What is Design Thinking?
Design Thinking is about achieving deeper understanding about your products’ and services’ users and uncover valuable insights. Understanding your users’ and customers’ needs is an essential skill.
Traditionally enterprise software products are built from a business-analyst perspective, engineering perspective or Enterprise Software vendor perspective. A business analyst comes up with a list of features what an end user might need, he develops a functional specification, and technical teams develop a technical spec, design and develop the solution, test it and give to the end user. End users are trained on how to use the solution.
In engineering perspective, technical teams are faced with a business challenge and identify and assess different solutions within their capability and scope of the organization. Their focus often is on the easiest and fastest solution that solves the business problem at hand. Questions brainstormed would be does our .Net developers can develop a solution to the problem.
In a software vendor perspective, companies buy applications from a software vendor such as SAP, Oracle and customize it according to the company’s business needs. In this perspective, companies prepare a list of features and functionality they look for in a tool and select it based on how much functionality and features the vendor’s tool is supported. Software vendors such as SAP build generic products that cater to all types of organizations and that means their tools try to cover every possible business scenario. Because of this generic nature of the tools
In all these three perspectives of software development, End user and the User Experience part is ignored at the expense of functionality and features. It is assumed that user need to be trained extensively and user needs to master the product. This assumption results in disconnected and disparate workflows and poor user experience. Users try to avoid the new software and find workarounds with manual steps leading to poor ROI on software investments.
Users are now in control of what they experience. They expect brands to inform, entertain and provide utility to them – and they expect this when, where and how they want it.
Design Thinking is a paradigm shift in solving problems and innovating. Your customers are not just expecting a product or a service, but also expecting amazing experiences along with them. True understanding your customers’, users’ emotional and functional needs is important to deliver amazing experience. Using empathy to put Users, Customers, Vendors, employees, business partners at the center of problem solving is the main foundation of design thinking. Design is more than making buttons pretty. It’s about helping users get things done in the most effortless way possible. Whether it is a software tool, or a check-in process at a hotel, landing page of a marketing campaign, or optimizing the sale process, Design Thinking enables you to transform your organization.
“Design thinking helps you seek a balance between intuition and analytics, between exploration and exploitation, between reliability and validity, and between art and science” – Roger Martin.
"Do you really know what your users need from the IT applications? Design Thinking can help you discover that." -
Design has the potential to influence the corporate strategy