How can design thinking workshops improve brand design feedback?

Le design thinking est à la fois une mentalité et une méthode qui guide la conception de solutions. Il commence par comprendre profondément les besoins et les perspectives des utilisateurs, suivi par la génération d'idées créatives et la création de prototypes. Ces solutions sont ensuite testées et ajustées en fonction des retours d'expérience, le processus se répétant jusqu'à ce qu'une solution optimale soit atteinte. Le design thinking se caractérise par une approche centrée sur l'utilisateur, la flexibilité, la créativité et l'innovation.

Design thinking (DT) is a design philosophy that empowers you to understand the ethos (Internal and external) of a product, process, or service. It provides you with the opportunity to avoid costly mistakes by ensuring that you conduct pertinent steps to uncover the what, who, why, how, when of certain “X” you are solving for. It can be innovative and transformative. Two great collaborative DT questions I ask my clients are the “5 Why” and “How Might We”, these two questions help you crystallize any project objectives and potential action steps.

And, using Design Thinking approach to creatively craft your brand feedback can help you generate a pragmatic response from your customers. For example, you run a bakery and noticed customers seldomly patronize your vegan pizza and when they do, they only have a slice or two with a distasteful look on their face, if you’re someone like me, I’d be curious to know what’s happening and how I can solve the problem if there’s one. You could take an approach of sending a rating survey and one optional feedback or You could pose a 25 seconds structured survey with options to get more inputs. One of the feedback mechanism could give you a meaningless insights and the other might offer more perspectives and help you think through the next steps.

Why use design thinking for brand design feedback? Actually I will use design thinking for 'improving' 'innovating' whatever current brand design is based on empathizing with users. Using design thinking will allow us to review what we have and then make it better - the iteration process without making any assumptions. But design thinking is but one of the tools available out there. Someone once said that "Design Thinking informing the creative and user-focused aspects of a project, and Agile managing the development process." (I know we are only talking about Design Thinking here).

I won't necessarily use Design Thinking simply to get feedback. But I will use it to 'reevaluate' what we've have done previously to ensure that I am truly meeting user/people's needs adequatly. Since the standard process is already established; my comment on the "Empathize, Define, Ideate, Prototype, and Test" is that we use it to ensure that whatever we have done meets the requirements of the people.

Empathize, research, analyze, and structure your brand design feedback work in various meaningful categories that could give you further insights into the performance of your brand. Leverage the categories of People, Process, Technology, Data, and Innovation; these 5 categories would help you gather detailed insights into your brand perception and would empower you to device means to innovate or pivot your brand.

Regardless of what initiative you’ve decided to leverage Design Thinking approach, always have a sponsored user or champion that would help you test in all phases of research, design, testing, feedback, implementation, and iteration. These user or champions should belong to the category of potential users or participants of your initiatives. They will give you honest opinion with a bird eye view.

Design thinking for me is all about empathy. Now building up empathy for a target audience (that sounds cold, but I am using standard terminology) is the key here. Once we can get started off this very first step, of Design Thinking by empathizing with people who we think will use our product or service, then everything else falls into place. Once you 'grok,' the people - you are all set for a great design thinking session.