Design Thinking and It’s Importance
What is Design Thinking, and why it is relevant for organizations
Design thinking is a method or framework that centers on the user for whom the goods or services are targeted. This approach popularized by design consulting firm IDEO gained momentum in the larger business world. Design thinking is now widely used across both the private and public sectors, for business and personal projects, all around the world.
What is design thinking?
Design thinking is a framework that prioritizes the end user’s needs above all else. It relies on observing, with empathy, how people interact with their environments and uses an iterative, hands-on approach to create innovative solutions. It makes use of how end-users (humans) engage with a product or service, rather than just thinking about how they will engage with it.
To be truly human-centered, designers watch how people use a product or service and continue to refine the product or service in order to improve the user’s experience
Design thinking is useful for tackling problems that are ill-defined or unknown by reframing the problem in a human-centric way.
Why is design thinking important?
Design thinking isn’t just for designers, it also gives people who have not trained as designers the opportunity to use creative tools to solve a range of problems. Design thinking transforms the way organizations develop products, services, strategies, and processes by putting together the human point of view with what is technologically workable and economically viable.
Here are some essential uses of design thinking
● The principal aim is to solve the target user’s needs. Using a human-centered approach, design thinking can uncover and solve the problems of the user that they hadn’t thought of and ones that the user is not even aware of.
● Helps scale the design process and helps organizations create better, more efficient, human-centered designs.
● Design thinking brings everyone into the design process. It involves everyone, from the designers to the stakeholders and target users.
● Tackles Ambiguous and complex challenges. Instead of assuming what the need of the target user might be, design thinking involves careful observation of human behavior to identify their actual needs. This helps to tackle ambiguous challenges.
● Design thinking leads to innovative solutions. It looks at problems from a completely different perspective, which results in innovative and disruptive solutions.
The five steps of design thinking
●Empathy
Empathy can be a physical or virtual journey into the feelings of others. Who is the user? What is their pain point or need? Empathy can be a physical or virtual journey into the feelings of others. It is the core focus of the design thinking approach. It involves using a beginner’s mindset and immersing yourself in the target user’s experience to find out their pain point.
As IDEO’S Tim Brown put it, “Without the understanding of what others see, feel, and experience, design is a pointless task.”
Empathy involves withholding judgment, no preconceived notion of what the user needs, and helps you connect deeply to the end-user to create products that ultimately meet real human needs.
● Define
The next step is to define the problem and identify potential solutions. The define stage allows designers to combine findings from step one and come up with a point of view that will help reframe the problem and open new and innovative ways to solve it. Know the User, their deep unmet need, and then list the insights from your empathetic need-finding process. When you use this human-centered approach of searching for an actual need, you can then re-define the problem statement and open all kinds of opportunities for innovation.
● Ideate
The next step is to gather ideas for solving the identified solutions. It is now time to brainstorm and come up with ideas without judgment. That way, no one in the group feels stigmatized for suggesting a crazy idea. And by reaching quantity to boost creativity and increase the likelihood of coming up with innovative solutions.
Here are a few brainstorming rules:
● Appoint a facilitator
● Set a clear goal
● Share ideas one at a time
● Be visual (sticky notes, sharpies)
● Build on top of other ideas (“Yes, and…”)
● Stay on topic
● Limit the time
● Encourage crazy ideas
With a lot of ideas to choose from, the team gets to select which idea to work on. Other alternatives to brainstorming are sketching and discussing ideas in a group or mind mapping when you are on your own.
● Prototype
This is the stage that turns ideas into actual solutions. The point of a prototype is to come out fast with a concrete version of the idea to see how the target users interact with it. Prototypes don’t need to be perfect. It is cheaper to fail early (during the initial stages of a project) than later, after a lot of resources are allocated.
We build prototypes to learn, solve conflicting ideas, start conversations, and manage the building process. “Sometimes the key to good empathy is sharing or co-creating a prototype with your users and getting feedback.”
● Test
In the testing stage, you test the prototype on real users, observe their reactions, and collect feedback. This way you refine the point of view, learn more about the user, and get insights on how to improve the product further. It is important to test prototypes early in the design process to correct the course if the product hypotheses are incorrect.
Adopting a beginner’s mindset is vital, as you test early solutions don’t be blinded by assumptions. Each step along the testing phase helps you relearn, rethink, and understand the needs of the user and build better products faster. When testing, you will have to go back to one or several of the previous phases and keep iterating, one phase at a time.
Conclusion
People may feel that the design thinking process is solely for those in the creative industry (designers), but it is now widely used by different industries. It is useful in breaking down complex problems, be it in business, government, or social organizations. It can be used to explore how to support individuals while catering to larger organizations. The design-thinking process makes it more likely a business will be innovative, creative, and ultimately human-centered.