Design Thinking:

Key to deliver delight

I am a big fan and follower of design thinking. I’ve been trying various elements of design thinking and have become really passionate about it because it works. Design thinking is a proven and repeatable problem-solving protocol that any business or profession can use to achieve big results. It is a combination of creativity and critical thinking that allows information and ideas to be organized, decisions to be made, situations to be improved, and knowledge to be gained. It can be applied to products, services, and processes, anything that needs to be improved.

A primary element of design thinking is simply thinking, identifying the real pain point of the user/customers and ideate on a solution to address a pain point to meet a customer need.

So how can we implement design thinking in our work

Customer Centric

Design thinking is human-centered approach which focus on people/customers and their needs and not on a specific technology or other conditions.

It begins from deep empathy and understanding of needs and motivations of people.

In most of the cases we tends to generate ideas or take decisions based on our understanding and judgement about how the customer might have used it. Although the ideas or decisions are founded on good intentions, but sometimes can fail miserably for the customers because they were nowhere involve in the process. Customer-centric is the main word here. When you get the customers in a room or visit and talk to them, you will be shocked to know how unaware we are sometimes about understanding the real users’ problems.

Identify & define the real pain point

In order to deliver a delightful experience to our customers, its very important to have not only a deep understanding of the real pain point of them but also the context under which they operate.

There are various ways that we can get to that:

1. Talking to customers: Just going and talking to customers won’t help. Asking the wrong questions we will end up getting the wrong answers. If we don’t ask it in such a way that elicit sufficient info to come, there won’t be any insight that you can draw.
2. Observing the customers: Don’t just listen to customers, observe them as well. Innovation comes from observing customers. You’ll find tons of product opportunities to capitalize only by observing how people uses product to accomplish their everyday tasks. The customers generally don’t know what are the problems they are facing as they made themselves comfortable in the way of doing things over a period of time. So if we ask them to tell or define the area they have concerns, they just won’t be able to do that. We can understand the under lying frustration and unveil those just by observing them.
3. Be the customer: Its very important to be in customers’ shoes, which means that we need to take out our shoes first. It’s the most trickiest part as we need to shelve ourselves as designers or engineers and start playing the role of a customer and start thinking from their perspective.
4. Capture the emotion: While doing customer interviews, it’s very important to capture the emotions using emotion symbols. After the interview, while doing the brain dump, those emotion symbols will help us to reconnect with the feeling, the customer was going through while doing or expressing something.

Create multiple options

Now that we have a proper understanding of the real pain point of the customer, we need to step back and look for all the possible opportunities we have that could have potentially solve for the pain point. This is the time we need to go crazy, go broad on the ideas without considering any technical or resource constraint before narrowing down to a specific few set of solutions.

Fine tune selected directions

Once we have a few good options, those ideas now needs to be validated with our customer. The goal of this exercise is not only to validate the design but to validate our understanding based on which we came up with the few set of solutions. Design thinking creates an environment that lets new ideas to grow and run experiments from which we learn and evolve. Sometimes we need to combine options, refined, etc. to get best of all the design options. Several rounds may be needed to make sure the right answers are being brought forward to solve the pain point.

Pick the winner and execute

This is the most important and critical stage. From now onwards its completely on the strong shoulder of the designers. With design thinking, we get a clear understanding of the requirement and a probable direction to go but it neither negates nor replaces the need for smart designers doing the work that they’ve been doing forever. Packaging still needs to be thoughtfully created. Branding and marketing programs still need to be brilliantly executed. Products still need to be artfully designed to be appropriate for the modern world. When it comes to digital experiences, for instance, design is really the driving force that will determine whether a product lives or dies in the marketplace.

I would like to share few things that I do as a designer which eventually empowers me to do justice to my work.

Just to keep in mind, these are neither a checklist nor instructions on design thinking but some of the best practices I follow and had really worked for me to deliver an awesome experience for my product ☺.

1. Laser focus on details: As a designer, I think that it’s a table stake to have an eye for details in each and every part of the design. Every single thing (big or small) that goes out from a designer as a deliverable should have the designers impression on it. It includes not only the interface design but also how we are presenting the work. I give special attention to the font, colors, supporting graphics used in.
2. Invite everyone to participate at first: Everyone who is actively involve in the product should be invited and have the opportunity to share their view/perspective.
3. Break the wall — go for a bigger space: If it possible look for a bigger space for your work. Make use of a white board to the fullest and transfer all your idea on that, through a flow chart, storyboarding etc. Once we do that we will be able to see the complete e2e picture in front of us and will be much easier to identify the gaps. Its also much easier to communicate your idea to other stake holders and help them to think visually.
4. No judging — keep an open mind: Judging and criticizing (-ve way) thoughts and ideas is an absolute no-no. All ideas are gold. Help people feel comfortable to speak up and say anything. Even the silly ideas can be molded into a truly genius idea or trigger an offshoot idea from someone else.
5. Identify SMEs: Identifying the person in your team who knows in and out of the product and have a deep understanding of the customer base. QA is the team, that I believe knows the most of the product they work than any one else. I have been immensely benefited by interacting with them and dev team in understanding the various use cases which I was not aware of. This helped me making my design recommendations more confident.
6. Celebrate: Did we learn something new today? Create something that stretched boundaries? These are the things that will motivate and should be celebrated. Highlight the time savings, cost savings, increased teaming, and anything else you’re proud of, to various stakeholders while presenting your design, so that they can instantly connect to the benefit and start appreciating your work.