"The ‘Define’ stage is about making sense of the broad insights from the empathy work to focus on a clear challenge. It’s where you take all that learning and find the key problems worth solving."

Tim Brown, CEO of IDEO

The Define stage in design thinking is the second step, where you take the insights gathered during the Empathy stage and synthesise them into a clear, actionable problem statement. This involves organising and prioritising findings to pinpoint the core challenges your users face. The goal is to frame the problem in a user-centered way, guiding the project and participants toward focused and effective solutions that address the real needs identified.

The Define Stage:

Synthesise Empathy Findings: Review insights gathered during interviews, observations, and journey mapping to identify key patterns, behaviours, and pain points. Group related insights to develop a clear understanding of users’ challenges and motivations.
Create User Personas: Develop fictional personas based on the empathy findings to represent different user types. Each persona should include demographic details, goals, pain points, and behaviours to help ensure the design process stays user-focused.
Define the Problem Statement: Craft a clear, actionable problem statement from the user’s perspective. Use insights from empathy findings and personas to articulate a user-centered challenge that guides the design process.
Identify and Prioritise Key Insights: Clarify and prioritise user needs based on empathy data and personas. Focus on the insights that have the greatest potential to drive innovation and solve critical user problems.
Develop a Design Challenge: Frame the problem as a creative question, such as "How might we...?" This encourages the team to generate innovative ideas while staying focused on user needs and challenges.