Design Thinking – The Customer-centric Way to Innovate and Improve Customer Experiences

Do you always rely on your gut instincts as to what will solve people’s changing problems?
Do you have a team that spends much of its time thinking about which strategy will drive change and deliver value?

In these digital times, one of the biggest challenges faced by organizations is maintaining positive customer engagement. Companies invest heavily in the latest technologies, resources, and infrastructure to innovate, without asking – ‘Will this solve people’s dynamically changing problems?’ or ‘Is this what people actually want?’

Rising global transactions, large ecosystems, and the dynamically changing needs of millennials – create unique challenges and opportunities for businesses. These changes demand multidimensional solutions.

Therefore, to address everyday business challenges and gain a competitive edge – organizations need a human-centered approach called – Design Thinking! This means instead of getting a single solution, Design Thinking helps to evolve the thought process and respond to customer needs continuously.

If you own a branding agency or a web design company – Design Thinking can help you generate innovative ideas for your clients for a better impact on customers, the market, and beyond.

This article covers everything you need to know about Design Thinking – the creative problem-solving technique and why enterprises should incorporate it for strategic innovation.

What is Design Thinking?

‘Design Thinking’ is not just a buzzword – it’s a radical shift – a new mindset of approaching problems. It is a future-focused approach that puts people at the center of everything!

In the conventional method – enterprises usually find a solution from the finite set of proven choices to deliver another innovative solution. Whereas, Design Thinking is a customer-centric process that says – ‘First find the problem, and the rest will follow!’

Design thinking brings a fundamental shift in the industry! It says, ‘Don’t think outside the box. Think like there is no box!’ It brings a magical balance between logic and insight, imagination and art, structure and chaos, business and execution, and innovation and empowerment.

Design Thinking is a cost-effective and valuable framework to tackle large-scale challenges and develop innovative solutions for value creation. The core principle is being human-centric and user-specific.

In simple words, Design Thinking helps organizations –

• Understand the unmet needs of your target audience
• Make a shift from ‘what could be the correct solution’ to ‘what is the correct problems based on empathy, it helps to comprehend how consumers actually engage with the product or service – rather than how the organization thinks they engage with it.
• Generate revolutionary solutions and reduce the risk of launching new ideas
• Harness the power of change and enable organizations to achieve their desired outcomes.

A Success Story to get you started….

Design Thinking has helped many organizations worldwide to solve critical issues that may crop up while achieving business goals.

For instance, Whirlpool – one of the biggest electronics manufacturers, was lagging behind competitors in adapting to the latest trends. The company was functioning on manual labor, lack of resources and flexibility, extended downtime, and inadequate infrastructure.

With the help of the Design Thinking technique, the company could weave fresh new concepts to drive innovation. They could accentuate their productivity and problem-solving skills, thus taking the organization forward in this digital era.

Why is Design Thinking important for enterprises?

Today, reviving customer experience is afoot, pushing companies to go beyond and organize the whole delivery of exceptional experiences. Design Thinking offers innovation the necessary upgrade to inspire novel, impactful, and valuable solutions. The process applies to any business, industry, or complex system.

Helps to solve complex consumer needs –

Using empathy and a human-centered approach, enterprises can discover consumer pain points they hadn’t previously thought of or were aware of. Design Thinking is less about obsessing over challenges and more about finding novel and useful solutions.
It forces organizations to work against our brains and embrace different perspectives to find alternative strategies and ideas for a more impactful and less conventional final product.

Tackle large-scale challenges that are ambiguous to define –

Consumers often don’t know what they need or the problem they need to address. But, upon careful observation of consumer behavior, enterprises can usually define ambiguous issues that they can efficiently address with novel solutions.

For instance – You have received feedback from the consumer that your website or product is not user-friendly. Or you struggle to enter an otherwise competitive market and stand out from the big players.

The Design Thinking process was designed to help enterprises tackle such big problems and introspect to unravel them.

Helps to deliver more innovative solutions –

From research to idea generation to creating prototypes and testing the idea – Design Thinking is a hands-on approach to problems that would have never been known. The iterative process helps enterprises make ideas tangible, accessible, and testable.
It makes the customer experience exceptional as the entire process is rooted in customer needs.

Enterprises can run more efficiently and effectively –

Rather than investing in resources to find problems for a long time without devising an outcome, Design Thinking enables enterprises to design prototypes and do A/B testing to see which is more effective. The process thrives on frequent experimentation and repetition of activities until you have found the best solution and removed all bugs.

The Five Stages of Design Thinking

The Design Thinking framework is based on qualitative and quantitative research combined with creative thinking, ideation, and prototyping, to reach an innovative solution to a complex problem.

It makes businesses think differently – break the norms and develop new things for the otherwise evolving consumers.

1. Empathy

The first phase is to know your audience. Enterprises need to understand their desire and challenges as clearly as possible and empathize with them.

Empathy helps to feel what it is like to be in another’s shoes, an essential quality needed for customer-centric designs.

Empathy helps discover challenges the consumer isn’t aware of or cannot articulate, which enables you to understand the aspect of human behavior while designing.

2. Define

The second step is to define the problem based on your research and bring out novel yet useful solutions.

This step uses the discovery done in the Empathy step. Gather all your observations and think about your consumers’ difficulties and problems.

Define and articulate the challenges to work on in the next step.

3. Ideate:

Channel your focus on the final outcomes, not the present constraints.
Form teams and start brainstorming ideas. Foster collaboration and encourage creativity to generate ideas that can be a potential solution.

4. Prototype

This is the stage where you will use the idea in the real world. Give life to your ideas and observe how they pan out in the real world. Use prototypes for exploring possible solutions.

5. Test

Test your solutions, reflect on the results, improvise the solution, and repeat the process.

Please note – It is not necessary to follow the order of the process as mentioned above. Design Thinking is an iterative and non-sequential process. From start to end – you will find yourself repeating the activity to formulate better solutions and eliminate any obstacles.

Conclusion

So, now you might think – the entire process involves tiresome steps, so is it worth it? Will it really yield good results?

Well, Design Thinking is a widely popular concept and proven approach to solving intricate problems in any industry or for large enterprises or start-ups. Most of all, it doesn’t matter what field you are in or what product or service you are offering – Design Thinking is a robust and flexible process that anyone can adopt for whom ‘People’ – your customers matter the most!

It helps bring out an integrated customer experience and offers businesses several new opportunities. Design Thinking is here to stay! It is gaining popularity in product or service-based companies and the education, government, or science sector.

It’s time to think outside the box and accentuate customer experience with solutions that are not instantly apparent with your initial level of understanding!