Now that you've chosen an area to focus on for this design project, each member of your design team should interview three or four people to better understand - their attitudes, practices, hopes, and fears regarding sustainability in this area - as well as their attitudes about using apps and services. Truly understanding their needs is the critical first step in our design thinking process and will help you in developing useful composite character profiles.

Your team should create two or three Composite Character Profiles that will help you to define your POV statements.

Your team should create two or three POV statements based on your Composite Character Profiles that will help you frame the design challenges that your design team would like to focus on into actionable problem statements that will help launch your idea generation. Then, choose the one POV statement that your team feels will provide the strongest point of departure for ideating about the features of a potential service or app.

Focus on creating a Customer Journey Map. But, your team can also use other ideating techniques to help generate and consolidate your ideas if they're helpful.

Create a description of the features of your Minimum Viable Product (MVP), based on your team's brainstorming and selection activities. You should continue ideating within your design team to refine vision of the essential features of the service or app that you'll be proposing, then itemize those features — the absolute must-haves — in your MVP description. Use this MVP to guide your detailed design of the service or a your design team is proposing as a solution to the needs you've identified. And the features that you've identified as essential will the be the ones that will be most important to prototype and test during the next phase of the design thinking process.