Distributed to Writing and Design
Power of Design Thinking for Writers
Design Thinking is one of the most powerful tools I use for my professional and personal goals. I apply it to my writing practice too.

Design Thinking is an innovative process and an agile approach focusing on the users and consumers of the solutions. This approach is commonly used in the IT industry, engineering, and manufacturing. This practice can be applied to any discipline as long as the discipline has a target audience. Needless to say, I cannot think of any discipline without consumers in mind.
Design Thinking can be useful for writers too. This is my main premise in this short article. Writers can use Design Thinking principles for quality, simplicity, and agility purposes.
As writers, our consumers are readers.
By using the Design Thinking approach, writers can define their writing solutions with clarity and redefine ambiguous points by reframing the content problems from readers’ point of view iteratively.
Design Thinking can be considered as an innovative problem-solving technique with close interactions of the actual users of the solutions. As writers, one of our fundamental roles is to solve problems for our readers and delight them.
For example, as non-fiction writers, we can define our content problem, pose questions, create a solution framework, elaborate on key points, support our ideas using references from the body of knowledge, and share our findings and conclusions considering the expectations of our readers.
The focus of the Design Thinking approach is consumer satisfaction. In this approach, consumers can be analysed using personas. Design Thinking encourages us to create personas in defining the problem and proposing the relevant solutions. For writers, the personas are the readers.
For example, some of my writing personas are leaders, technicians, architects, specialists, biohackers, artists, scientists, engineers, educators, students, doctors, health practitioners, and general learners. All these personas have different requirements, expectations, and desires. By considering the needs of these personas, I tailor my message by design.
Design Thinking practice can assist the writers in understanding the uncertain and ambiguous situations in the earlier phases of the content development lifecycle by questioning assumptions, reviewing risks, issues, and dependencies.
This methodical and agile approach can be beneficial for writers aiming to delight their readers.
Design Thinking includes questioning, brainstorming, prototyping, iterative experiments, sketching, and continuous tests in a user-centric approach with agility. By applying these techniques, writers can develop user-centric content and increase the quality of messages for customer satisfaction in a timely manner.
In this article, I looked at one use case of Design Thinking. If you want to delve into more detailed information on Design Thinking with references, you can check my article published.