8 things you've got to know about Design Thinking
Adi Mazor Kario
Tech Product, Design & AI Expert ?? l Empowering Tech Companies to Lead with Unbeatable Products l Google Gen AI Expert l Keynote Speaker l Bestseller Author
In today's competitive market, companies must innovate, move fast and be creative. In the case of established companies, with more traditional culture, innovation provides a way to stay at the top, while out-competing new, fresh competitors. In the case of startups, they need to maximize their effort in order to get to product-market fit. Design thinking methods can optimize their scarce resources by focusing on their users and their needs.
Done Right, Design Thinking...
· Captures the mindsets and needs of the people you're creating for.
· Paints a picture of the opportunities based on the needs of these people.
· Leads you to innovative new solutions starting with quick, low-fidelity experiments that provide learning and gradually increase fidelity.
Design Thinking can apply to:
· Product design
· Service and experience design
· Organizational change and transformation
In the last few years, I've been facilitating design sprints and design thinking workshops all over the worlds and they are a great tool to solve challenges and create out-of-the-box-product, fast. In this article, I'd like to share 8 ways Design Thinking can help your company solve a challenge or create a better product.
1. Solve Challenges
I guess an easy way to begin to understand the value of design thinking is by exploring what it is. It is a problem-solving strategy whose focus is to get people to break out of the natural patterns. It is a methodology used by designers to solve complex problems and find desirable solutions. It revolves around a deep interest in developing an understanding of the people for whom we’re designing products or services. It helps us observe and develop empathy with our customers. It is a process of questioning: questioning the problem, questioning assumptions, and questioning the implications. It is extremely useful in tackling problems, by re-framing the problem in human-centric ways, developing ideas, and adopting a practical approach in prototyping and testing.
Design Thinking can be used to solve big challenges. Really big challenges. Earlier this year I was invited by Google in collaboration with the UN's World Food Programme to help startups solve world hunger. We used Design Thinking methods to help these entrepreneurs understand their users and clients, prototype fast and test their solutions. You can see me in this video talking about the challenge-
2. Iterate Fast
Design Thinking is an iterative and agile process of ongoing experimentation: sketching, prototyping, testing and trying out concepts and ideas.
The process you move from an idea to prototype and testing is very fast- you could reach a validated solution or product within a few weeks instead of a few months.
Google's Design Thinking framework- Design Sprints will take you from idea to a product in a week or two. https://designsprintkit.withgoogle.com/introduction/overview
3. Collaborate Efficiently
Design Thinking is a great way of building collaboration between teams, to create a space for the productive sharing of ideas and building of innovative solutions that have the broadest possible support at their inception. It is a process that translates thoughts and ideas from different people or teams into a single clear narrative that everyone can understand. Design Thinking can create collaborations across the company. Design thinking can also help everyone in the company understand the voice of the customer or users, their motivations and needs.
Design thinking is a tool that can be used by all company leaders/managers and the process are there to guide and support rather than impose, all participant in the process collaborate together to get to a better result and solution. Design thinking will gather the brainpower of all the smart people in your company to solve a challenge together, faster.
4. Get better ROI
Many of my clients are not familiar with design thinking methods and its benefits and it only makes sense they are looking for the end value, the ROI of the process. Companies that use design strategically grow faster and have higher margins than their competitors.
5. Innovate and drive change
An innovation won’t succeed unless a company’s employees get behind it. The surest route to winning their support is to involve them in the process of generating ideas. The danger is that the involvement of many people with different perspectives will create chaos and incoherence.
The biggest barrier to company culture change is that most people feel anxiety and resistance to change that is imposed upon them. People don’t feel invested in the process that leads to the change and so fear the consequences to their daily patterns and working practices. They resist ideas for which they have not been party to the formulation. The processes and practices of design thinking are collaborative. They give a voice to a variety of opinions from across the company, and they allow more people to take part in defining the change. Now, even though not all ideas that emerge will move forward, everyone should at least be reassured that they have been considered and constructively explored to such an extent that the value of what does define the company's culture change is understood to be of greater priority.
6. Re-frame the problem, get better solutions
Defining problems is obvious, conventional ways, not surprisingly, often leads to obvious, conventional solutions. Asking a more interesting question can help teams discover more-original ideas. The risk is that some teams may get indefinitely hung up exploring a problem, while action-oriented managers may be too impatient to take the time to figure out what question they should be asking.
It’s also widely accepted that solutions are much better when they incorporate user-driven criteria. Market research can help companies understand those criteria, but the hurdle here is that it’s hard for customers to know they want something that doesn’t yet exist.
Finally, bringing diverse voices into the process is also known to improve solutions. This can be difficult to manage, however, if conversations among people with opposing views deteriorate into divisive debates.
7. Empathize
Design thinking is all about finding solutions that respond to human needs and user feedback. People, not technology, are the drivers of innovation, so an essential part of the process involves stepping into the user’s shoes and building genuine empathy for your target audience- clients or users.
User Empathy mapping, one tool that Design Thinking offers to understand your clients and users.
8. Act Fast. Act Now.
Design Thinking is a proactive tool you can use in order to get things done. Design thinking is an extremely hands-on approach to problem-solving favoring action over discussion. Instead of hypothesizing about what your users want, design thinking encourages you to get out there and engage with them face-to-face. Rather than talking about potential solutions, you’ll turn them into tangible prototypes and test them in real-world contexts.
From my experience, after many years of working with companies of different sizes and with various products, I believe Design Thinking is a tool every company who wishes to succeed needs to know and understand. Projects that took months, with long discussions and many iterations, could be shortened with this method. Design thinking can accelerate, collaborate and innovate faster than any other method. Try it!