Design Thinking: A Cost-Effective Approach to Building Solutions that Matter

Every business faces timeless challenges.

1. Find creative, innovative and workable solutions for the current or future problems
2. Deliver a good quality product in the short term
3. Maximise profit

They understand that to overcome those challenges, we need to maximise efficiency (either in process or teams’ performance), reduce waste, and take a calculative risk by validating the assumption using low-cost validation strategies.

Design Thinking is one of the most popular and validated methodologies that provides a set of simple-to-use tools to overcome those challenges in any business or project. It is a human-centred approach (because it puts the needs and wants of the user at the centre of the design process) to problem-solving. It can be used to solve problems **in a creative and innovative way.

Design Thinking Phases

It contains five non-linear and iterative phases that can help us systematically extract all required information in a complex environment that may require solving the problem; build a strong conviction by interacting with the focused group and iteratively plan the execution of big-bet, high-reward projects.

1. Empathize: Find stories and focus on emotion
2. Define: Identify a new way of looking at the problem, by asking different questions and looking at the problem from different perspectives
3. Ideate: Generate radical new concepts, suspend judgement
4. Prototype: Build to think, create rough sketches or prototypes that are used to explore different possibilities; don’t worry about perfection
5. Test: Be curious, Iterate forward

Core Principles of the Design Thinking

• EMPATHY:- The team tries to make good friends with the customers
• ITERATION:- The team approaches a good product in cycle, experimentally & step by step
• OPENNESS TO SOLUTION:- The selection of ideas is kept as large as possible right from the start and even crazy or outlandish ideas are consistently developed further.

To get a good idea, you need a lot of ideas. It is the single most variable to get a good idea from volume of ideas. Linus Pauling

The core foundation of Design Thinking: Diverge before converge

To gain the benefit of the design thinking process, it is important to first identify the outcome of the project and clearly define the goal aligned with all stakeholders. Once the outcome and goal are presented in front of everyone, the teams can be focused and include their thinking process to identify a lot of opportunities to achieve that outcome.

Once the outcome is identified and defined, we can apply the below steps

Step 1: Understand the problem from as many different perspectives as possible

This can be done by talking to users, observing them, doing research & asking open-ended questions

• In other words, identify opportunities — map out all opportunities surrounding the outcome and goal of the project

Step 2: Identify the most relevant and impactful problems that align with the project’s goals and objectives

This can be done by grouping related insights to identify key problem areas or pain points or an opportunity for further exploration, organizing the collected information for finding patterns

• Focus on the impact of this opportunity will have on the outcome of the goal
• Explore which opportunity will make the biggest difference

Step 3: Brainstorm with the cross-functional team to find a wide range of solutions

This is where we can get creative and the team can come up with new and innovative ideas

• Think about all the different ways to solve the prioritized opportunities
• Generate as many ideas as possible (good or bad)
• Ask all team members to initially brainstorm alone before everyone back together to share their ideas in the group

Step 4: Evaluate tradeoffs between different solutions and identify the right solution best fit our goal

In this step, we need to start thinking about the feasibility of different solutions

• Select the solution aligned with the skill of our team, complexity, and timeline

The next step…..

Once we have identified the right solution, we can take a little extra time to build a prototype and again test it with real users.

In this way, we can create a loop of Hypothesize → Build → Measure → Learn

Design thinking is an iterative process because after executing every series of steps, we come up with new learning, assumption, and hypothesis and we again repeat the series of steps to validate them using some low-cost validation strategy until we fully understand the problem and its root causes.

The next article….

How to design minimum viable products that WILL be used by users to solve their day-to-day activities?

What are some of the low-cost hypothesis validation strategies and how they can be utilised effectively to reduce the project’s cost, increase speeds and make data-driven decisions?

Please write to me at deepakmaildesk@gmail.com for any feedback.