A glimpse into Design-Thinking!

Visualize a typical scene from the Charlie Chaplin movies:

Setting: A factory assembly line, with Charlie Chaplin (CC) as a worker, and a heavily built angry looking Supervisor.

The scene goes as below:

The supervisor sees some loose part on the assembly line and goes to the Switch to stop it, and passes CC courteously bows to him. On reaching the assembly line, CC sees that it has stopped, goes towards the Switch, once again meets and bows to the foreman on the way and turns the Switch ON! The foreman, just about to repair, gets startled and goes to switch it OFF again. This goes on hilariously for quite some time and finally ends with poor Charlie getting a nice bashing!

We all face albeit a slightly less dramatic version of this from time to time! Confused how the Charlie Chaplin scene and the title come together? Let's dive right in!

Recollect the times some good samaritan tried helping you, but instead added on to your work, or when you exert yourself to help someone only to hear that, the result was not what they were looking for!

This is very common in our quest to solve problems, be it for #Businesses, #Clients, or even #Friends and #Family. Recently, I got a chance to learn about something that can help prevent these issues!

The concept that I am referring to here, is “Design-Thinking” and before any of you think that since you are no Graphic or UI/UX designer, this one is not for you, just bear with me a little longer!

So, what exactly is this? – stated simply, it is a way of gaining a deeper understanding of the stakeholders’ problems and come up with a solution through an iterative process that is both effective and sustainable.

To understand this better, let us look at the various stages involved in Design-Thinking and make a sense of this!

1.????Empathize: Get into the shoes of the users and try to understand the problem they’re facing! Candid discussions and observing them perform the task at hand – done without prejudice or assumptions can help achieve this!

2.????Define: Articulate the problem as clearly as possible to create an unambiguous problem statement. Here’s a simple template – “[User] needs to [User Needs] because [Insights]”, where the target audience and their needs get clarified and the reasoning as a result of the first stage gets highlighted.

3.????Ideate: Once the problem is clear, create a safe place to generate ideas for solutions. This should happen without the fear of criticism and there should be a freedom to express ideas. Once a set of ideas are generated, the top ones to be pursued can be chosen through discussions/voting.

4.????Prototype: The shortlisted ideas now need to be brought to life through prototypes to be able to test them. As the product gets finalized, higher quality prototypes can be made to achieve a near-real experience.

5.????Test: Once the prototype is ready, it must be experimented and thoroughly tested to identify what works and what needs to be changed. This phase also helps to receive feedback from the end users to incorporate any changes. The stages 4 and 5 are iteratively performed for fine tuning the final product.

Thus, as problem solvers, if we hope to deliver the best solution to our stakeholders, a design-thinking approach is not an option but a necessity.

If this gets you excited and you want to learn more, this Open-Source website has some great literature on this matter: https://www.interaction-design.org/literature

#musingsofaconsultant #designthinking #problemsolving #empathy #upskill #learningeveryday