Many times, when you’re starting a new business, developing a new product, or developing a marketing strategy, you’re making assumptions about what people want. How do you involve end users from the very beginning, to ensure that what you’re creating is something that fills a need? Through the design thinking process, you can break down a complex, abstract challenge into actionable problems you can solve.

In this short course, you’ll take a deep dive into the first half of the design thinking process: empathizing with stakeholders and creating a design brief that solves real challenges. Using a real world challenge as a practice case, you will learn how to:

• Identify challenges for the design thinking process
• Develop user-centered research protocol
• Use creative methods for gathering data
• Engage end users in problem solving
• Analyze and synthesize qualitative data into actionable design briefs

You will leave with a set of tools you can use in the future as you identify and tackle your own complex challenges.