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What is Design Thinking? How can it help your business?

Design thinking is a methodology that helps businesses create products and services that are meaningful to those who use them. This blog post will discuss design thinking, how it can help your business, and the steps you should take to start using it in your organization.

What is design thinking?

Design thinking is a method of problem-solving that uses a human-centered approach to create meaningful solutions for the people who use them. Practitioners of design thinking believe that all problems can be solved by understanding why people do what they do—and then they create solutions based on those understandings. They focus not on technical issues and limitations but on how people experience those problems and the burdens associated with them.

What Is the Design Thinking Approach?

The design thinking approach to problem-solving involves five distinct steps:

  1. Empathize
  2. Define
  3. Ideate
  4. Prototype
  5. Test

Empathize

The first step is to learn as much as you can about how your customers interact with your business. It’s important to watch how they use your product or service and ask them about the problems that make their experience less than satisfying.

Define

The goal of crafting the perfect problem definition is to identify what your customers are experiencing and how you can address their issues. To do this, we examine both user feedback and information gathered from stakeholders. To find the best possible solution, it is crucial to be specific about your problems and user concerns. 

Ideate

In the ideation stage of design thinking, your focus should be on exploration and innovation. Using brainstorming, come up with as many ideas that will plausibly solve your problem as you can—even if they’re not practical right away! The objective at this stage is to explore and design a prototype to test with your customers. This ensures that future solutions will work the way we want them to.

Prototype

As you reach the prototyping stage, you have already identified the problems you want to solve and a range of possible solutions. Use a whiteboard, sticky notes, or index cards to sketch out the beginnings of your vision.

Design thinking is important when prototyping products and services. This is a photo of prototypes being sketched out.
Photo by Amélie Mourichon on Unsplash

Prototyping sessions can be conducted individually or in a group workshop. Workshops work best when they include all participants, customers, and the internal team. This leads to a second conversation with customers after you have a prototype in development. The purpose of this step is to find out what their reactions are to your proposed solutions.

When all interested parties participate in prototyping, you can quickly narrow down what works and what doesn’t. Does your solution have any weaknesses? What needs to be added and what needs to be removed? 

Test

At each step of the process, you will have the opportunity to empathize with your customers and gain a deeper understanding of your business issues. By testing, you can improve your prototypes and make them better and better until your customers are happy with them.

It’s important to understand that there is no guarantee that the problem has been solved or that the solution will work simply because you have reached this point. Design is an iterative process, and sometimes that means going back to the drawing board—going back to the empathy and defining steps and starting the entire process over again, perhaps with a different emphasis, to synthesize what you have learned. These iterations continue until the results satisfy the team.

How can design thinking help your business?

Many businesses face challenges when trying to grow: limited resources, limited time, limited knowledge about their industry or market, and so on. Design thinking helps companies overcome these obstacles by focusing on what matters most: understanding who their customers are and what makes their lives better. And we know that if your product or service doesn’t improve your customer’s life in some way—even if only slightly—then there isn’t a reason to buy from you instead of another company offering similar products.

To conclude, the design thinking approach is a human-centered problem-solving process that can help businesses of any size overcome challenges and create innovative solutions. By understanding the user’s needs, wants, and limitations, businesses, particularly small businesses, can develop creative ideas that solve real problems in a short amount of time. If you want to learn more about using the design thinking approach in your business, contact us for more information. We would be happy to walk you through our process and answer any questions you may have.

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