Design thinking: The secret to digital success

Design thinking has become a key practice for enterprises crafting digital products with the end user in mind.

Design thinking is fast becoming a key ingredient for successful digital transformation. But what exactly is design thinking, and how are leading startups and businesses harnessing its power to enhance business value?

Design thinking practitioners observe and analyze user behaviors to gain insights into their needs and wants. They then use those insights to create digital products and services tailored to customers’ needs.

Design thinking vs. human-centered design

Design thinking is closely related to human-centered design, and the terms are often used interchangeably. It helps to think of human-centered design as an umbrella term under which design thinking sits.

If human-centered design is the philosophy that puts people at the center of digital solutions and services that are being designed, design thinking includes the best practices used to build those solutions. Design thinking and human-centered design tap anthropology, sociology and psychology to meet consumer desires, and may include social network analysis and narrative analysis.

It’s about finding out peoples’ behavior, motivations and needs and coming up with solutions and services to match, The toolbox is wide and varied.

Design thinking best practices

Design thinking can help foster innovation as companies seek to “renew” themselves to keep up with the pace of change. But the switch to design thinking requires culture change. Following are the tips for implementing design thinking.

1. 1. Empathy: A lack of understanding and empathy for stakeholders is a big reason why digital initiatives fail. Capturing empathy isn’t easy, as end users don’t share a hive mind. Moreover, enterprises must also consider those who install, repair or maintain the solutions they design. This is where contextual inquiry and other ethnographic and participatory design techniques come in handy.
2. 2. Iteration: Corporate governance tends to crimp innovation. Organizations must allow for the multiple failures associated with great or novel ideas. Here, iteration is key, and teams should be continually sketching, storyboarding and prototyping solutions based on stakeholder feedback. Product designers must ideate solutions with the business. Often this means using cloud-based tools to help visualize and regularly revise the solution.
3. 3. Project failure points: It’s vital to identify areas that aren’t working and fix them. That’s one of the advantages of iteration: Designers and engineers can fix bugs and user design quirks on a rolling basis.
4. 4. Collaboration: Organizations must conjure good ideas and collaborate with clients and other departments to get them implemented. Workshops tend to work best here, allowing multi-disciplinary teams to introduce concepts based on customers’ pain points and gather feedback on ideas and, eventually, prototypes.

A need to improve customer experiences is what ultimately drives most organizations to embrace design thinking.

Conclusion:

You’ve likely heard the expression “starting with the customer and working backwards.” This is the ethos from which design thinking springs. And while it may seem like common sense, enterprises have long taken the build-it-and-they-will-come back.

Prior to design thinking, user-friendliness was an afterthought. IT departments would take specifications from the business and then spend months building technology solutions.

As technology is increasingly woven into the matrix of a business, even traditional companies are considering user experience as a key factor in solutions both for employees and customers.