What is Design Thinking? Well, design thinking can be defined as a design methodology which provides a solution focused approach. This is highly beneficial in resolving ill-defined or unknown problems as it takes human-centric approach to re-frame the problems.
It is very essential to understand the five stages or elements of design thinking in order to get equipped to solve problems that occur in our organization.
Every company can develop their own design thinking, so first of all let’s share the design thinking incepted by developers at Helios then we would take a look at the design thinking model proposed by Hasso-Plattner Institute of Design at Stanford.
Our teams of web development experts have UI and UX designers who have shared their thought process on design thinking. Here are the elements that go in the design thinking adopted by UI development experts and web development specialists at Helios Solutions.
Our Design Thinking – From Utility to Experience
Understanding
Everything finally boils down to User Experiences! Hence, the term ‘UX’ has been emphasized a lot these days. Design in the objective sense is the essence of creating engaging user experiences. It is the part of the journey of providing with user experiences. Because, technological advances are focusing towards building experiences more than utilities, design thinking has become important. It is an effective form of exploring opportunities. With the new techniques and tools, the processes and approaches may change but the core and the rationale remains the same.
Empathy
It is an ability that refines the design process and gives insights on the requirements of the development process. To develop design thinking, one should posses the quality of being able to empathize. Design thinking requires wide horizons, ability to draw possibilities and combinations that lead to interaction and judgment. In order to reach this stage of design capabilities, it is important to understand the users, see the solution from the user’s perspectives.
Visualization
Creating user experience is successful when you are able to use the touch points as that shapes the mindset of the customer towards your brand. This calls for visualization where the understanding needs to be in the context of data visualization.
In data visualization, the tools are used for analysis to elaborate the features of a system. Data visualization avails the understanding of small changes – positive or negative.
Story
Design thinking requires the ability to put across a story. It is an iterative process which involves methods, tools, understanding of problems and looking for solutions. The story will require the individuals for making the most impressive methods of storytelling.
Compelling
Design thinking needs to be compelling. Every aspect chosen like the touch points, color palette or the effects for functionality, every aspect needs to act like a guide to the user. It is important that your users are compelled to take an action. This can happen with cognitive process that your web development specialist shall include in the design thinking strategy. Here, it is important that the design and the development teams work in tandem and achieve interactive user experiences with the help of design thinking.
Design Thinking by Hasso-Plattner Institute of Design
Now let’s take a look at the five-stage model proposed by this leading university in teaching design thinking as shown in the figure below. The best part of this design model is that it is non-linear and the knowledge gained at the later stages of the model can also be feedback to the prior stages.
Empathize
Firstly, it is of utmost importance to gain a deeper personal understanding of the problem that needs to be solved. You would need to consult experts in order to better understand the area of concern. Moreover, keen observation, effective engagement and empathic understanding are crucial to design thinking – the human-centric design process.
Define
After the empathic understanding of your problem, you would need to define the problem in a human-centric manner as a problem statement after analyzing your observations in the previous stage. Your definition of the problem should help the designers to collect ideas to establish features, functions or anything that would lead to the resolution of the problem.
Ideate
In the third stage, designers have to start brainstorming in order to generate ideas to reach out to innovative solutions to the problem statement generated in the “define “stage. You should also pick different ideation techniques so that you can test your ideas in order to find the best possible way to solve the problem.
Prototype
After the ideation the design team would produce several inexpensive as well as scaled-down versions of the product and then share and test it within the team. This experimental phase helps them to identify the best possible solution because they accept, improve and re-examine the prototype or reject it on the basis of user experiences. This is because user experiences and interaction design are interdependent.
Test
In this stage the designers test the complete product rigorously by using the best solutions that were identified in the prototyping phase. Although, this is the final stage, the results produced in this stage can be used to redefine problems, empathic understanding the problem again, and more. This is the reason this process is called non-linear as depicted in the figure above.
How to become a design-thinking company?
To become a design thinking company you would need to make your organizational culture more customer-centric and collaborative. You must include cultural measures like efficiency, internal engagement and the most important one is employee satisfaction. Likewise, you would need to focus on financial measures like product quality measures, sales and productivity and customer satisfaction.
You can achieve this by introducing various methods of problem solving and finding ways to discover what are the true needs of people. It is very crucial here to note that design-led companies, such as Nike, IBM and Apple often outperform the overall market by a considerable margin.
Furthermore, you would need to make a long-term investment in training, support as well as design architecture.
The key benefit that design thinking brings to a company is better decision-making around the development of products and services and thus ensures improved financial performance of your company.
Now it’s your turn
Are you a design thinking company? Please let us know about your views on design thinking. Please be the first to initiate a conversation by leaving your comments below.
