Why Design Thinking is Essential in Establishing a Process
Design thinking is not a standalone activity. It’s a philosophy that has its impact on every element of the business taking from building a physical product or establishing a standard procedure for operational efficiency. Design Thinking is quite powerful because it focuses mainly on the key stakeholders of the product or process it is working on, i.e. the end user or consumer. Well, if we don’t consider the customer, then whom we are working for? As developed by IDEO, the first step of the five-step process of DT is Empathy. Empathy is not something that is understood, it should be felt. To analyze the problem that persists in a product/process or to identify the possible design enhancement in otherwise considered perfect process, it is necessary for a designer to empathize with it. The design thinker should walk in their shoes, spend some time, and utilize his critical as well as human thinking to ideate a near perfect design.
Let us discuss two examples where the application of Design Thinking could have yielded better process design and hence improved user experience.
Imagine a situation where you are stuck somewhere and need to call someone urgently. Unfortunately, you ran out of balance and need to recharge immediately to get your work done. The first thought that comes into mind for doing an e-recharge is to use Paytm app. As it wasn’t used for some time now, the app requests you to enter the login credentials. Regrettably, you forgot them which is quite natural to happen with every one of us. Now, as a habit, you hit on the “Forgot Password” option which throws you a prompt like this.
Here is what the irony/ design problem is. The app is asking to make a call to a number from a customer who doesn’t have enough credits to make any call and recharging the credits is the only reason he visited the app in the first place. Did you find any disconnect in the logic? I definitely did. Also, the number is not a toll-free where one can call without having any balance in the phone. To make things worse, the app doesn’t even offer any other alternate options to get through it such as answering a secret question or receiving a one-time password which are quite traditional and secure.
With this, let’s move to another customer experience problem by one of the major telecom brands which disrupted the market with its entry a few years ago. Yes, this is about Jio.
I recently moved to a new city, and to my luck, this network provider doesn’t have good coverage in the area I live in. They have this amazing app called My Jio where a user can get his things done taking from recharge to raising a complaint. So, I tried using this service to raise a service complaint regarding the low network in my locality. As the mobile internet is slow, I used Wi-Fi to navigate through the app and tried to register a request. Not so surprisingly, I received this text on the app.
How am I supposed to register a low network coverage issue by using an app that works only with internet by using the network which doesn’t provide enough speed for that app to work? Sounds stupid? But well, that’s how it is.
I am sure with the kind of permissions these apps request while installing, they will be able to find the network strength even if wifi is used.
The above issues doesn’t necessarily mean ignorance or overlook. It just requires the designer to spend some time in empathizing with the end user and think through all the real-life problems one might face while using it. As said, Empathy is not something which is understood. It should be felt.
#designthinking #userexperience #empathy #strategy #markering
