How Design Thinking Works For Businesses

What is Design Thinking?

Ideated in 1978, design thinking is a methodology that has taken the design world by storm and has impacted the technological world in such a way that in fact it was even used in inventing the world’s first ever computer mouse. Design thinking has driven innovation over the years and it is essentially a human-centric approach which can be adopted to amalgamate what technology has to offer along with the various requirements of businesses. It is highly instrumental in focusing and fixing problems as it is a solution-based way of developing things where the various ideologies of people are understood in order to ideate and develop an efficient solution.

• A good design thinking strategy can help teams collaborate, which can show you things from different perspectives and innovate using those viewpoints.
• Design thinking is also instrumental in driving sales as the focus quite early on is on the user because of which the product is more likely to be more aligned with their expectations and requirements.
• Tools like visualization and journey-mapping which are the core of design thinking help designers to ideate better to create the perfect product.
• It is an iterative process which includes communication and collaboration for a more efficient designing process. 
• The most important part of the design thinking methodology is the versatility it has to offer and it can be used for any vertical from finance and healthcare to improving social services.

Phases Of Application Of Design Thinking:

Design thinking is essentially harnessing the tools and techniques of a designer but actively approaching the problem from the user’s mindset and identifying what has to be done to market the product better. Let’s look at what can be done to make this strategy a success:

1. Empathize with your audience and define the problem

Understanding your core-audience is key to defining the right design thinking strategy for your product. This is the first step wherein the problem is defined and the intended user base is observed and understood through various methods like surveys, questionnaires etc. for a thorough user behavior analysis. Going further, the problem statement should be defined and while it is important that it is human-centric, it is also equally important that it is not vague but specific enough for a practical action plan.

2. Brainstorming and ideation

Thinking out of the box and coming up with as many diverse ideas is pivotal at this stage and is testimony to the fact that a good design thinking framework has been established. At this point, it is pivotal that designers assess the needs and requirements of the user base and address their challenges in order to come up with a great solution. While the empathizing phase of the design thinking process would have set base to understand potential customers, it also gives designers the arsenal to experiment and the focus now is to brainstorm and come up with as many ideas as possible with the motive of stumbling on innovation along the way.

The final phase of the design thinking process is dedicated solely to testing out all great ideas that you may have come up with and single out one which will work best. It helps to create scaled-down versions of your ideas or prototypes which will give you a clearer picture of what each idea looks like when implemented on a larger scale. This is an iterative process and designers often need to look at how each solution looks in real life and improve on and also understand the drawbacks and challenges that will be encountered in the actual development of each solution. User testing during the design thinking process is another great measure to understand potential customers and how they are reacting to your idea.

How GeekyAnts implemented design thinking

At GeekyAnts, our focus is to ensure that each and every collaboration we have is a success and that our partners are having a great experience collaborating with us. While we have always stressed on developing the best software for our clients, we’re also a design studio consisting of creators who have ideated to create the best possible design solutions to align with the UI/UX of our projects.

Design thinking is all about thinking differently and of finding various ways to tackle the same situation. With the focus being on problem solving, designers try to think as uniquely as possible while working iteratively in an agile pattern to ideate and create beautiful designs which stay true to the customer’s requirements and their expectation. This approach provides them the opportunity to look at a problem from various angles while the collaboration required for deep thinking sets the stage for the process to be streamlined and for the product to be more successful.