Trends in Design Thinking for 2017

Entrepreneurs are finding that connecting their innovations and development to customers can be extremely elusive, and design thinking is quickly rising to the level of the C-Suite as one of the most effective solutions to closing the gap between the voice of the customer and action. For much of the world, this represents a new organizational shift toward “design thinking” but at Useable we’ve been using design thinking for more than 20 years, figuring out how to make beautiful, functional products that people adopt and use. Our keen understanding of User Experience and Design Thinking in every aspect of a business from product creation to customer acquisition and developing channel partners continues to be the key differentiator for Useable.

The world now sees this as a new approach to business in which connection and empathy is established with users, models are created to examine complex business problems, and failure is tolerated, even celebrated as a part of the creation and development process. This way of thinking is helping companies develop more flexible and adaptive product development organizations that innovate, pivot, and re-think the services and customer experiences they provide to differentiate their brands in today’s competitive marketplace.

From companies focused on building better products and services to companies re-thinking their employee experiences, organizations worldwide are adapting design thinking in ways never before imagined. And putting “design thinking” into practice is just the beginning.

Here’s a look at the emergent trends that will require design thinking to drive success and will the way organizations use the voice of their customer to architect products, marketing programs, product launches, and customer retention programs.

1.             Virtual reality (VR) is about to become an actual reality. Not only will this be revolutionary in the gaming world, but the unexpected applications will have an impact on every industry – from education and tourism to health. We already see applications in Real Estate where one of the world leaders uses augment reality to demonstrate the views and imagine building interiors for business parks that haven’t been built yet. In education, sports training, medical applications, and more VR will forever change the customer experience. Companies need to pay attention to developing the ability to deliver immersive, engaging experiences at a level of quality and with their brand equity in mind.

2.             Service Economy is already making what was once reserved for the wealthy available to the masses. At the swipe of a finger, anyone anywhere can call upon highly personalized experiences, whether it’s ordering a personal chauffeur (like Uber) or having a personal assistant run an errand (like TaskRabbit). With this “instant luxury,” we will see new expectations for service intensity and reward immediacy emerge as product adoption drivers. In a strange twist, the service economy itself will also drive changes and expectations because, with >30% of the American workforce now in the demand economy there is a new market for on-demand services to support them. For example, through extensive interviews, surveys and workshops we have identified tax help as one of the services most needed by these workers. The customer voice told us that the traditional approach to taxes wasn’t working for them. They wanted the kind of service they provide; personal, connected, and “on-demand”.

3.             Employee experience. More companies are finding that it’s not always just about the voice of the customer in modern design thinking. Employees, contractors, collaborators and channel partners are the heart of every organization and companies are realizing that they must listen to their own community to design and innovate through effective employee-experience design. Companies must build a workplace culture that support and builds upon to the needs of their talent base, whether it’s recognizing and rewarding individuals, empowering employees to be trusted thought leaders, or offering a peer-to-peer experience that blends into their social world. Delivering the increasingly “liquid consumer expectations” requires that the design thinking about user experience be extended into to the workplace and community to include the voice and expectations of an increasingly “liquid workforce”.

4.             Active Listening. No one goes unheard in today’s connected society. Listening technology – either literally listening through voice-recognition devices or figuratively listening to user data—has upended the traditional customer journey into real-time “micromoments.” This is triggering a predictable cycle of “immediate need identification, relevant product or service reply and repeat the cycle.” The only way to anticipate the needs of users will be to track their behavioral patterns to gain a clear picture of consumers’ needs, wants, and status and to design services that not only meet, but anticipate, their needs. Some new technologies that take this to a whole new level are on the horizon. For example, in a recent article, Who Owns Your Attention, I wrote about new tools incorporated into your computers camera or set top cable box that can analyze micro-expressions to determine emotional reactions that show up on our face. These micro-expressions are a form of “listening” can be used to target advertising or even dynamically price products based on our emotional reactions. As I researched this article I found dozens of patents for emotion-sensing technologies from facial recognition to temperature sensing or other sensor data – almost all of them tied to advertising or, more effectively monetizing our attention. The companies represented included many you would expect – Google, eBay, I.B.M., Yahoo!, and Motorola. It also included many you might not expect - Sony researchers anticipate games that build “emotional maps” of players, combining data from sensors and from social media to create new and novel gaming interactivity.

5.             Digital trust. It has become much easier to anticipate what consumers want through smart technology, but this surge of information brings an extraordinary level of responsibility with regard to respecting consumer privacy and keeping their information secure. Recent studies indicate as many as 70% of our new “connected smart devices” have “serious security flaws”.[1] The problem is, the more we connect, the more information we feed to these new electronic eavesdroppers. Take the modern cell phone for example. In theory, this one connected device could tell hackers who you are, including your name and address, your email contacts, even your location. If you use Apple Pay or Coin, hackers could get your credit cards. They could know where you are, whether you are moving or sitting; and where you usually spend your time. Digital trust is the crux of any healthy company-customer relationship and to ease customer concerns, businesses need to engage in “privacy by design,” weaving privacy standards into technology and the product design process from the very beginning of their concept. Companies that wish to exploit customer information risk losing the digital trust that is essential to long term success in any product. For more about this subject, check out “A New Slavery for A Digital Age – Who Owns Your Privacy”.

6.             App integration. Despite lots of commentary predicting the imminent end of the apps, they might not be facing extinction just yet. What is clear is that the consumer landscape in which they operate is changing rapidly. The future of app design will no longer be based on the single-use transactional service, but rather on the integration, or super-connection, of services that plug into platforms through APIs. Customers are looking for a hub where all technologies and services they use can intersect and interact to create a seamless one-stop destination for their daily needs. One great example is Day One, the well-known journaling app that was an immediate and unmistakable success from the day they launched. Day One almost immediately amassed multiple awards for both its design and quality of the user experience. Through positive reviews and loyal users, Day One rose to the top of the charts and received recognition from Apple's App Store team. But Day One also recognized that traditional stand-alone apps are quickly fading as consumer demand for integration with other platforms takes center stage. In version 2.0, Day One syncing was radical changes: instead of syncing with Dropbox or iCloud, Day One syncs between devices using its own platform. After creating an account in settings, Day One asks you to log in on your various devices. The recent reviews of Day One chronicle the many changes - and available platform integrations - that Day One has made that will keep it at the top of the design thinking examples for years to come.

7.             Health monitoring. Consumers are now routinely using wearable health monitoring devices for both leisure and preventive care. The rising health tech space allows consumers to be more proactive about their health, while minimizing unnecessarily and costly trips to the doctor’s office in an age of rising premiums. Wearable technologies in use today generally concentrate on measuring outputs and outcomes; or what we call "lag measures" in business. Why? Because they are easy to measure and they are accurate. If we want to know how many steps we took this month, we simply count them. If we want to know how well we slept, we consult the sleep log. To make the leap and better influence the future, a different type of measurement is required, one that is predictive rather than retrospective. That’s when the real revolution occurs—when wearable technologies learn to use lead indicators or predictive indicators in their data analytics. This will allow them to serve the needs of all of those involved in patient care—beginning with the patient, and extending to those charged with their care and getting paid for it. What good is an instrumented patient if only the patient gets that data? More about the future of wearables can be found in this article; Where Big Data Meets Wearable Utility.

8.             Personalized options. Consumers that are constantly connected have access to more possibilities and options than they can handle – having too many choices is affecting the ability of consumers to find what they need. Studies show people make 200 decisions about food each day alone. How can we find better ways to identify and deliver what people need, while reducing the thinking required to fulfill their needs? Services that can anticipate needs based on individual data and provide personalized options – or even automatic task completion (such as Google Now) – will shine. As choice increases the role of your brand becomes more important. For anyone engaged in innovation and/or product development, the implications are clear: We need to ensure that the products we create have real value for customers AND that customers are able to recognize this value. 

9.             Connected Communities. We live in a world of almost too much content and interpretation and implementation options for consumer choices can be lacking at a community level. Product reviews in their current form solve some aspects of the challenge but what seems to be missing is the connective tissue that would allow those with initiatives, ideas and programs to share, curate (vote up or down) ideas. These community forums help ensure we’re using a common vocabulary and provides content curation that allows community specific groups to find the information that is most relevant to your audience. The accomplish this by engaging and sourcing content from a variety of sources then sharing it strategically through your communication channels to validate content with reviews, votes or commentary. The need for great content curators for any product line, has never been more urgent. There are simply too many work demands, programs, professional societies (most with super-specific focus), social networks, news feeds, emails, and infographics putting demands on the time and attention.

Looking forward, the journey toward design thinking maturity will bring about two challenges – process integration and scale. Weaving design thinking into your companies’ product creation DNA will be the key to creating a user-centric culturethat can ensure you build the right product for the audience most likely to adopt it quickly. What is more clear is that the next generation of successful entrepreneurs and products will be developed, launched and marketed with the voice and journey of the customer driving everything from ideation and creation through launch and marketing into initial target markets.

[1] HP Security Research 2014