Design Thinking – a new era of problem solving

What is Design Thinking? How is it applied to products or companies? Is it easy to incorporate? How does the future of its adoptive organisations look like?

Process improvement strategies help organisations (overall) and teams (on a smaller scale), improve their efficiency, by clearing up older ways that no longer work. Improvement techniques could be technological, operational, or cultural.

Lately, we have been hearing of a lot of process improvement strategies, of which one is Design Thinking. Though it is on the rise, and quickly gaining popularity among major brands, it is still a concept waiting to be understood.

Let’s try to understand Design Thinking in detail.

What is Design Thinking?

Design Thinking is a strategic process for problem-solving, whose primary trait is the viewing and analysing the customer’s point of view. The concept revolves around the objective of enhancing user’s experience, and thereby improving customer retention.

It allows the team (or organisation) a different approach to figuring out a problem, before devising the optimal solution.

It is divided into 5 steps:

Design Thinking -1

Let us take a deeper look into each step.

  1. Empathize – in this stage, the user’s views are gathered. A closer look is taken at what the user’s requirements are. Further, feedbacks are noted in regard to solutions that have previously not worked.
  2. Define – this is the stage where the problem is figured out. The data from step 1 is segregated and the pain points are defined.
  3. Ideate – once our problem is defined, we brainstorm towards viable solutions.
  4. Prototype – in the prototype stage, we experiment and modify the errors from step 3.
  5. Test – the prototype solution is tested on a segment of target users, and feedback is collected.

Though there is no hard and fast rule to follow the above steps in the mentioned order, consultants generally do so, often toggling multiple times between steps 3,4 and 5, until an apt solution is found. This means, that like the process of Kaizen, a continuous improvement process is observed, once a problem has been targeted.

Going a little deeper into the process, let us understand what we mean by the beginning phase – empathy.

Empathy Mapping

Like we mentioned, the stage deals with gathering and understanding user’s views and reviews. The means to do so, are termed “Empathy Mapping”.

Understanding the user’s views and requirements, compels us to delve into the consumer behaviour.

To do so, a subset of users is determined first.

Design Thinking - 2

Segmenting the views and reviews into categories allows us to filter and prioritize requirements. This further eases the next step of defining the problem.

Importance of Design Thinking in the new age of business

The new age of business relies mostly on digitalisation. With products and services fully capable of being served digitally, user experience has taken a similar route too. A sincere focus on customer experience, helps a business give the customer what they want, along with what they need.

For far too long, companies and businesses have showcased to consumers the best of their products. Features kept getting better, more functionality was added. Over the past three decades, with the shift in paradigm towards digitalisation, the mindset has highly become product-centric.

Design Thinking allows companies to change their organisation’s mindset to a rather customer-centric one. With the priority being the requirements of the intended end user, innovations are driven by needs.

Let us consider a simple example. Imagine an app that helps you (the end user) keep track of your expenses. From a product centric point of view, the developers could add various features to make the app seem highly functional. But if those features are difficult for the user to comprehend, they would lose interest quite quickly. This could prove to be difficult for the developing company to bear with.

Rather than focusing on what they could provide, if they led with the question ‘what does the customer want’, they would have a product that is better liked. Having worked based on feedback, the needs would be known, in turn making the testing of the app, smoother. Furthermore, users would have an idea of what to expect, which enhances their experience.

Design Thinking, in a way, resembles backward integration. Or we may say, it is a combination of backward integration and Kaizen.

Future of organisations adopting Design Thinking methods

With Design Thinking-led strategies making way into major corporations globally (the likes of Agile, Lean Start-up, Human-Centred Strategy, and more), its importance is evident. Now the question is: “What’s next?”

Design Thinking methods could very well be used by User Experience and User Interface Designers to predict the problems that could arise in the future. Being iterative in nature, the methodology allows room for experimentation while testing, and thus generating results that cost much lesser the traditional ways of tackling long term problems.

Design Thinking has proved its relevance over the years, with major names like PepsiCo. incorporating it in their daily operations, across the organisation. It would be right to assume that Design Thinking methods are the future of management. While many organisations prefer having different teams learn individual contents of this methodology, it has been observed that the best results are produced when all the different aspects of Design Thinking (Agile, Lean Start-up, etc.) are combined. This means, all teams must have exposure to the entire process, to make it a part of their organisation’s culture. With each individual knowing how they can contribute towards the output, organisational productivity and employee satisfaction rise along with great user experience.

What do you think is the future of Design Thinking within organisations?

Tell us in the comments below.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *