What make design thinking work for everyone

How do designers think? One answer lies in where they focus when creating the UX of any application. Any designer worth his salt focuses on the humans who will ultimately use this application, how they will use it, for what purpose will they use it, and how to make their life easier when using the application. Therefore, design thinking, at its core, is a framework that helps other disciplines to step into the mindset of a designer, by following a human-centered design process. This process, when applied correctly, can help transform how we create applications, and how teams work within an organisation.

Let’s continue to look at a few reasons why design thinking can truly help your organisation:

“…By humans, for humans” — Stefan Sagmeister

The initial step of design thinking focuses strongly on empathy. By meeting with the people who will use your product, especially in the same environment and under the same conditions they will be using it, helps to build a rapport with the users. This level of understanding cannot be achieved through formal meetings, or other traditional methods.

If you follow the process of design thinking, you find that in each phase your focus continuously remains on the users. Through many of the iterative steps of design thinking (See design thinking 101) the users’ feedback and comments are constantly considered, and the solution is continuously refined based on new learnings. Indeed, the end user becomes an integral part of the team, and our anchor to building a usable product.

The problems with parallel

When it comes to solution design, most methods encourage engineers to come up with solutions and simultaneously vet these against feasibility criteria. Studies have shown that that method tends to curb creativity as the team is constantly looking at how practical solutions are, vs the concept of just throwing it out there.

While this may seem counterproductive, the creativity that is unleashed when people don’t have to defend their ideas or feel criticised at the moment makes it worthwhile. Don’t worry, we will of course test the feasibility of all these ideas and weed out what doesn’t make the cut further down the line.

Multidisciplinary teamwork for the win!

A close-knit team is essential for success in any business vertical. That said, in most companies we find that teams who work closely consist of only one discipline. Design thinking encourages all disciplines of the team to work together from the get-go, bringing together designers, engineers, SMEs, product owners, and end users etc together.

This helps to identify and better define problems faced by the end user and to also find better solutions, as the same problems are looked at through multiple viewpoints.

“Fail faster, succeed sooner” — David Kelley

Design thinking encourages quick turnaround and rapid prototyping. While in the initial stages you do have to spend some time talking and empathising with your users and finding solutions, one goal you should carry is to take away just enough to do a primary prototype.

This, in conjunction with a multidisciplinary team which includes the end users, helps the team to identify and understand problems in the solution faster and more efficiently. Ensuring that the team doesn’t spend too much time and resources running down the wrong path and won’t end up with a product that is ultimately unusable by the client.

Don’t forget that design thinking also encourages iterative behaviour between phases. If you ever find yourself blocked just take a step back and examine where the mistake was made.

Take away

Design thinking is an innovative way of looking at the world. By focusing mainly on human needs and using an interactive process and a multidisciplinary team to find solutions for those needs, we aim for quick and efficient prototyping. This gives us the ability to fail faster and figure out on the go where we made mistakes, finding successful solutions faster and better.

If you’d like to find out more, talk to us, and learn how design thinking can make a difference in your organisation.