Design Thinking

Today businesses want meaningful relations with their customers. as opposed to the traditional thinking that focused on enhancing the functionality and looks of their product to only improve sales, disregarding the relationship with their customers.

Therefore, industries across sectors are looking for practical and innovative solutions that meet their needs. There are some examples that distrusted its industries respectively, like Uber that has improved the process of hailing a taxi, giving the company its competitive edge, or AirBnB that improved the selection of lodging and added multiple other jobs to the economy, or even Bird that helped people in urban areas get from point A to point B in a faster way without sitting in traffic.

These innovations are great, but they face the challenge of continuous innovation to sustain or further their edge in their respective markets. That's why innovation must be part of the company’s work culture, and not a one time event.

What are you talking about?!

I'm talking about the combination of an ideology and an iterative process that considers multiple factors to solve complex problems in a human centered way.

It means using both sides of the brain, the left side (logical) and the right side (creative), using both helps in finding the connections for problem identification, ideation, and innovative solutions. These solutions are Attainable, Desirable, Sustainable, and Cross-domains.

The Need

Design thinking aims to transform ideas into actual, verifiable products or processes in a cost and time-efficient manner by leveraging information architecture, branding standards, wireframes, visual mocks, user journey & interaction design, etc. Let’s understand the role of design thinking from the point of view supporting everyday processes.

Promotes user friendly engagement

Users want their interactions with technologies to be simple and intuitive as they engage with their complex business logic due to the rising complexity of modern technologies.

Solves problems with user-centric approach

By focusing on a user-centric approach and human interaction, you can leverage design thinking techniques and structured processes that facilitate potential solutions, creative confidence, and idea generation to solve problems.

Usability research and analysis reports help design decisions for different customer-facing solutions’ interfaces, so developers and designers understand their target users’ problems better.

For businesses across different sectors

Not just products and services but entire business systems can be developed through the lens of design thinking.

Kaiser Permanente used design thinking when working with nurses in patient care to overhaul how nurses change their shifts. The process helped lower errors while transferring information, boosting patient safety, care, and confidence. Here design thinking focused on the services rather than the tools.

Complex problems use Design Thinking to help getting solutions

Complex problems can be solved by leveraging creativity and structure of Design thinking. Like many companies such as Apple, Amazon, Google, and many more, they use Design thinking to nurture a culture of innovation. These companies allow teams to develop new ideas and test them creatively and constructively, then launch it.

It creates products innovation

By understanding the user behavior, the value of design thinking methodologies can be harnessed and facilitate high-impact solutions at the root level, rather than superficially. This will lead to a faster go to market with more relevant solutions.

Supports business growth

By leveraging design thinking, you could save costly resources in creating products or platforms that effectively deliver the solutions your customers require, instead of rushing into it and spending precious resources.

Design thinking facilitates practical solutions and ideas that can be implemented into the product development process and give you time to build a robust product that delivers on customer requirements. If you think about the long run, Design thinking will help you solidify your product market placement and enable you to get ahead of the competition.

The Principals

Empathy and user experience

Today the user and not technology drives innovation, that's why we need to get user feedback to build solutions that are responsive to our customer needs.

One of the biggest mistakes that businesses make is to rely on internal operational efficiencies when they design for external users. You can still enhance your internal operations, but Design-centric organizations will observe the external customer rather than making a general assumption solely based on the internal feedback.

Creating personas based on research helps designers and developers empathize with the user throughout the design process. They take in account potential barriers, attitudes, emotional and psychological experiences, to create and map the persona and journey.

Collaboration

By collaborating between multidisciplinary teams, it will ensure you have actionable cues and guidance to the design process.

You should obsess over your customers, clarify and fine-tune your craft, you should push the envelope as far as you can. Think of barriers that you did not anticipate, needs there were unmet, and present them to the stakeholders.

Don't limit yourself by thinking of design only, it can range from architecture, to style guides. Anything in the process needs to be thought through.

Ideation & Solutions

Ideation is a crucial step in the process. You must actively focus on the quantity of your ideas without worrying about what everyone else thinks. Through brainstorming and other creative methods we can record all these ideas and consider them in the future.

Once the root problem is identified, we need to start gathering as many ideas to get to a viable solution. Challenge your assumptions and think of alternative solutions then evaluate the opportunities to come up with the best solution.

Experimentation

When you launch a new product, ideally you want to test it in a beta or in a trusted circle of users to gather as much feedback from real users outside of the team that developed the product before you have a formal release.

Design thinking does not end with idea generation. You now have to develop prototypes, test the design, incorporate changes based on user feedback, etc. In short, design thinking can be a somewhat repetitive process as you identify flaws in the early versions of your proposed solution.

Be proactive

When testing your concepts, be sure to optimize them along the way. Rather than guessing what the users want, design thinking encourages you to be proactive towards action-oriented approach to problem solving, developing real-world tangible prototypes.

Research your competition, see what users like, so you can include those features in your product, iterate on them and make them better.

Setbacks will happen

You're not always going to get things right the first time. While all aware of the big hits of the leading companies, they don't always see the setbacks. These companies mask them, and treat them as innovations cost.

Be Flexible

Keep your design as adaptable as possible, where you are prepared for changes your system may require in the future, and it will. When designs are too rigid they often cause increased cost of development due to the need to adhere to a rigid style guide. Keep it flexible.

Simplicity

The reason why certain products are more successful than others, is the simplicity built into them.

Oftentimes we think of all the features we want to give our users, and lose sight of the reason they use our product to begin with. Removing features allows us to offer the users with a simple and straightforward experience.

Spend time to deliberate decisions about what the product should do and – more importantly – what it shouldn’t

The Five Phases of Design Thinking

Empathize

This means observing and engaging with human beings to truly internalize their experience on an emotional and even psychological level.

Define

A great creative brief, built with both strategic focus and creative inspiration, is the key to unlocking the best solutions and building consensus along the way.

Ideate

Brainstorming, mind-mapping, landscape mapping and Post-it Notes are all viable tools to fuel this brilliant but messy phase.

Prototype

Experiment transforming ideas into tangible “artifacts.” These artifacts may be a packaging design system, an eCommerce experience, a new feature innovation or a customer journey. Regardless of the task at hand, rapid iteration and even prototyping is a crucial step in quickly breathing life into the work.

Testing

Open-ended and solutions-focused questions, such as, “What problem could this solve for you?” “How could this solution impact your experience?” or “What might make it an even better solution?” These questions avoid answers that shut down iterative improvement and encourage consumers to build on the concept or solution in productive ways.

Design Thinking Is Intuitive and Natural

Don’t get caught up in the academic dialogue around design thinking; it can be needlessly intimidating and can undermine its own fundamental purpose. Embracing design thinking as a way to codify and organize your creative development and output will create stronger teams, instill deeper collaboration, build confidence of your designers, foster a more resilient design culture, and most importantly, create potentially monumental solutions that improve the lives of other human beings.

Because the design is the result of empathy and collaboration, it supports a more mindful and sustainable approach to business.

We encourage leaders to work harder and create a culture that allows employees to move forward and innovate while following the design principles as a reference point. Design thinking is great for innovation, but expectations must be set around a realistic timeline.

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