Design Thinking is defined as an iterative approach to work that enables the resolution of human-focused problems.
This approach aims to design innovative solutions (for a product or service) in order to respond to customers’ needs and offer them a better experience.
To benefit from this method, you must respect its main principles and integrate them into your company culture.
Be more user-centric and less business-centric. This means that users are involved throughout the design process by way of various approaches. The effort invested and resources established will enable the creation of usable, accessible solutions. You will therefore ensure you satisfy your customers’ needs, reduce the risk of error, avoid certain financial losses and, naturally, increase your sales.
One of the first stages of design is empathy. It’s imperative for arriving at a better understanding their needs, thoughts, emotions and motivations.
Start by asking yourself the following questions:
The answers to these questions can be found initially within collected data, market studies and trends you have access to. It could also be discovered through research, particularly through surveys, interviews, focus groups, observations, etc. The results will enable you to identify opportunities and prioritize your ideas and future actions (empathy mapping, current and future scenarios, etc.).
At the end, you will be able to develop tools, such as persona worksheets and customer journeys, which enable you to consolidate what you’ve learnt about your users within each team.
Innovation doesn’t happen by creating a website, but by creating the shopping experience that happens on that site.
When you adopt an approach focused on user needs, it’s important to bring together all of the participants, whether near or far, in the design process for this new solution.
To successfully lead Design Thinking projects, it is also necessary to establish a company culture in which you think like your customers, and where collaboration, creativity and innovation are central to everything. Such a process often takes a long time to establish, but it will be beneficial from every point of view.
Team composition is an important step in the project, and it needs to be diverse: engineering, sales, marketing, design, human resources, etc. In this way, each member will offer a unique value and a diversity of creative ideas. This will therefore make the creative process richer, more productive and more effective. Team composition can also be accomplished through resources that are external to the company. The most important thing is to equip yourself with all of the relevant participants, including those located at every point of contact on the customer journey.
Once the team is assembled, its members must be aligned around a common problem while keeping a single goal in mind: responding to customers’ needs.
“The last best experience that anyone has anywhere becomes the minimum expectation for the experience they want everywhere,” stated Bridget van Kralingen, Senior VP, IBM Global Market.
Design Thinking is a method of working that promotes iteration. IBM visualizes its way of working through the Loop model, which enables constant listening to and understanding of the needs of customers and their environment, thereby facilitating an understanding of their needs and evolution.
Every time you observe something, you better understand the world around you. Every time you think about something, you better understand your team and your customers. Every time you act, you better understand the current and potential solutions before you.
“Fail early to succeed sooner,” said Tim Brown (IDEO). Risk-taking is important to Design Thinking. So give your team the space to fail. No one is supposed to understand the problem right away.
This is even more true today, during the pandemic, when we need to be able to adapt quickly.
In summary, here are the benefits of Design Thinking:
A certified Adviso team:
In order to be up to date on the industry’s best practices, all customer experience experts at Adviso are certified in IBM’s Design Thinking at the co-creator level.
We guide our clients towards the resolution of complex, innovative problems by using a co-creative approach as well as, in the right circumstances, the Design Thinking methodology.
To learn more about Design Thinking and its application, please accept our invitation to participate in two workshops we will be holding in association with Les Affaires on September 10 and 17 at the Gestion de l’Innovation conference and the Expérience Client conference.