
When research, problem statements, ideas, and experiments live on a shared visual canvas, everyone sees the same thing. Product, design, engineering, and business stakeholders are less likely to argue from separate slide decks or half-remembered conversations.

Faster pattern spotting
Visual tools like journey maps, flowcharts, and blueprints help patterns, gaps, and contradictions stand out. It's easier to see where you have too many ideas, not enough research, or conflicting assumptions.

Better asynchronous collaboration
Hybrid and distributed teams cannot rely only on in-person workshops. A visual room that stays beyond meetings lets people add comments, ideas, and updates in their own time without losing the big picture.

Stronger memory for the project
Weeks after a meeting, documents are forgotten. A current canvas that shows how the problem definition, ideas, and experiments evolved gives the team better memory. New people can onboard faster, and leaders can see the reasoning behind decisions.

You don't need a huge tool stack to get these benefits. A good visual collaboration tool, plus a consistent way of using a small set of frameworks, is usually enough.
If you want to put these ideas into practice, you can try Vani, a shared visual intelligence platform, for free at vanihq.com