Empathize exploratory phase + research + interviews. Objective: To understand the user, the strongest frustrations in his missions, his real problems. this phase will lead you through interviewing and observing users, and then synthesizing your findings to discover meaningful needs and insights.

Define identify and focus on the most important issues. Your point of view; by taking the insights gathered in the previous step, construct an actionable problem statement that reflects the understanding of the users and their environment, this is your point of view. Mainly, this should be more than a simple re-statement of the problem space, it should be a unique design solution strongly influenced and framed by the discovered needs of the end-users. It is important that any initial or revised problem statement is continuously re-framed to match new insights generated from current and future empathy work.

Ideate with specific methods to find the best solutions to problems. In this mode, the goal is to do a wide examination of the solution space by continuing to generate ideas well beyond any initial solutions that spring to mind. After such probing is done, the focus is narrowed and the solutions are evaluated one by one in order to determine if they are viable or not.

Prototype use this phase to rapidly develop and build your solution concepts and then test your prototypes with users. Prototyping should manifest the current ideas into the physical world in such a way that they can be interacted with and the results discussed. An initial prototype should be cheap and rough; a role-playing activity, post-its on a wall or a simple physical object. By keeping the investment in, and resolution of the prototype low it will be easier to quickly explore different scenarios and incorporate the results back into the iteration process.

Test to experiment with the models created with the user, and to collect user opinion, user feedbacks. Has the problem addressed been well understood, the solution is good, must it be corrected?