Have you ever admired the way a company or a product addressed user pain points and solved problems through innovative solutions? Chances are, they were employing design thinking tactics to power their ideas and execution. According to the Harvard Business Review, design thinking works by removing the biases and behaviours that hamper innovation. This, in turn, leads to unique solutions that challenge the status quo and leave ample room for innovation.
So, what is design thinking really?
Design thinking, quite simply, is the process of coming up with newer, more innovative solutions while taking a human-centred approach to a problem. When solving a problem, design thinking reframes it to properly understand the pain points, challenges existing assumptions and practices, and identifies new strategies through deeper introspection. It’s a hands-on method of creating solutions that go above and beyond merely solving problems. It is by no means a new phenomenon. People have been using design thinking before it was even called that to solve problems and scale their businesses. Challenging assumptions, solving complex problems, and identifying human-centric solutions is at the heart of good design, technology, literature, and more. Continuous growth in the form of experiments and rework is a key feature of design thinking, leaving no room for complacency. How can design thinking help you and your business?
Experts have been leveraging design thinking for centuries to make profits and scale their business.
Identify your users’ problem
Design thinking goes beyond simply identifying existing pain points. It poses intriguing questions that stimulate new solutions to problems that customers didn’t know they had. More significant problems and opportunities often hide behind smaller, more commonly experienced friction points.
Placing your users at the centre of your solution leads you to design innovative solutions while solving existing pain points and anticipating future ones. Take advantage of user feedback and incorporate the same into building a more robust product.
Challenge the status quo
Using a diverse set of voices, reframing the problem, and looking at it from multiple perspectives leads to new solutions that may be difficult to build at first, but when scaled, lead to tremendous results. Take, for instance, Airbnb’s approach to making short-term housing and tourism more affordable, open, and easy to access. After dealing with initial mistrust and hiccups, they’ve built a platform that rivals well-established hotels and their legacies.
Innovate to provide better solutions
Design thinking helps you come up with creative solutions, as you place your focus on problem-solving. This lets you work on your goals and achieve them in a shorter time frame, setting you apart from competitors. Releasing products and services that target user pain points and offer innovative solutions places you first in the consumers’ minds, inspiring loyalty.
Improve user experience
Design thinking takes a human-centric approach and serves to improve the overall user experience. It starts by identifying user personas and creates different iterations of solutions to optimise each user persona’s buyer journey. From the first moment, a prospective user reaches your product until the final purchase and use; design thinking creates touchpoints that encourage the customer to use the product.
Improving customer experience after purchase by heeding feedback and incorporating the same into newer iterations of the product can help with customer retention and attracting a large number of customers due to positive feedback.
Opportunities to launch more products
With design thinking inspiring innovative solutions, companies can build and launch new products and services addressing user pain points. This leads to faster company growth and helps the business scale quicker. Since design thinking includes lots of different, diverse voices to build effective solutions, there are more opportunities for other teams to collaborate and come up with innovative ideas. These new products are better in line with customer demands and expectations, leading to higher adoption and continued success.
According to the Design Management Index, design thinking led companies have consistently outperformed at the S&P index by 219% over the last ten years. There is real value in incorporating design thinking when designing your products and services and building your company.
ruttl & design thinking
At Brucira, we use intelligent design thinking when creating products and services for our clients and ourselves. By incorporating early user feedback, reframing the problem to solve different pain points, and creating a simple design solution, we’ve gained great user retention and helped businesses grow organically.
ruttl is our new visual feedback and collaboration tool for web design projects. We were tired of using the old design review process — countless marked-up screenshots, lengthy email threads, lost snippets of feedback. So, we decided to reframe the problem and create a unique solution that lets designers and developers comment on live website to collaborate better by reducing the time spent reviewing and communicating. We’re in our beta stage, collecting valuable early user feedback and refining the product to make it a perfect offering.
Check it out at ruttl.com for yourself.
Want to see how design thinking can impact your business favourably? Contact us at hello@brucira.com.
See more of design thinking reflected in our client work and products.
