Design Thinking 1.1
Some companies adopted design thinking when targeting their business problems. Design thinking reveals that such companies have a soul, a vision, and a message that resonates with their customers.
Everything that any discipline can contribute to solving problems can be improved through design thinking. But how to continue.
Solving Creatively
Problem focus could lead to stagnation and frustration. Things are usually more complicated than they appear, and focusing solely on problems disables seeing what is working and using it in creative way.
Design thinking can solve complex problems across systems, procedures, protocols, and customer experiences. It requires to focus on solutions instead of problems. Instead of staying stuck in the problem domain, design thinkers always consider an ideal future.
Problem solving in this manner involves regarding peoples’ needs and finding creative solutions. It forces individuals to use every tool at their disposal, from their intuition and imagination to their innate sense of logic and reasoning, to unravel complex issues and explore possibilities.
When a solution is discovered, it is subject to change according to the needs of the company and its customers. Design thinking is never stagnant. It is an continuous and reflexive commitment to innovation.
Anyone who needs solving problems could benefit from adopting design thinking. It enables to solve any problems and come up with creative solutions by looking at issues holistically and addressing needs.
When you put design thinking into practice, you have more space to innovate and you improve your audience’s experience.
Although this is a vastly creative process, design thinking has several identifiable stages.
Empathise
This stage involves by collecting as much information about a field as possible. You may consult with experts, and get as much background as possible to envision a better future.
Define
After you have enough background information, define what customers need. Conducting formal and informal surveys to gather customers’ feedback. Watch how people interact with the products and listen to how they describe the products.These observations allow businesses to figure out need and what is holding customers back.
Ideate
After you understand your customers’ pain points, work to reconcile the difference between what they expect and what you produce. Look for patterns from customer feedback and brainstorm solutions based on the information that you’ve been given. Staying focused on solutions enables to come up with alternatives that hadn’t existed before.
Prototype
Design thinking requires novel solutions. The ideas may start as quick drawings or outlines, but they eventually become full-scale models. Along the way, incorporate feedback to remix and refine the solution until it is the best that it can be.
Evaluate
No solution is complete without testing to make sure that it effectively addresses the problem. Obtain as much feedback as you can get. End-user input continues to be an important factor and look at quantitative data to ascertain if the prototype really work.
And then - Design Thinking for Products
If you intend to translate gained insights on the customer’s needs into a mature developed product, you might not satisfied with the prototypes. Prototypes are a beginning. They show what is possible and what is feasible. They spawn a solution space that can be explored by other methods.
Especially agile development methods like SCRUM seem to be a suitable match for translating prototypes into products. The Design Thinkers become Product Owner and serve as translator of the insights. They provide the agile team epics. And the agile team can translate the epics into a mature solution.
In short. Design thinking is about exploring and narrowing the problem space and agile development complements this by an exploration of the solution space converging to a product.