Design Thinking to Create Value in Digital Transformation

Empathy, experimentation, and iteration are key components of the human-centered problem-solving approach known as Design Thinking. While it is an effective tool for fostering innovation or development of digital products, Design Thinking can also aid leaders in coming to better business decisions. Digital transformation initiatives (or even better, culture) benefits tremendously from incorporating a customer-centric mindset across the organization. Empathize, Define, Ideate, Prototype, and Test are the five non-linear steps in the Design Thinking process and each stage has value to provide across an organization. Let's take a look:

• EMPATHIZE: This step is focused on sharing and comprehending other people's experiences. Team members must put themselves in the place of their users (e.g. customers, employees, stakeholders) in order to comprehend their challenges and needs. This process is essential for developing solutions that improve people's lives.
• DEFINE: Teams use the knowledge they have obtained from the Empathize step to outline the issue they are working to solve in Define. This stage enables teams to concentrate on the problem's actual causes rather than merely its symptoms. Problem space definition is critical to help appropriately direct ideation by the team.
• IDEATE: Teams come up with a variety of solutions to the problem they have outlined in this step, typically leveraging divergence and convergence methods to produce many ideas and then refine them together. Teams are encouraged to go outside the box and develop original, unique ideas as a result of this stage. These could be ideas related to solve a small product-level problem or an enormous existential challenge that a business is facing.
• PROTOTYPE: Teams use their ideas in this step to produce analog or digital representations of them. These prototypes are then utilized to quickly and cheaply test and validate the ideas. There are a lot of forms a prototype can take, but the intent here is to test the hypotheses that arise from your ideation. Low-fidelity is your ally as you seek to validate if further investment is warranted.
• TEST: Teams use the prototypes they've developed in this step to solicit user input, which they then use to hone and polish their concepts. Teams can use this step to refine their concepts and produce solutions that genuinely satisfy the user or customer population. Again, this could be a new internal process, business strategy, employee program, benefits package, customer solution, anything that solves an organizational problem, not just the testing of a traditional digital product. And testing rarely means you're done. It might be time to loop back to Empathize, Define, or Ideate based on your new insights.

There are times where it is valuable to follow each of these steps in a very prescribed manner and times where these are just broader considerations that you should factor into ideation or prioritization efforts. Design Thinking is obviously valuable in helping to create products and services that are focused on user needs; however, you're missing out on a lot of the value of Design Thinking if only your design (or development) teams are using the methodology. Roles and leadership across the organization stand to benefit from many of the same tactics and techniques. After all, the implication of Design Thinking is that non-designers should adopt some of these valuable design-oriented thought patterns and problem-solving.

Making smarter decisions is one of Design Thinking's main benefits for organizations. Leaders can rapidly and inexpensively test and confirm their ideas through experimentation and iteration, enabling them to make decisions based on evidence and user input rather than depending on gut feeling or assumptions. This improves the likelihood that their business will succeed through reducing risk and generating creative solutions. You can probably picture the benefit this would provide as organizations embrace digital transformation. Design Thinking helps drive a customer-centricity (or employee-centricity as they consider internal solutions) mindset, which is critical for investing in the right digital products and services. Customer experience is vital to a company's overall performance in the age of digital transformation and Design Thinking methodology is one of the best places to start.

Ultimately, Design Thinking is a powerful tool that can be used throughout a business to foster a culture that values the customer, encourages creativity, supports experimentation, and enables data-driven decision-making. Executives will be motivated to concentrate more on customer demands and employee satisfaction. And companies are likely to boost digital product innovation and improve overall business decisions by embracing Design Thinking. Maybe it's time your organization embraces a user-centric culture of experimentation and iteration, whether you're driving enterprise-wide digital transformation or just trying to solve the latest problem in front of your team.

"Design thinking is about creating solutions that are not only functional, but also beautiful and meaningful. It's about understanding the context in which a product or service will be used, and designing it to meet the needs of the user." - Don Norman