Design thinking for business growth.
The design thinking methodology is a problem-solving approach that places people at the center of the process. It’s not just a design exercise, but a mindset that can benefit everyone, including designers and non-designers, as well as organizations and businesses.
In fact, research shows that design-led organizations outperformed their counterparts by an average of 211% over the past decade. This highlights the value of design thinking when carried out properly.
Take Apple, for example. Their recent market valuation of $2 trillion makes them the first U.S. company in history to reach that mark. This achievement can be attributed in large part to their robust application of design thinking, which drives their out-of-the-box disruptive innovations in creating products and services that tremendously satisfy their users’ purpose.
Design thinking is a creative problem-solving method that starts from a place of deep observation and immersion in the problem you’re trying to solve. By connecting deeply with the people you’re trying to solve the problem for, in the context you’re solving the problem, you can uncover hidden problems by questioning the assumptions, beliefs, and implications, thereby reframing those problems in a new light.
To gain invaluable user insights, user research can be conducted through user interviews, intercept studies, guerilla research, or by conducting a desktop research such as competitor analysis/audit. The key determiner of the success of a product or service is your users — how enjoyable the experience is to them, that they’d want to use your product, in respective of the several millions of similar products vying for their attention.
However, it’s also important to understand and appreciate the needs of the stakeholders, as much as those of the users. Observing helps you gain clarity on the underlying deeper issues, as the more clarity you gain, the more enlightened you are of the problem, and consequently, the problem becomes more apparent to you.
Empathy is a key component of design thinking, as you’re designing for and with your users. You gain empathy by learning and observing your users to holistically understand what their motivations are, the why’s behind their behaviors, their feelings, wants, and needs in order to craft a solution that’ll best address their unmet needs.
Just like design, empathy is a learnable skill. The more open-minded you are to take a walk in your users’ shoes (mentally), the more empathetic you can become.
Once you’ve gained a high-level understanding of the problem you’re trying to solve in the present and future context of your users, you can successfully reframe and define the problem in a succinct way.
When you’ve defined the problem to solve, you can begin ideating possible solutions by sketching with paper to brainstorm and create as many rough sketches as conceivable that’ll most likely solve the pain points you’ve identified. Rapidly prototype and validate these solutions by testing with your users and select the best solution from the prototype that’ll work cohesively to address users’ needs.
As Steve Jobs once said, “Design is not just how it looks and how it feels, Design is how it works.” After validating the solution, it’s crucial to continuously refine, iterate, and optimize the solution to readily meet users’ needs.
The most innovative companies in the world are continuously and consistently refining and iterating on their products and services to better serve their global users, customers, and audiences.
In conclusion, the design thinking process is a non-linear process that doesn’t require you to go through all the steps in a sprint-like manner. You can always go back to a previous step when you’ve gained a new perspective on how to approach it. Working backward is highly recommended in the design thinking process.
