Design Thinking

Talking about what’s taken the business world by a storm, we are trying to shed some light on what we understand by the term, Design Thinking. It started as a process aimed at designing new technology and products but quickly made its way into not just the businesses, but also, in our institutes, our homes, and largely into our lives. Cutting right to the chase, we will define what design thinking is?

Design thinking is the process of solving problems by using the shoulder-to-shoulder approach with the consumer, which essentially means viewing the problem from their point of view and this makes all the difference. Observing how they look at the problem, what is lacking in their environment, and what are the challenges a consumer faces on the ground. The idea is to keep the process as close to the human experience as possible, by making it “customer-centered”. Only by closely observing the whole product/technology life cycle, can the creators truly understand what and how can they enhance the customer experience with each update in their product. This enables a long-lasting product value for the customers as compared to the traditional problem-solving approach. Design thinking consists of five stages:

1.?Empathize: The first stage of design thinking is empathizing. Empathy is powerful because it can surface issues or experiences a consumer had while interacting with the product even without realizing themselves. The observations must be accompanied by empathy because only then a designer can keep aside all the assumptions or judgments and get a real viewpoint from the consumer. It is because of its non-linear and iterative nature, that design thinking has gained momentum in the past few years.

2. Define: In the second stage, the observations gathered from stage one are put to use. It is through repeated scrutiny; you can define the problems that have been encountered. What are the recurring issues that kept coming up and how did they affect the whole experience? Once you gather all the relevant information from your empathized observations, you would be able to define what it is.

3. Ideate: The next step is to generate a bunch of different ideas to solve the identified, defined problems. Just brainstorming several plausible ideas with a team or individually can help bring out various approaches to tackle the issues at hand. The idea is to generate several ideas at the end of the session while asking questions, making notes, and planning the course of action ahead.

4. Prototype: The next obvious step is putting those ideas into action. Developing a solution, which does not have to be perfect but fair enough to give a concrete idea of how it going to turn out. As the name suggests, it is a point of action to see how consumers react to the blueprint which can be later turned into a new and improved product/service.

5.?Test: Once the prototype is out for testing with the customers, the designers again observe how they react or interact with it. This is where the non-linearity and iterative nature of the whole concept comes into play. After this stage one may need to go back to stage 1 or 2 or the whole set of stages yet again.

Due to its human-centric approach, design thinking has emerged as a valuable approach to problem-solving. It helps organizations run more efficiently and innovatively. Not only that, it is the future. Thinking has to evolve with the constantly changing times, and technology is the best leverage we have to make our lives easier!