Design Thinking at Gotham!
Once upon a time in the city of Gotham, a reputed online cosmetic brand, Pryka was facing a problem. The sale of beauty products in the city had dropped dramatically and no one knew why. So the team at Pryka embarked on a new mission — to boost the sale of beauty products in Gotham.
Given the havoc the Joker had caused in the city and his love for makeup, the Pryka team concluded that the sales had dropped because customers were too scared to be clubbed with the Joker’s initiatives. They immediately started working on creating brand new products associating a positive image with the use of their products, organized a massive marketing campaign, spent a fortune on advertising and were confident that this would result in increased sales.
It didn’t work. Despite wonderful new products and a fantastic marketing campaign, sales did not grow significantly after the launch. So what went wrong, exactly?
Following their initial failure, the Pryka team regrouped and decided to enlist the expertise of the Design Thinking (DT) Team to fix the problem.
Empathize:
The DT Team assembled a handful of Pryka’s long-time customers to assist the Pryka team in better understanding their needs. Throughout these conversations, Pryka learned that the assumptions they’d been going on with were not that accurate after all. They were correct in assuming that the Joker was to blame for the drop in sales. He was, but it turns out that a majority of the customers weren’t buying makeup online because they were getting products that were close to being expired. That meant they could only use them for a few weeks before having to discard them and replace them with new ones.
Define:
With this new information, Pryka changed their initial problem statement of building a positive image to ‘We need to deliver cosmetic products to customers that will last them longer.’
Ideate:
Armed with this clear understanding and a precise goal, DT and Pryka team worked on ideating ways in which they could ensure that customers got ample time to use their products before they expired. The whole team sat down with different stakeholders and brainstormed a path to create a systemized First-In-First-Out product delivery chain for fulfilling customer orders.
Prototype:
The Pryka team then broke down each aspect of the proposed delivery chain and started experimenting with their ideas. The DT team helped Pryka track all their efforts through clearly defined metrics and the team followed an iterative approach to implementing feedback they got from onsite workers.
Test:
Finally, Pryka tested out this new system at one of their warehouses and looped in some customers to test the success of this new system. These customers ordered products from the Pryka website and reported that they were happy to receive products with expiry dates more than 6 months.
The Outcome:
After successful testing and positive customer feedback, Pryka deployed this system in all of their warehouses. Within the next six months, they were able to achieve a significant increase in sales.
Although this story is fictional, the approach isn’t. This is Design Thinking — a user-centric iterative process that focuses on understanding customer’s needs and coming up with effective solutions to meet those specific needs. Design Thinking follows a five-step process of Empathy, Define, Ideate, Prototype and Test and is the basis of a design-first approach.
Most companies today skip the very first step of empathizing with their actual users. They are more focussed on building products which they think will add value to their customers rather than solving the real pain points. This leads to lost opportunities and a wastage of resources. A design-first approach reduces the risk associated with launching new products and services because the customer provides us feedback at all steps of the process. It also helps us generate solutions that are revolutionary and not just incremental.
In today’s fast-paced competitive world, it’s extremely important for organizations to learn and iterate faster. This makes Design Thinking all the more relevant because it helps companies communicate directly with their end users and build products for them, with them! So don’t jump the gun — talk to your customers, embrace the design-first approach and see the magic happen!
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