7 Design Thinking Frameworks Compared
First published in March 2018. Updated for 2026 with two additional frameworks, a comparison table, and a guide to choosing between them.
During a consulting engagement, an inquisitive team member asked me two questions: what "value" does a design thinking methodology (abbreviated here as DT) deliver to a business, and which "DT process" from a long list would suit a software development project?
The value of a collaborative design effort is well documented and easy to articulate. The second question was harder. With so many frameworks to choose from, anyone would grope for answers. That prompted me to compile the better-known ones into a single article.
The goal was not to verify their efficacy. It was to understand the ethos behind each design process and how various co-creation exercises are run. This isn't an exhaustive list, just the frameworks I've come across most often in my research.
To "Design" Is "Design Thinking"
Industry analysts have widely supported the adage "Good design is good business." Design belongs at the core of an organization's innovation strategy, and there are many frameworks for getting there through collaborative thinking.
Definitions are just as numerous. Idea Couture's co-founder Idris Mootee calls design thinking a "new management wonder drug." My personal favourite is IDEO CEO Tim Brown's, which is all-inclusive and often repeated in workshops:
Design thinking is a human-centred approach to innovation that draws from the designer's toolkit to integrate the needs of people, the possibilities of technology, and the requirements for business success.
Some dismiss design thinking as jargon or business-school terminology. That's naive, given how much interest it has drawn worldwide.
With so many forms and definitions, it's no surprise that design remains an enigma for many. At its narrowest, design is seen as aesthetics. Strategically, it brings together finance, people, ideas and technology to reach an optimal outcome. It rarely follows a linear set of actions, and it broadens the horizon by capturing divergent opinions on how something could be accomplished, not only what.
Each framework below reflects the ideology of the organization behind it, and each works as a model for co-creation.
At a Glance
| Framework | Phases | Structure | Fit for software projects |
|---|---|---|---|
| IDEO | Inspiration → Ideation → Implementation | Overlapping spaces | Good for early discovery; broad, not prescriptive |
| Stanford d.school | Empathize, Define, Ideate, Prototype, Test | Sequential on paper, iterative in practice | Easiest entry point for new teams |
| Idea Couture | Blends design, systems thinking, strategy, foresight | Integrated, strategy-led | Best for product vision and roadmap, less for delivery |
| Frog CAT | Clarify, Build, Seek, Imagine, Make, Plan | Non-linear, returns to "Clarify" | Closest match to Agile; revisits goals each cycle |
| Darden (Liedtka) | What is? What if? What wows? What works? | Four questions, staged | Good for business-case-driven work and stakeholder buy-in |
| Double Diamond | Discover, Define, Develop, Deliver | Two diverge/converge cycles | Strong for framing the problem before building |
| Design Sprint | Map, Sketch, Decide, Prototype, Test | Time-boxed, 5 days | Best for testing one risky idea fast |
IDEO
In 2009, Tim Brown published Change by Design, a comprehensive look at human-centric design and its impact on industry and social innovation. It frames design around three principles: Viability (business), Desirability (human) and Feasibility (technical).
IDEO considers design a human process built on active collaboration and observation. Instead of an orderly sequence, its model has three overlapping spaces:
- Inspiration: designers distil on-field observations and research on human behaviour into insights.
- Ideation: a multidisciplinary group generates ideas and tests them against those insights. Ideally it includes "T-shaped" people, with depth in one field (MBA, engineering, architecture) on the vertical bar and empathy for diverse populations on the horizontal.
- Implementation: promising concepts become prototypes, tested with users, iterated and refined. Prototyping also surfaces unforeseen implementation challenges.
Tim Brown and Jocelyn Wyatt describe the model in more detail in Design Thinking for Social Innovation. IDEO also offers the Human-Centered Design Toolkit and The Field Guide to Human-Centered Design, both available through IDEO.org's DesignKit.
Stanford d.school
The Hasso Plattner Institute of Design at Stanford, better known as the d.school, was founded in 2004 by IDEO co-founder and Stanford engineering professor David Kelley, along with other professors. The d.school “doesn’t offer degrees. It is something Steve Jobs talked him out of.” Kelley then quotes Jobs: “I don’t want somebody with one of your flaky degrees.” Kelley explains that Jobs preferred students to earn a conventional degree—such as computer science or business—and then learn the d.school’s way of thinking on top of it. Although, today, the Stanford d.school is involved in degree programs, unlike when David Kelley originally described it as a place that would not award degrees. The school brings together Stanford students and industry leaders to build creative confidence, and its framework has five stages:
Stanford d.school - Design Thinking
- Empathize: observe and interview users to discover unmet needs.
- Define: capture the user, the need and the insight from the first phase.
- Ideate: brainstorm widely (divergent thinking) and reframe the problem.
- Prototype: build a minimum viable version that captures the basic experience.
- Test: put it in front of users early, in the spirit of "fail fast, fail often."
The stages read as a sequence, but the d.school itself stresses that they're non-linear, and teams loop back as they learn. Templates for each stage are in this Medium post.
Idea Couture
Idea Couture (IC) is a strategic design consultancy with an integrated approach. Unlike the other frameworks here, it combines DT with futures thinking and applies the result to business strategy for customer experience innovation.
The framework draws on market research and analysis. Storytelling and observational research articulate unmet needs, and rapid prototyping makes tangible versions of the future. IC brands this "D-School + B-School," pairing design's multidisciplinary strengths with the analytical rigour of business school. In short, it combines systems thinking, business strategy and design, with futures thinking to make sense of tomorrow's market.
IC even built a game, IMPACT – A Foresight Game, to teach the basics of strategic foresight: building well-informed, future-oriented perspectives to guide innovation and planning. Cognizant acquired Idea Couture in 2016.
Further Reading: Notes on Designing IMPACT: A Foresight Game
Frog Design
Frog's Collective Action Toolkit (CAT) is fluid and non-linear. Like other frameworks, it brings diverse people together around a shared vision. What sets it apart is the assumption that goals will shift as the team learns from each activity. Participants keep returning to Clarify, at the centre of the model, to reflect on the vision and insights.
The six areas are Clarify (your goal), Build (your group), Seek (new understanding), Imagine (more ideas), Make (something real) and Plan (for action). You can start anywhere, work alone or in a group, and balance time between acting and reflecting.
That pattern of confirming what was learned and re-aligning to the vision at the end of each phase mirrors Agile. It's the framework I'd try first on an Agile software team.
Darden (University of Virginia)
Strategist Jeanne Liedtka has written several books on DT. One of my favourites is Solving Problems with Design Thinking: Ten Stories of What Works, ten case studies of companies that transformed product development and sales through design. With Tim Ogilvie, she also created a four-stage toolkit for managers to think like designers and build empathy with customers. She teaches it in a Coursera course on designing for growth.
- What is? Take a deep dive into today's reality. Customer dissatisfaction is a good starting point.
- What if? Generate ideas that address those pain points and capture them as "napkin pitches," descriptions short enough to fit on a paper napkin.
- What wows? Test the napkin pitches with rapid prototypes, checking customer needs, your ability to execute, and the viability of the business model.
- What works? Launch the survivors as small-scale experiments with real customers, then iterate on the feedback.
Liedtka and Ogilvie's underlying point is that managers should see themselves as learners. Most are taught a linear method (define the problem, list solutions, analyze, pick the best), but designers know that invention takes experimentation and empathy is hard won.
Managers get 10 tools for the journey: Visualization, Journey Mapping, Value Chain Analysis, Mind Mapping, Rapid Concept Development, Assumption Testing, Rapid Prototyping, Customer Co-Creation, Learning Launches and Storytelling. Details are in this Darden article.
Double Diamond
The British Design Council introduced the Double Diamond in 2005. It pictures design as two diamonds, each one a cycle of diverging (exploring widely) and converging (narrowing down): Discover, Define, Develop, Deliver. The first diamond is about finding the right problem, and the second about finding the right solution. That separation makes it a strong choice when a team is tempted to start building before the problem is clear.
Design Sprint
Created by Jake Knapp at Google and refined at Google Ventures, the Design Sprint compresses the process into five days: Map, Sketch, Decide, Prototype, Test. It doesn't cover an entire project. It answers a specific question, usually whether one risky idea is worth building, with a realistic prototype and real user feedback by Friday.
The classic sprint runs like this:
| Day | Focus | Typical activities |
|---|---|---|
| Monday | Understand and map | Define the long-term goal, hear from experts, map the customer journey, and choose one critical problem |
| Tuesday | Generate solutions | Review existing ideas, sketch competing solutions individually, and develop detailed concept sketches |
| Wednesday | Decide | Critique the sketches, use structured voting, have the decision-maker choose a direction, and create a storyboard |
| Thursday | Prototype | Build a realistic, high-fidelity “facade” of the proposed experience rather than production software |
| Friday | Test | Interview about five target users individually while the team observes, then identify patterns and decide what to do next |
Which One Should You Pick?
No framework is the best one. They differ in what they optimize for, so the better question is what problem you're facing right now.
- Problem still fuzzy? Start with the Double Diamond.
- One risky idea, little time? Run a Design Sprint.
- Agile team that needs to revisit goals each cycle? Try Frog's CAT.
- New to design thinking? d.school gives your team a shared vocabulary.
- Need a business case and executive buy-in? Darden's four questions map well to stakeholder conversations.
- Setting a long-term vision or roadmap? Idea Couture's foresight lens fits.
- Broad, human-centred discovery on a complex problem? IDEO's overlapping spaces give you room.
In practice, these frameworks share more than they differ. Each asks you to understand people, widen the options, make ideas tangible, and learn from testing. The phase names matter less than keeping those habits, and many teams blend them, for example using the Double Diamond to frame the problem and a Design Sprint to test the riskiest answer.
Frameworks also only describe the journey. Within each phase, teams choose their tools, and 'ethnographic research' alone might use user interviews, data analysis or contextual inquiry, together or separately. I hope this gives you a foundation for choosing a design thinking framework for your own projects.