Six key stages of effective design thinking

Here’s why design thinking is important

Design thinking helps to focus problem-solving by creating a set of processes that can help locate pain points, then work through to the leading-class solutions in time-efficient ways. Think of design thinking as a sort of scientific method. It helps teams get around biases to focus on root problems by creating a structure to systematically approach customer feedback and problem-solving. The output of these processes can also provide user research artifacts to which your entire team can refer to help answer questions that arise throughout design and development.

Design thinking helps with the design process and is important for many reasons:

• It helps keep a human element at the centre of the process.
• It takes the guesswork out of what your client’s needs are.
• It allows you to prioritize solutions.
• It generates revolutionary ideas by creating a “yes, and…” mentality during brainstorming.
• It helps teams learn quickly by allowing the team to fail faster and build out ideas more effectively.
• It’s flexible, allowing you to move forward and backward through the process to prototype and iterate faster.

But design thinking is also important from the business perspective:

• It nurtures a customer-first approach to problem-solving.
• Reveals gaps in business intelligence about your users.
• It reveals pain points experienced by the client and, if these are removed effectively, helps businesses ease friction from actions (like purchasing).
• It saves time and money by informing what not to do.

Why design thinking is so useful in tech

When building an app, many people get excited about all the potential bells and whistles that can be added to really “wow” a customer. But more often than not, simpler is better. How do you pare down an idea to its essence to address your user intuitively knows how to use the app? It starts with understanding your client/user and how they might use the tech itself. That’s why it’s so important to get their input early on in the process. An augmented reality (AR) buying environment may seem super cool in theory, but what if your customer prefers a simple one-click shopping experience?

Keeping things structured

Although design is often considered the realm of creatives who — we’ve been led to believe — prefer an overall lack of structure, design thinking is very much a structured exercise. This purposefully structured systemic approach to creative problem-solving is important for a few reasons. It instills confidence in the team, who can move through things step by step. Each step has a clear output that the next activity relies on, so going in order and moving through the process remains integral.

You also don’t have to know how to code an app or work Photoshop to jump into a design thinking framework. It’s meant for diverse teams to be able to have input in the process and the steps all along the way.

That’s one of the reasons design thinking works so well for EY Design Studio and the clients. As we prefer to have a collaborator-developer relationship with companies, design thinking allows us to pull our collaborators into the process. They can help shape questions to customers, share insights, source experts, and build user personas around the collected data. They are also part of the ideation phase where we begin to source solutions. Mockups, prototypes and iterations are all collaborative efforts, which helps maintain transparency in the overall process, and our client-collaborators can participate in the process largely due to the design thinking framework.

The importance of waiting to prototype

Design thinking reduces risk and uncertainty in innovation. It does this by engaging with customers/users at every step of the process to refine concepts, test assumptions and prototype solutions. Design thinkers rely on user insights, not historical data or research. That’s why prototyping comes a bit later in the process. First, the user must be understood. Then, solutions can be sourced that will fit their needs.

Fast failing

Once the leading-class approaches have been revealed, it’s time to mock up, test and iterate. Design thinking allows teams to fail fast and test theories relatively inexpensively and quickly. You’ll be able to see what works and what doesn’t, understand why, figure out how to fix it, and then craft simple solutions based directly on user feedback.

Here’s why that’s good:

Prototyping allows for the design thinking process to remain non-linear. This means you can test assumptions through prototypes and learn from the prototypes to form new, sometimes better, ideas. You can test, return to the ideate phase and prototype again. The end result is a stronger product that’s already been through the fire on multiple occasions. Weak spots are ironed out and processes are streamlined to create something that’s both useful and intuitive. But the end product only comes from multiple passes of iteration.

Fast failing is important in tech, as it’s a way to save time and resources while working towards a solution. Instead of working backward — building something that a user rejects and then figuring out how to make the user respond to the end product — design thinking allows us to take smaller bites, by finding what works and discarding what doesn’t.

Creating the perfect app in the first go just isn’t going to happen. But what design thinking allows for is for the best ideas to rise to the top and be tested for strength of concept. It allows for iterations and simple refinements that make the best ideas even better. And it allows you to go back and try again — whether that means prototyping a new design or redefining the problem.

This may seem like a lot of work – and it is. But it also means that we’re going to end up developing the best end product possible. Also, because we’ve kept the user at the centre of the process, it means your customers are much more likely to use your solutions. We’ve listened to them, gathered feedback and designed an app that addresses their pain points and meets their needs. Ultimately, the due diligence performed during the design thinking process is aimed at creating a robust and useful app that will complement your business and delight your customers. And the best part? You’ve probably gained some pretty powerful insights on your customers that will reverberate into other areas of your business going forward.

Are you ready to build your own app and curious about our process? Reach out and say hi! We’re here to answer your questions concerning how we build strong client relationships and intuitive apps.