Design Thinking is a key element in Your Digital Transformation Journey

"We must design for the way people behave, not for how we would wish them to behave.” ― Donald A. Norman

When you experience beautiful things, what do you feel??It could be a beautiful piece of furniture and eye catching smartphone and inspiring work of music,?a captivating book, for example, or it could even be a digital experience that just completely surprises?you.?You feel joy.?You feel a sense of wonder and excitement.?How could something like this reach so deeply into your being into your soul to reach the core essence?of you??This is way good design resides in the ability to reach inside of you deeply and connect with you on a totally different level

This is where Design Thinking lives!

When I started working in digital in 2011, I came into it with a misconception when delivering product. All I wanted to do was ship features to customers, and then we discover there was "Gulf of Evaluation" disparity between the user’s perception of the required system interactions to achieve desired goal, and the actual system interaction required to achieve goal

Then over time, I learned one of the most invaluable lessons of my career in digital so far.?It's the blind spot of every product leader assumption.?It was assuming that we should knew what customers really wanted. The other part of this equation is design – WHY? The developers I worked with them can build anything that I want.?If I wanted to create functionality to help customers research or buy products, they can put lines of code down and in a week or two, it's ready to ship to customers.?Mission accomplished.?Well, not!

What I've learned is that the product creation equation can't function without good design.?You see, for all the product and customer knowledge that I have as a Agile Project Manager in 2015, my blind spot is understanding the myriad of ways that customers really want to use a product when product owners,?product managers, product leaders and engineers get together. Our focus is normally on two things ; solve the customer's problem and solve it quickly.?But the missing component here is what is the problem and how would the customer like the problem solved??This is where Design Thinking comes in.

So what's so special about design thinking??It's a way of thinking that puts humans and all of their unique characteristics collectively and individually at the center of how products work??Design thinking is a process.?It's about helping everyone working in product development systematically work through human centered methods to creatively solve problems, using different ways of thinking through interactions with customers and employees.

Design Thinking is a customer-centric development process that creates desirable products that are profitable and sustainable over their lifecycle. It goes beyond the traditional focus on the features and functions of a proposed product. Instead, it emphasizes understanding the problem to be solved, the context in which the solution will be used, and the evolution of that solution.

It focuses on deeply understanding users challenging assumptions and reframing problems to identify alternative creative strategies and solutions that are unconventional and different.?Not only is it about solving problems, but it’s also a way of thinking combined with practical techniques.We spend time with users or customers and employees and develop empathy for them, their backgrounds, their challenges, their objectives and of course, their frustrations.?

This is why it's an integral part of any Digital Transformation.