Design thinking – decipher the strategy for innovation
You must have heard quite often about design thinking in software development. Is this the new buzzword in technology? Well, surely it is. It all revolves around the businesses, the service they offer and the way they offer it!
In today’s era, where there are many options available and jam packed marketplace, achieving customer loyalty becomes a tricky and tedious task.
Customer is king, rightfully so. Each service provider is differentiating themselves from the rest to appeal to their customers. The most assured and trusted way to accomplish it is to create highly customer-centric products or services.
It sounds obvious. However, the main question is how robustly we can create and deliver complete customer-centric products/services.
The answer is, through ‘design thinking for innovation’.
Let’s discuss design thinking in depth in the upcoming section and how it can be applied to software development.
What is design thinking?
It’s a human-focused way to deal with complex issues and driving innovation in solutions. It’s a procedure that empowers us to think from our client’s point of view, and in the end, build deliverables that stand true to the requirements.
Three foremost things to note here:
- It’s not only for the designers. Design thinking is for everyone who is involved and care about delivering solutions to solve clients’ problems.
- Designing is more than creating products and services; it can be applied to systems, procedures, protocols, processes and customer experiences.
- Design thinking is not just thinking. It is more of doing than thinking. Let’s find out how.
Design thinking process:
The five stages of design thinking:
To implement design thinking for strategic innovation, you need to understand them. Take a look below.
- Empathise: Empathy is the base of the human-centred approach used in design thinking. It’s all about establishing a connection with your customers to understand their problems. It’s all related to getting in their shoes, meaning by observing their environment, talking to them, identifying issues with them. By following this approach, you can receive accurate insights into their needs, emotions, challenges and expected outcomes.
- Define: The problem statement is defined in this step. The findings of empathy step are put together to create a problem statement which reflects customers’ needs and challenges. This statement is the driver of the solution-finding process.
- Ideate: Once the problems have been identified, it’s time to apply thinking to provide innovative solutions. The catch here would be to go for all basic possibilities to quality analysis; looking for alternative ways to address the problems and then bringing forth innovative solutions to the problem statement.
- Prototype: Prototype is an experimental phase. Here, you can shrink the list down to a few strongest of the ideas and create test/preliminary versions of the actual solution. The prototypes could be a paper model or wireframe or anything. Basically, the prototypes should be rough and rapid. It gives the flexibility to learn the shortcomings and adjust quickly.
- Test: The test phase is a recurring one. To maintain the customer-centric approach, the prototypes are kept under scrutiny. You’ll have to refine them based on clients’ feedback. For refinement implementation, the team has to go back to previous stages to make further iterations, alterations and modifications to find out the best possible solution
The process is iterative. The positive thing to consider here is, when you receive feedback on your prototypes, it’s an opportunity to improve and create a solution that best satisfies customers’ all requirements.
Design thinking in terms of Software development:
We have seen what design thinking is; now let’s move on to learning how we can implement it on the process of software development.
Traditionally, the sales team, business analysts and other delegates are closest to the customers’ vision. They get to understand clients’ needs, goals, challenges and pain points. Once the requirements are collected and documented as per the standards, then the development and testing team become a part of the process.
Now, then – here’s an alternative method with design thinking: –
After gathering the requirements, the entire team, or at least the leads of software development teams (Business analyst, Project manager, Development lead, technical architect, QA lead) can come together to understand those needs.
They can ideate together, keeping the clients’ requirements at the core and brainstorm some possible innovative solutions. Once quick prototyping is done, it can be presented to the customers for their feedback. After receiving go-ahead from the client, the actual development can then start.
Advantages of design thinking:
- Everyone knows what the customer needs: Since now all team know what the customers is looking for, the subsequent processes of designing, development QA are all carried out with the exact objectives in mind. There aren’t any gaps in comprehending the clients’ needs hence there’s very little possibility for assumptions. The end result/solutions will be majorly reflecting the exact customer’s requirements
- Feasibility verification: the ideation phase sees designers, solutions architects, even developers’ involvement; the created prototypes are likely to be deemed feasible. Since everyone is around the table, there are no over promises to the customers that designers or developers struggle to meet in the further stages of development.
- Innovation: When people from different streams, line of expertise, processes and focus areas- come together to in creating value output, there’s a plethora of creativity to tackle the problems from many angles and through processes. Hence the probability of designing ingenious and innovative solutions is much higher.
- Affordability: Clear understanding of requirements is directly related to the cost efficiency and time-saving. Since the whole onboard is aware of what exactly is needed, it reduces the possibility of rework on a great margin. It saves an organisation their time and money. There’s less or no rework, which is a great benefit.
- Exceptional customer experience: When an organisation thoroughly understands clients’ needs and can solve their problems while exceeding expectations – they eventually win customer loyalty.
Takeaway:
Several large organisations saw the value of applying design thinking. Today some of the major players who use design thinking and seeing results are IBM, Apple, Airbnb, Ericsson, Blueberry and many more.
Design thinking is the apt way how large, small, big organisations are developing the products/ services and delivering true value to their customers.
A final thought to consider here: The best way to go about design thinking and strive for innovation is to make it a part of your organization’s DNA rather than using it once or at very least in a scattered way. Making it a permanent phenomenon is the way to go with design thinking.