How Visual Thinking supercharges Design Thinking

Design Thinking and Visual Thinking are similar to chocolate and peanut butter. On their own, they’re two distinct flavors. But when combined, they complement each other, resulting in something new, different, (and delicious).

While individually effective, using the two disciplines together can deliver remarkable outcomes. The interplay allows you to harness the power of both structure and creativity. By making Visual Thinking an integral part of your Design Thinking toolbox, you unlock new levels of innovation, communication, and problem-solving efficiencies, improving understanding and execution across the board at every stage of organizational change. 

Let’s dive in.

First, a quick explanation of each 

Design Thinking is a structured, human-centered approach to innovation and problem-solving. It aims to deeply understand user needs in order to create effective, user-friendly solutions through iterative prototyping and testing. It makes design part of the larger picture and creative process — not something tacked on at the end. 

Visual Thinking has no core process and features a wide-ranging set of tools and methods that can be mixed and matched to help create clarity. By using drawings, diagrams, and imagery to represent ideas and processes, you can simplify complex concepts to enhance understanding. Some ideas and things are difficult to accurately and effectively describe in words, especially for large and diverse audiences. Visual Thinking helps people see everything from “the big picture” to the smaller details.

Both practices are rooted in practical applications core to the success of any organization (and the people who are part of it): exploration, collaboration, efficiency, effectiveness, clarity, communication, understanding, innovation. Designers do not own Design Thinking. Artists do not own Visual Thinking. These are skills that can benefit everyone in an organization — thereby benefiting the organization as a whole.

How can they work together?

Design Thinking takes a more ordered approach. However, there is no equivalent structure to follow in Visual Thinking. That’s part of what makes them uniquely suited to working in tandem. 

Because Visual Thinking is flexible, you can apply it at will within the parameters of Design Thinking. Visual Thinking also can be incorporated into any stage of Design Thinking because they are robustly complementary.

Visual Thinking helps to bridge gaps in communication, adding information that can’t be captured in words, resulting in a more impactful understanding of what’s being presented. When Visual Thinking enters the Design Thinking framework, it provides something for people to rally around and drive toward lasting organizational change. 

How Visual Thinking fits in the 5 stages of Design Thinking

For each of the prescribed steps in Design Thinking that we present below, there are clear opportunities where Visual Thinking can play an important role. 

1. Empathize

At this initial Design Thinking stage, you must understand the user’s needs. They may have expressed a list of things they want addressed, but oftentimes they actually don’t know what they want (or more accurately, need). Or you have identified a problem but not yet zeroed in on why it’s a problem.

At this point, Visual Thinking can be used to create empathy maps, and you can begin to see what a user is seeing, feeling, doing, and saying. Because you’re bringing it all to life with visuals, it’s no longer just a list of issues, but powerful vignettes of emotion that humanize problems so you can understand how best to solve them.

2. Define

With Design Thinking, you collect information from research, feedback, or exercises. And all of that information can lead you to believe you know exactly what the problem is.

Visual Thinking allows you to see that data in a more meaningful and shareable way. You can see that seven people thought the issue was X, while three people thought the problem was Y. Visualizing these issues helps you to illustrate the current state, identify holes to fill, and even capture the future state. 

When the problem is attacked visually, it becomes more engaging. People see it in front of them and begin to feel they can play a part in fixing it.

3. Ideate

At this stage, you begin bringing the future state to life, usually by listing pros and cons. When Visual Thinking is added to the list, words and pictures together begin to tell a powerful story. 

As thoughts and ideas emerge, the accompanying images crystalize concepts and speed the process. Visual Thinking elevates this stage: You start to see a sketch of an object that doesn’t exist yet, the outlines of a new website, the challenges you’ll face, or the initial images of an industrial design. Visual Thinking at ideation primes the process for the next stage: prototyping.

4. Prototype

In Design Thinking, this phase becomes more time intensive and expensive as prototypes are built, refined, scrapped, and rebuilt.

But with Visual Thinking, you can tackle prototyping with a pen and stack of index cards. For example, if you’re developing a new smartphone app, examples of an interface and user flows can be sketched on sets of index cards that can be used to get a feel for the flow of information.

Visual Thinking tells you what you need to know early in the process before involving large teams. It’s fast, it’s cheap, and if it’s wrong, you recycle and start over. 

5. Test

Your perspective as a designer can never be as authentic as the experience of your users. Visual Thinking allows you to put visuals in front of a user more quickly.

Users can immediately begin assessing value: Can it fit? Does it work? Is it light enough? You can conduct A/B testing or put forth multiple options: Same design; different words. Same words; different design. 

And with Visual Thinking, you can capture the results of the tests simply by watching users. You don’t always need to ask them what they think or explain what the problem is. Emotion — such as a grimace on their faces — is real feedback, and can help you forge a more empathetic connection.

Visual Thinking and Design Thinking: Better together

While Design Thinking provides a structured framework for innovation and problem-solving, Visual Thinking offers a versatile toolkit to enhance each stage of the process. By integrating Visual Thinking techniques throughout the Design Thinking journey, teams can:

• Gain deeper empathy for users through visual storytelling
• Define problems more clearly with visual data representation
• Accelerate ideation with quick sketches and visual concepts
• Create faster, more cost-effective prototypes
• Conduct more insightful user testing through visual observations

If you’d like to learn more about how Tremendousness uses Visual Thinking to get more out of the Design Thinking process and improve your organizational change campaign, we’d love to hear from you.