Benefits of design thinking => Design Thinking — Day 13
1.0 Recap
Yesterday, I wrote about the stages of design thinking. These stages are: Empathy, define, Ideate, Prototype, Testing. Here is a recap.
2.0 Assignment
Today, I’ll be writing about my response to an assignment which is related to the stages of design thinking.
Question
Please identify and outline two potential benefits of using a design thinking approach in your projects. You are encouraged to use concrete examples from your own working and academic life to highlight how design thinking could improve your current or future projects, or how it could have been used to improve projects you have been involved with in the past.
Answer
- The first benefit I can think of is design thinking helps to focus on the end user.
An experience that cements this benefit was when I worked on my VR Capstone project. I wanted to build a VR experience that creates awareness about child trafficking. At first, I couldn’t decide on which users I wanted to connect with(like the end user) using this experience.
With design thinking, I could have done more research about the problem I was trying to solve with VR. I could have also talked to people who might benefit from the experience and learn about how they feel with regards to the problem I was trying to create a solution for.
2. The second benefit that comes to mind is design thinking helps us to do rigorous tests of the final products.
An experience I can relate this with is the project I’m currently handling, we launched earlier this week. Before launch, we spent a considerable amount of time testing the application, capturing bugs and errors users might encounter when they get to use the app. This testing was done internally by the support and marketing teams.
After testing internally, we deployed the app to production so that real users could start using it. We realised that we didn’t test the app in such a way that a beginner might use it. We made a lot of assumptions on how real users should use the app. Design thinking would have allowed us to think differently in the way we were testing the app.
The best way to learn is by asking questions and letting people know how you understand the topic. Feel free to leave a comment, we will definitely learn from it🙂.
