The Students' Perspectives on Applying Design Thinking for the Design of Mobile Applications

Design Thinking (DT) is relevant for companies committed to developing a more creative and innovative application. DT provides a human-centered view of technological artifact design. Therefore, it is important to learn DT in Computer Science and Software Engineering courses as an analytic and creative process, in order to better prepare students for the software development industry. We conducted an empirical study with 17 postgraduate students in the context of mobile applications design. We used coding procedures from the Grounded Theory method for analyzing the obtained qualitative data. Based on the results, we identified some difficulties that participants experienced in using different DT techniques. The results of this study can help teachers understand the difficulties faced by students in learning DT and, consequently, help them to look for new teaching strategies for their classes. Moreover, these results can contribute to the software industry showing the competitive advantages of using DT in the design of the applications under development, especially in mobile applications.