What is Design Thinking?
Imagine that you have an idea for a product or service. As a start-up founder or product manager, you write the product specifications, you contact suppliers to understand the cost of delivering your idea (or you just go for it if you are lucky enough to have coding or maker skills). Before you know it, you are in business, but you have not asked the most important question. Is this product what customers really need? This question is key to avoid pitfalls and optimise both costs and time.
Design Thinking is a way of working that places users at its heart. It is a human-centred way to solve problems. The main advantage of this methodology is that it provides the possibility to test quickly if an idea, solution or enhancement can bring real benefits to our customers. It integrates different approaches, tools, and techniques from different fields (Marketing, Psychology, Design, Business, and even Ethnographic Research).
The goal of Design Thinking, which was born at IDEO is to “find the user itself and define its needs” and by finding those needs, create a solution or a product that can be really useful. To achieve this goal, this methodology is made up of five core phases: empathize, define, ideate, prototype, and test. The process is non-linear and these phases do not necessarily have to happen in this order.
The most famous user of this type of methodology is Apple, -with Amazon as a close follower-, but design thinking is now ubiquitous in even the most inconspicuous industries, such as Financial Services. At Barclays Bank, Santander, as well as a number of Fintechs the methodology is widely used. Barclays Bank, for instance, has a Chief Design Officer, and it is under his umbrella or in collaboration with his teams that this type of work falls under.
By investing in design, prototyping the product, and collecting feedback, Barclays managed to focus on the customer experience for their mobile banking app. This led to higher net promoter scores. These higher scores, in turn, drove higher income and reduced complaints, thereby lowering costs. For example, the Barclays Mobile Banking App net promoter score climbed upwards for a number of months by using this type of approach.
In another field, GE is probably one of the most famous examples of a company that applies Design Thinking. We have mentioned that one of Design Thinking aims is to create empathy. This was very much needed because of the nature of the product to be sold by GE Healthcare.
GE Healthcare needed to understand how children experience having an MRI scan. This was considered to be an unpleasant experience and even a traumatic procedure for the little ones. Doug Dietz an industrial designer that has worked for many years for GE, remembers the first time he went to meet end-users and saw a little girl crying: “That machine that I had designed basically looked like a brick with a hole”. The way to resolve the problem? GE created an ‘adventure series’ decorating the scanners with pirates amongst other designs.
The outcome was highly successful. With a reduction in the levels of anxiety of children, this type of MRI machine prevented doctors from having to repeat the scan and reduced the need for anesthesiologists. With more patients being scanned per day, this impacted the financial equation too.
Design thinking is also used by GE on its industrial operations. Oil and Gas operations are complex. IoT Applications built on top of infrastructure need to simplify all that complex data into useful information for operators. GE focuses on User Experience (UX) and design thinking, with users being involved early in the design process to help inform the solution characteristics in the real world.
Maribel Ayala is a Marketing Consultant with experience working for companies such as Barclays Bank, Barclaycard, GE, D&T Opticians and Christie’s Fine Arts. She specialises in Design Thinking and Performance Marketing.
