28 best Design Thinking tools and software
Design Thinking isn't just a buzzword. Bringing a human-centred design thinking process to your organization can help create meaningful solutions that solve the real problems your users are facing. But what tools exist to make design thinking more efficient and effective?
In this guide, we'll share a working definition of design thinking and a collection of Design Thinking tools that will help you at every stage of the Design Thinking process.
Since its debut in 1969 when Simon Herbert introduced the model in the Science of the Artificial, Design Thinking has revolutionized business models, processes of innovation and many aspects of product and service design.
One of the reasons for design thinking’s popularity is that it is human-centered, putting users and customers at the center of creation in order to understand their problems, thus making products and services more user-friendly.
Design Thinking may seem like just a tool or technique, but this is not the case. Design Thinking is more of a mindset or a process with several different stages, and each stage can be supported with different tools to help in the understanding-designing process.
In this guide, we’ll explore Design Thinking software for each stage of this process and also provide some framing with a definition of Design Thinking and each stage therein.
The Design Thinking process
What is Design Thinking?
In essence, Design Thinking is a human-centered process of finding creative and innovative solutions to problems. By approaching the process using design methods, organizations and teams in any field can better understand their users, redefine challenges, and quickly test and iterate on possible solutions.
Simply put, Design Thinking is a way of approaching organizational challenges with a user-first mindset before designing and testing solutions quickly in order to see effective results.
The Design Thinking process is flexible and non-linear in nature, allowing teams to go back and forth between ideation, testing, and user definition as best suits the project.
You might learn things from testing that allow you to better ideate and understand your users. By encouraging flexibility, the design thinking process ensures teams can be nimble and more effective.
Remember: while Design Thinking has its origins in the way designers solved problems, it is a process and way of thinking that can benefit any organization or industry. If you have customers or users, design thinking is a way of solving the problems they face and building better products and services.
What are the 5 stages of Design Thinking?
The design thinking process has five stages that can be approached in both a linear and non-linear fashion. The five stages of Design Thinking are:
Empathize
The first stage of the Design Thinking process is where your team will seek to better understand and empathize with your users. By truly understanding your users and how they interact with your tool or service, you can then create a better product informed by their needs.
In this stage, you’ll likely conduct user interviews, collect customer feedback and analyze data from your analytics tools to more deeply understand your users and the problems they face.
Define
Only by clearly defining a problem and your users can you develop the best solutions. In this stage of the Design Thinking process, you will use the data, observations, and thinking done in the empathize stage in order to create a problem statement that best reflects the challenges affecting your users.
The define stage is all about clearly stating the exact problem(s) you’ll be tackling with your project and the exact user needs you’ll be seeking to address.
Ideate
Now you’ve come to understand your users more deeply and have clearly defined the challenges facing them, you’re now ready to start brainstorming new solutions that are human-centered in nature.
It’s important to keep all the work you’ve done in the previous stages in mind when it comes to ideating – remember that you are designing solutions for your users and it’s from this perspective you should consider possible solutions.
Teams will typically hold an ideation or innovation workshop to brainstorm, sort and prioritorize ideas. Expert facilitators or design thinkers will run activities designed to engage the entire group and refine ideas, ready to turn into prototypes and move forward with.
Prototype
Design Thinking is designed to be a quick, iterative process. A core part of this is by swiftly prototyping possible solutions to get a feel for how effective they will be ahead of putting massive organizational cogs into motion.
In this Design Thinking stage, you and your team will design, prototype and assess possible solutions before either accepting, improving or rejecting them – all while remembering the needs and experiences of your users.
The key to a successful prototype session is to remember that this is an experimental phase and that it’s okay to iterate so long as you and your team are actively pursuing the best solutions to the issues raised in the previous stages.
Test
After ideating, designing and prototyping, you’re now ready to test your solutions. Ideally, you’ll test with real users, collect feedback and engage with them throughout.
Data is massively important for this stage and so using tools to facilitate usability testing with analytics in mind can ensure you have the confidence to determine if your solution actually solves the problem and benefits your users.
Best tools for each Design Thinking stage
Keeping in mind the stages of the model, we have collected some of the best Design Thinking tools to help you create real value for your customers and users.
- For the complete process: SessionLab, Sprintbase, InVision, Batterii
- Empathize: Respondent.io, Hotjar, Mixpanel, Typeform, Zoom, Calendly
- Define: Smaply, EnjoyHQ, Userforge, MakeMyPersona
- Ideate: SessionLab Library, Stormboard, IdeaFlip, Miro, MindMeister
- Prototype: Boords, Balsamiq, POP, Figma, Proto.io
- Test: UserTesting, PingPong, Maze, VWO
Let’s dive deeper to review each tool more in detail.
Design thinking tools for the complete design thinking process
In this guide, we’ll share a heap of tools that can help with each stage of the design thinking process. Depending on your needs and existing tech stack, you’ll likely find some categories more useful to your design project.
In this first section, we’ll share some design thinking tools that can support you throughout the whole process. These tend to fall into two categories by their approach: they are either tools specifically designed to guide you through the design thinking process, or massively flexible solutions which happen to be suited to design thinking.
SessionLab
Whatever tools you choose, effective design thinking is a process best performed in a workshop setting, guided by a facilitator. Whether it’s defining a persona, synthesizing user insights or developing prototypes, the focused space of a design workshop can help groups get things done.
SessionLab is a design workshop planning tool that makes it fast and easy to create the agenda for your design thinking workshop. Drag and drop blocks to quickly create your ideal structure. Set timings for each design thinking activity to keep on track. Plan complex multi-session processes and collaborate on your design project in one-place.
SessionLab also features a host of design thinking workshop templates you can use to get started quickly and run an effective design sprint. Try Design Sprint 2.0 for a complete 4-day process or the One Hour Brain Sprint for an example of a focused ideation session.
Sprintbase
Sprintbase is a dedicated design thinking software excelling with its focus: Each step of the design process is supported by a dedicated structure and functionality in the app, and you are smartly guided through the whole workflow.
What really distinguishes Sprintbase from a generic whiteboard platform is that it has a strong aspect of educating users on ‘how to do innovation well’ through its tutorials and templates. Imagine it as a combination of a specialised designed thinking software combined with practical educational resources to develop innovation skills.
InVision
InVision is a flexible digital product design platform that straddles the boundary between online whiteboard and prototyping tool. While it’s not a bespoke design thinking tool, it is an effective solution for managing the process.
In its suite of powerful tools with outstanding user experience you can find solutions for collecting inspiration, organising information, creating and sharing ideas, sketching, wireframing, and designing prototypes. If you’re looking for a single space to collaborate on each part of your project and aren’t already invested in separate tools, InVision might be your best bet
Batterii
Batterii is an open platform for visual thinkers and designers to get on the same page, structure their thoughts and create more visually. You can browse through templates including empathy maps and customer journey maps to stakeholder analysis.
With the Batterii communities feature, you can co-create with users and collect insights easily before collaboratively organising the information collected to support your design process.
Design thinking empathy tools
The first stage of the Design Thinking process is to empathize with your users by collecting as much information about them as you can with different set of tools.
This human-centered approach helps experts focus on the user instead of their own assumptions about a problem.
Design thinking practitioners will typically gain empathy with their users by:
- Collecting qualitative user research data from existing users in the form of user interviews, customer feedback and surveys) and quantitative (product metrics)
- Collecting quantitative user research data from existing users in the form of usage data, product metrics, heat-maps and more
- Collect data from prospects who match your target audience or user personas, often sourced from a user research platform or contact base
Having a mix of new and existing users in your user research pool can be helpful at this stage. People seeing your product for the first time will likely have fresh perspectives while your existing users can provide feedback already knowing the context of the tool.
These design thinking tools for the empathize stage cover all of these scenarios. You’ll also find that almost every design thinking tool listed in this guide will help at multiple points of the process – we’ll outline where we think the each design thinking tool is best and also note where it can also be used.
Respondent.io
Sourcing high quality interviewees for remote user research sessions can be a challenge. Vetting potential candidates and considering how they match with your target audience persona can create a lot of work, even before you actually sit down for an interview or usability testing.
Respondent.io is a platform designed to help you find research participants that explicitly match your project needs. We’ve used Respondent.io for design projects at SessionLab and have been happy with how its helped us gain insights, source participants, conduct user journey mapping and more.
Design thinking stages: Empathize, Define
Typeform
Typeform immediately sets itself apart from options like Survey Monkey with a fresh, simple aesthetic and an easy-to use interface. Creating customer feedback forms, surveys and questionnaires that look good is fast and easy in Typeform. It’s analytic features are no slouch either – seeing where participants dropped off and being able to easily graph responses can help surface insights for your design team to use.
Typeform also features many practical integrations to help you save time: for instance, you can easily set up responses to arrive to Slack and be recorded in a Google Sheet for further analysis or for interviewers to follow-up on. At SessionLab, we really appreciate Typeform’s flexibility and speed and it often has a part to play during most design processes.
Design thinking stages: Empathize
Hotjar
Hotjar is a powerful analytics and feedback tool that will help on the data side of user research and testing. While any analytics tool (yes, even Google Analytics 4!) can help with providing data to back up the empathize step, product heat-maps can often tell a much clearer story.
Hotjar enables you to collect data on your funnel conversions, see where people click and how they navigate on your site too. They also offer instant feedback from users and feedback polls to identify problems they may be having.
Design thinking stages: Empathize, Test
Mixpanel
Chances are you already have a product analytics tool but we felt it important to mention that these tools are a key contributor to a successful design process. We use Mixpanel at SessionLab and find that the ability to create cohorts, easily monitor experiments and see how certain features or changes affect activation and retention incredibly useful.
At the empathize stage, these analytic tools can help provide important context and insight into what users are doing (or not doing) and support any hypotheses or customer feedback. In any case, I wouldn’t dream of launching a design thinking project without at least some data analysis in-hand.
Design thinking stages: Empathize, Define, Prototype, Test
Zoom
You’ll need design thinking tools for video conferencing and meetings at various stages of your design process. In the context of user interviews, it’s often useful to select something familiar, easy-to-use and which can easily record interviews and make transcriptions.
Zoom provides exceptionally reliable quality, minimizing audio or video latency issues that you usually encounter with most video conferencing applications. It has a wide variety of features available both for individual and business needs including the scheduling of calls, a dial-in phone number and recording, even on the free service plan.
Design thinking stages: Empathize, Test
Calendly
Managing the set-up of your user interviews or remote user research sessions can easily become time consuming. For us, the worth of design thinking tools comes in eliminating some of the headaches from the process so you and your team can focus on actually designing.
Calendly makes it easy to send a single link to prospective interviewees and have them pick an available slot. It updates automatically, so you don’t need to manually assign interview slots as they come in and it integrates with all major calendar and video conferencing software with ease.
When going through a process of finding participants and conducting interviews, it’s possible to automate much of the early process by sending a Typeform to your users and then sharing a Calendly link only with those people who match your chosen criteria.
Design thinking stages: Empathize, Test
Design thinking tools for the define stage
Once you have gathered a lot of information about the users, their needs and problems in the empathizing stage, you can analyze and synthesize it in order to sift out the (real) problem to be solved.
To understand problems better, it is useful to create personas and define roles so you can attach needs and problems to different set of users. Once you have this you can see what patterns emerge and summarize problems into a problem statement.
Here, you might also conduct customer journey mapping to better understand your user’s experience, pain points and where you might focus your attention when creating new ideas.
In our experience, the define stage is best served by the tools below in combination with a group workshop. Co-creating and aligning on personas in a workshop setting with other team members can be faster and also ensure any potential design challenges are surfaced early. Take a look at the first day of Design Sprint 2.0 template to see an example of how you might define a challenge.
Smaply
Smaply, a platform to manage your customer experience, allows you to create, share and present your customer journey maps, personas and stakeholder maps. It’s a great used to support a design thinking workshop, particularly for those following the framework to the letter.
Smaply also provides a beautiful and detailed persona and stakeholder editor that can ensure the define stage of your design project.
Design thinking stages: Empathize, Define
EnjoyHQ
Part of UserTesting’s suite of research and analysis tools, EnjoyHQ is a platform for centralizing, organizing and sharing customer research in one place.
The insights you can gain from such curation can be invaluable in defining your customer stories and personas. Being able to cross reference customer feedback, interview data and other data sources can also help you make sense of things at speed.
For best results, integrate insights from your customer support and design teams in an ongoing manner. Being able to go back and see insights from previous periods can really help inform your process and save time on potentially unnecessary user interviews.
Design thinking stages: Empathize, Define
Userforge
Some of the best design thinking tools are those which are really good at a specific job. Userforge promises to help you create in-depth and realistic personas with less clicks than it takes most design software. You’ll find templates and images to help speed up your process and make persona creation easier.
We love that Userforge is easy to use and that anyone can create usable personas without design skills. It’s a great tool to bring to a design sprint where you might invite people from your sales, dev or support teams and want to involve them throughout the process.
Design thinking stages: Define
MakeMyPersona
MakeMyPersona by Hubspot is a slick solution that can help you structure the information you have about your customer personas. It guides you through 19 essential questions that covers the most important aspects to build up your personas. Your answers and the output personas can be downloaded in Word format via email.
It’s a simple tool for beginners to get started thinking about personas and involve non-design team members in the process. MakeMyPersona is a great free design thinking tool that I’d easily recommend to those wanting to learn (or teach) persona creation.
Design thinking stages: Define
Design thinking ideation tools
This stage is about coming up with creative solutions to your challenge based on your problem statement and what you know about your users.
A typical ideation stage involves using brainstorming and problem solving techniques to generate ideas before refining those ideas and voting on those you wish to move forward with as a team. The tools below all support this process and also work well with the define stage too.
The best design thinking tools can support this process by making it easy for your group to collaborate and fully engage in the creative process. Online whiteboards are one such design thinking tool but you’ll often find that design thinking techniques used in the context of a workshop are what provides the real juice here. Use them together for best results!
SessionLab Library
The free library of more than 1000+ proven facilitation methods from SessionLab offers a wide variety of techniques for every stage of the design thinking process. Bring them to your design workshops and meetings to help create participatory processes that generate creative solutions and help your team use their design thinking skills.
Ideation processes are often best served by proven techniques and workshop settings. From brainwriting to 3-12-3 brainstorm, you’ll find the best stand-alone brainstorming activities to get ideas flowing in your team. The SessionLab library is free to use. By signing up you can also save your favourite methods and begin structuring a workshop agenda around them with ease.
Design thinking stages: Empathize, Define, Ideate
Stormboard
When running brainstorming sessions online, Stormboard is a digital whiteboard tool that stands out with functionality designed to support a facilitation process.
You’ll find features to help with generating ideas, organizing them and then sorting them by priority. Particularly for facilitated processes, Stormboard is a great addition to your design thinking toolkit. You’ll receive a little more structure and guidance than more freeform online whiteboards that can help ensure a productive process.
Design thinking stages: Define, Ideate
Miro
In the world of online whiteboards, Miro is one of the best design thinking tools you can bring to your process. We use Miro as a space to kickoff the project, ideate together and support our workflow throughout a project.
Being able to visually collaborate in one-space is useful at most steps, but its especially useful when ideating as a group. You can easily create stick notes, structure information and drag in supporting information in a way that supports your brainstorming sessions.
You’ll also find a heap of templates and plugins that can help you simplify the ideation process and make it easy for your team to generate new business ideas and think through an idea together.
Design thinking stages: Define, Ideate
Ideaflip
Ideaflip is a simple yet elegant tool for brainstorming sessions that focuses on replicating the feeling of using sticky notes in a virtual space. It’s easy to collaborate, annotate post-its and group them together for quick ideation and decision-making sessions.
While much of this functionality is present in bigger tools, Ideaflip stands out with its features that support breakout groups and structured discussions. Based on the rest of your tech-stack and process, it might just provide what you’re looking for in a lightweight tool.
Design thinking stages: Define, Ideate
MindMeister
For many people, mind maps are an integral part of the brainstorming and ideation process. MindMeister is a best-in-class design thinking tool for creating mind maps with linked items at speed. It’s easy to use and customize and for group sessions, the collaboration features can help support you process.
As with many of these ideation tools, we’d recommend using MindMeister in the context of a workshop or with sync sessions to follow – this can help ensure that meaning is made of what’s mapped out and that teams are well positioned to use your map in the prototyping and design stages.
Design thinking stages: Define, Ideate
Design thinking prototyping tools
By this stage you will have a few solutions or features that you will want to test. Prototypes do not have to be too detailed, high-quality or actually even functional yet. The idea is to create a prototype that is sufficiently able to display a specific feature or working mode.
Depending on your project and process, this might look like creating a wireframe or simulation, all the way through to a minimum viable product version of your feature or solution. Design thinking tools for the prototyping stage are typically flexible in nature and are designed to take design ideas from simple mock-ups through to animated prototypes or vertical slices quickly.
Boords
Boords aims to be your complete storyboard toolbox. While much of its toolkit focuses on creating storyboards for video, it can be effectively used for creating customer journey prototypes and animations.
Their storyboard creator allows you to experiment with pictures and gifs, voiceover and action text or redraw existing frames. With the animation tool you can actually make animation from your frames with sounds to create prototypes you might show to your users for feedback.
Design thinking stages: Ideate, Prototype
Balsamiq
Balsamiq has a clean and user-friendly interface, making it one of the easiest to use prototyping and wireframe applications. Features like drag and drop, simple interactivity and smart text resizing makes the wireframe creation process almost as fast as pen and paper.
Sharing with direct links makes collaboration super easy and as a low-fidelity prototype tool, Balsamiq is a great choice for many teams.
Design thinking stages: Ideate, Prototype, Test
Pop
POP is a mobile application for turning your sketches into animations. It is very easy – just take snaps of your sketches or pictures and the app merges them into an interactive prototype. The best thing about POP is that it allows you to share your prototype and get feedback from users instantly.
Pop is part of Marvel’s design suite, so when you’re ready to create more in-depth prototypes or hand-off to developers, it’s easy to integrate your Pop prototypes into your design workflow.
Design thinking stages: Ideate, Prototype, Test
Figma
Figma is a powerful design suite that many (ourselves included) use at the core of their process when moving towards your design thinking solutions. It’s easy for designers to create designs and user interfaces, collaborate in one-place and quickly modify based on feedback.
When it comes to prototyping, Figma supports everything from creating wireframes and visual mock-ups, all the way through to animated protypes you could even share with your audience.
Prototype testing can be done by sharing Figma designs or presentations with users in an interview too. It’s also worth noting that with adjacent tools like Figjam, Figma can easily take a central place in other design thinking stages too.
Design thinking stages: Ideate, Prototype, Test
Proto.io
Creating working prototypes that users can explore on their own is a must for certain projects. While its possible for developers to create a working prototype for testing in the form of a hackathon, sometimes, you’ll need a fast, no-code solution that you can use to validate a prototype without involved your dev team.
Proto.io is a modern design thinking tool for prototype testing that makes it easy to quickly build beautiful prototypes. You’ll find simple but effective building tools and interaction types alongside a content library and features to help you share your projects with testers too.
Design thinking stages: Prototype, Test
Design thinking testing tools
When testing the complete product or service, it often happens that data gained through testing will redefine the problem statement or several features, making Design Thinking a real iterative process.
While nothing beats the ultimate experience of seeing your users interacting live with a prototype, there are various different tools you can use when you have to conduct user testing remotely. And if your prototype is a website, you can also benefit from website analytics and screen capture tools.
UserTesting
UserTesting is one of the best and biggest names in user testing applications. Pick users according to what you want to test whether it’s a website or mobile app. The platform records every move your testers make, so you can truly understand how they navigate and perform the tasks you assign to them.
Over the years, UserTesting has become a fully featured suite that will allow you to analyze the data collected and amplify the insights throughout your organization. If you’re looking to scale your design thinking capabilities and become a more research oriented company, UserTesting is a powerful option.
Design thinking stages: Empathize, Test
Pingpong
Pingpong is a user-research platform where you can find tens of thousand of testers from all over the world. Pingpong will automatically set up the best testers for you based on your needs and you can easily schedule interviews which can be recorded as video feedback and later analyzed.
In comparison to some other user research platforms, Pingpong has a cohort that is great for usability testing and for ironing out product prototypes.
Design thinking stages: Empathize, Test
Maze
Maze is a user research and testing platform that we’ve found a great choice when creating interactive prototypes you want to test with users. With Maze, it’s easy to create wireframes and prototypes, share them with users and receive actionable insights as a result.
In our experience, the heatmaps and analytics that come as a result of your tests in Maze can provide incredible insights for your design team to follow-up on. It’s a great way to validate ideas and also get a sense of how a proposed change actually feels.
Design thinking stages: Empathize, Prototype, Test
VWO
At it’s heart, VWO is a digital optimisation platform that focuses on A/B testing web-based experiences. If you’re testing different solutions on your website or web-based apps, VWO makes it easy to create, run and optimize experiments and test at speed. After it’s been implemented, it’s possible to run tests based on user feedback without needing to fiddle with serve-side code.
For anyone looking for online tools to replace the now defunct Google Optimize, VWO is a great tool that can help you find the best solution from various experiments and tests. It also has an analytics suite featuring heatmaps and funnel analyses too!
Design thinking stages: Empathize, Prototype, Test
Conclusion
We hope that all of these design thinking tools will be useful and will support you in creating awesome, valuable and human-centered products and services for us and the world!
Choosing design thinking software to match your needs and projects can help ensure that your process will be efficient and deliver effective solutions too.
So what’s next? If you’re running a design thinking workshop and need help structuring an agenda, check out our guide to planning a workshop for actionable insights, tips and a template.
Robert took his first facilitation training in 2009, and since then immersed himself in designing and delivering experiential learning experiences, group workshop, and train-the-trainer/facilitator programs. His passion for facilitation led him to co-found SessionLab, the online platform that helps people design and facilitate better workshops.
Hi Bianka, thank you very much for the well-written post. One tiny remark: Creatlr is misspelled. Would you be so kind to correct our name? Creative regards from Holland! Niels Hoogendoorn (co-founder Creatlr.com)
Hi Niels,
Sorry for misspelling it, I am going to correct it right away, thanks for pointing it out. We are happy that you find the article useful! Regards, SessionLab team
Thanks!
Great article- thank you so much for sharing this masterpiece!
You’re welcome, Julian! Great to see that you find the list useful. Let us know if there any further tools that you would include.
What a great read! I really appreciate the wholistic approach.
There’s an additional platform called “Sprintbase”. It guides teams through the entire process with structure, guidance and tools for learning.
You guys should check it out!
It looks like a really thoughtfully designed tool, thank you for the suggestion, Ryan! We are going to include it in the next revision of the post (coming soon)
thanks for the information
Hey there!
Great article, I found it very useful actually. I wuld just like to point out a minor writing mistake in the DT process image. I believe it is written “empathize”, not “emphatize”.
Thank you so much for the valuable info, best regards from Portugal.
Tomás
Thank you, Tomás, well-spotted. That’s an embarrassing mistake on our side, will fix it soon – I appreciate the help :-)
Awesome and helpful article. Great thanks for sharing this with us. Really appreciate your blog.
Thank you, you’re welcome :-)
Hi,
All this tools are online tools. Can you suggest offline tools for each phase.
Regards
Parag
Robert, thank you for such a great article!
This is exactly what I was searching for!
Due to the situation in the outside world, I decided to take a course on Design Thinking.
I run a small business and it seems that I will be able to get knowledge from already experienced professionals.
I’m planning to take this one course Innovation Week Online, cause I Future London Academy has great offline programmes.
Maximum practical learning and advanced skills.
What to you think about it?
You’ve organized it well here. I love using Mural and Miro for the realtime whiteboarding. I’ve also been hearing more and more people using Google Jamboard now too — especially when working with people new to these kinds of collaboration tools.
This list is awesome! We use the prototyping list all the time and we use Novatools.org for pretty much everything else, it’s an all-in-one innovation and collaboration tool. We use the basic whiteboard daily and some of their tools but use it because we can create internal processes and our own tools and workflows with it. We use it for market research, for ideation, for quick prototyping, and for business strategy. My team is working remotely and we all have a clear process. We love it!
@robert, Thank you for the great list!
Here’s a team of design thinking facilitators for over a decade now. We are launching a BETA of THE GOOD WORKSHOP. I hope you will try it out!
The web app automates the planning phase and tracks how the workshop performs. It also updates itself.