Redefining Problem-Solving with Design Thinking Approach

In today’s business world, organizations need to continuously innovate their products/services to survive. But sometimes, they struggle and fail to keep up with the market changes and consider customers’ requirements. So, the real question is what makes some businesses succeed while others fail? It’s because successful businesses use a design thinking approach to develop their offerings.

For example: PepsiCo, CEO, Indra Nooyi, stated that design thinking played a major role in almost every crucial decision that the company made and due to which the sales had increased by 80% during her 12-year tenure. 

It is a special way of delivering final output focusing on users’ requirements. This helps them to increase customer satisfaction and experience. 

In this blog, we will learn in detail about design thinking and how it helped businesses succeed in real-life. We will explore the real stories of success, showing how design thinking can make a big difference in business. 

What is Design Thinking?

Design thinking is a problem-solving approach where you prioritize your users’ requirements to develop exceptional products, services, or experiences. The main purpose of this approach is to constantly tweak your offerings until it satisfies your customers’ requirements.  

The 5 Stages of Design Thinking

There are five transformative stages in the design thinking process. From understanding your users’ needs to prototyping and pilot testing solutions, every stage brings you one step closer to customer-centric product development. Let’s look at each stage in detail below.  

Stage 1: Empathize: Here, you need to understand your users’ needs and expectations via research and observation to identify the core problem.   

Stage 2: Define: In this stage, you need to clearly define the problem based on your insights you got from your users’ data.   

Stage 3: Ideate: Next, you will brainstorm multiple creative ideas/strategies to address the problem defined in the second stage.   

Stage 4: Prototype: Further, we must create prototypes (models, sketches, frameworks, or workflows) of the ideas to test them.   

Stage 5: Test: Finally, pilot test your prototypes/models with users to collect their feedback and refine your offerings. Apart from that, you must iterate the same to arrive at the best possible solution to address the core problem.   

Real Case Study

As discussed, design thinking can be used incorporated in any business vertical irrespective of the industry. So, we thought why not implement design thinking in our own organization with the goal of selling software on online.

So, we conducted meeting with the product head where they discussed all the challenges and pain points in the Empathize stage. After that, they moved to the Define stage where they defined all the challenges faced by our customers.

Our team is still working on the later stages to come up with a solution that truly meets the customers requirements.

Common Design Thinking Frameworks

Design thinking framework is the step-by-step guide to solve any problem in a user-centric and creative way. It provides a roadmap for resolving challenges in a structured manner. Let’s look at some of the popular design thinking frameworks that you can consider:  

• Head, Heart and Hand by the American Institution of Graphic Arts (AIGA)

The Head, Heart, and Hand approach by AIGA offers a holistic view of design by integrating emotional, intellectual, and practical components where Head represents the creative and intellectual thinking. Heart symbolizes the emotional aspect and Hand highlights the practical execution of ideas. 

• Inspire, Ideate, Implement by IDEO

IDEO’s design thinking framework, Inspire, Ideate, Implement, emphasizes creating innovative solutions to meet real human needs: 

• Inspire: Comprehend your users’ requirements and behaviors via observations, feedback, and interviews.

• Ideate: Clearly define the problem through the collected data and brainstorm an array of creative solutions to solve the problem.

• Implement: Bring ideas to life through prototypes, continually testing and refining based on user feedback.

• The Double Diamond by the Design Council

In “Designing Social Systems in a Changing World,” Béla Heinrich Bánáthy introduced a “divergence-convergence model,” which inspired the British Design Council’s Double Diamond design process. 

The Double Diamond represents the stages of design: 

• In the First Diamond you have two stages

• Discover: Collect user feedback to find out the core problem.

• Define: Clearly define the problem depending on the collected feedback.

• In the Second Diamond you have another two stages

• Develop: Generate several prototypes or solutions to address the problem.

• Deliver: In this stage, test all prototypes to find the best solution to solve the problem.

Design Thinking Best Practices

To make your design thinking procedure as smooth as possible, here are some of the practices that you can incorporate:  

• Focus on Understanding Your Users: The best way to come up with the best solution is to step into your user’s shoes and see the world from their vision and perspective. This will allow you to generate solutions that truly resonate with their needs.

• Provide Training to Employees: To get started with design thinking with your team, it is better to provide them with training that makes it easier for them implement it. Moreover, it will also help them understand how it can improve their work and productivity in real-time.

• Gather User Feedback Constantly: It is always better to gather your users’ feedback throughout the design process. This will help you to identify the potential issues at the earliest and iterate your prototypes accordingly before investing significant time and resources.

• Visualize Your Ideas: Use sketches, mind maps, or any other visual elements to communicate your design ideas effectively and gather feedback from your team members easily.

• Promoting the Right Mindset: If you want to create different solutions, then you need to think differently. This is defined as divergent thinking. You should also use this thinking to encourage your team members to think differently or think “out of Box” while creating solutions.

• Build an Interdisciplinary Team: It is always better to include people from various departments while creating solutions for your users. This will help you get different viewpoints on a problem and plenty of creative ideas to solve that problem.

Wrapping Up

In today’s highly competitive business environment, understanding and meeting users’ needs is crucial for successful product development and customer satisfaction. Embracing the principles of design thinking hence becomes important for businesses that thrive to be successful in the long run with user-centric approach. 

Apart from that, design thinking is not limited to specific roles; any individual in any profession can leverage its benefits by integrating it into their everyday workflow to create innovative offerings.