Design thinking is a non-linear, iterative approach that allows teams to better understand their customers, challenge assumptions, redefine issues, and develop and test novel solutions. Design Thinking is the concept that designers’ work methods may assist us in methodically extracting, teaching, learning, and applying these human-centered techniques to solve challenges in a creative and inventive manner — in our designs, businesses, countries, and lives.

Human-centered design is at the heart of design thinking. It pushes businesses to concentrate on the people for whom they are creating, resulting in improved products, services, and internal procedures. The first thing you should ask yourself while developing a solution for a business requirement is, “What is the human need underlying it?”

Design thinking can be applied to any function or industry. Design thinking may help you build new solutions based on the needs of your clients, whether you work in industry, government, education, or a nonprofit.

You are no stranger to the ongoing push to innovate if you are a designer, an entrepreneur, or any other type of employee. Our ability to innovate—the ability to come up with ideas that are both actionable and effective—gives us an advantage in a competitive industry.

What are the principles behind design thinking? 

User-centricity and empathy

Researching your users’ needs is the first stage in design thinking. Empathy is essential in a human-centered design approach like design thinking because it helps you to put your own worldview aside and acquire meaningful insight into consumers and their needs. People, not technology, drive innovation, thus putting yourself in the shoes of your target audience and developing genuine empathy for them is an important part of the process.

Define

These concepts are known as problem statements, and they will connect to the requirements and difficulties of your users, as outlined in the user-centricity and empathy stage. Before moving on to ideation, you can use personas to assist maintaining your human-centered efforts.

Generate ideas

Ideation is a fundamental design thinking notion as well as a stage in the design thinking process. The ideation step encourages participants to concentrate on the quantity of ideas rather than the quality.

Experiment

The goal is to find the best solution for each problem encountered. To test the concepts you’ve produced, your team should create several low-cost, scaled-down replicas of the product (or specific functionality present within the product). Because design thinking is an iterative process, expect to repeat some processes as you find defects and weaknesses in early versions of your suggested solution.

Begin testing 

The prototypes are thoroughly tested by evaluators. Design thinking is iterative, even if this is the final phase: Gather feedback and go forward with your ideas by experimenting. As a result, you can go back to earlier phases to make more iterations, changes, and refinements – or to rule out alternate alternatives.

The design thinking method is strongly founded on how to build a holistic and empathic understanding of people’s concerns. Emotions, wants, motivations, and behavioral drivers are all vague and inherently subjective ideas in design thinking. 

It’s a method for delving further into problem-solving by attempting to comprehend your users, challenge assumptions, and reframe difficulties. As it requires us to analyze and confront our natural, restricted patterns of thinking in order to produce unique solutions to the difficulties our consumers experience, the design thinking process has both a scientific and an artistic component to it.

Examples of design thinking

Oil and gas companies like BP and Shell use design thinking to develop “digital twins,” which are virtual replicas of physical assets. By applying design thinking, these digital twins allow teams to simulate scenarios, test maintenance strategies, and predict equipment failures before they occur. This approach reduces downtime and maintenance costs, and it keeps workers safer by minimizing time spent around hazardous machinery.

To improve safety on rigs and in high-risk environments, companies have applied design thinking to develop wearable technology for field workers. Chevron, for instance, uses wearable devices that monitor workers’ biometrics, alerting them to potential health risks in real time. By focusing on worker needs, design thinking ensures these wearables are functional, comfortable, and easy to adopt.

At FBUX Consulting, we can help you ensure that design thinking is incorporated into the everyday experience of your users. Go to our Services tab to find out more about our service offerings and how we can help you improve your company’s customer experience.