| Design thinking is a philosophy and a process for creative innovation that focuses on the end-user and how they perceive interaction with products or services. This thinking approach is human-centered, and all decisions and actions are made to understand the end-user’s thinking and deliver the best product possible. Design thinking doesn’t just focus on designing processes or audiences’ engagement. It is useful for all aspects of software development as well. Everyone involved must adapt their thinking and methods to the customers’ experience. Design thinking strategy requires you to see beyond technical limitations and restrictions to understand the needs of your end-user. What do the end-user need/want? What do they want/need? etc. You must shift your attention from the project to the audience you are designing for and empathize with each person. The design is intuitive and familiar, with some support from your non-cognitive skills. Empathy, customer-centricity, and intuition is the way of winning audiences’ hearts. Your product’s success immensely depends on how well it is designed to meet the needs of those who will use it. You must provide services per the customer’s point of view, and you will need to have empathy and intuition to think like your target audience. Empathy is essential for understanding your end-users and translating their needs into a beautiful design and a satisfying user experience. Intuition is also essential to fill in the gaps left after listening to your target audience. Your experience with similar projects and your knowledge of (design) practices will help. Not just this, their potential and your ability to offer valuable input that you closely align while thinking about the target audience are the foundations of your intuition. The design thinking process is divided into five phases. These five phases are essential for design thinking. They provide a framework for validation and trial. This method will provide the entire team involved in product development with quality information to pick the right solution. IT will help your team create a viable end-product for the end-user, successfully competing with and staying ahead of possible competitors. It will surely help you win target audiences’ hearts. Phase 1: Empathize & understand This stage involves empathizing, and it is where a designer becomes familiar with the market and target audience. This stage is perhaps the most important because it creates the foundations for the final product and grabs. This stage is the most human-centered because it is completely focused on the end-user and their needs and problems. The core skill of empathy in design thinking, or brainstorming, is interviewing. To understand your target audience’s needs and desires, you need to create a list of human-centered questions. These are examples of questions: What is the purpose of this app? Which problem are you trying to solve? What are the tangible benefits of the app? What are you expecting your target audience will do within the app? Are there any features you’d love to see added in the future, other than the basic features? These questions focus on the user experience. You can only begin to formulate the best solutions for audience betterment once you know why and how your target audience will use them. Phase 2: Market research The second phase is called the definition phase. This stage allows you to organize and conceptualize all the information that you have gathered in the first stage. To solve the problem effectively, you need to identify and define it. In addition to gathering information based on your target audience’s needs, extensive market research is also necessary. It’s one thing for your product/service to be a good fit for your users’ needs. But it’s quite another to make it unique and more interesting than the existing apps. Phase 3: Ideate, plan, and execute The third stage of the ideation process is where you can use your intuition, experience, and skills to create solutions. It is the stage of filling in any gaps left after gathering input from your target audience. It would be best if you had a clear picture of what you’re making, who it is for, and how you will be doing it. Now it’s your decision to put all this information together and create a step-by-step plan for your final product. Phase 4: Scale down to become an MVP The fourth stage focuses on prototyping [1]. This is where you make a smaller version of your final product for your customers to test. It would be best if you had an idea of what the product looks like and how it functions based on feedback from your end-users. Your interactive prototype should be high-fidelity and interactive so that your target audience can test it as if it were the final product. To gain a perfect prototype, you could pursue a design thinking certification from Stanford. Phase 5: Iterative Testing The fifth phase, the iterative testing stage, presents the MVP [2] and allows your target audience to test-ride. You will need to create a list of questions that you would like to be asked, and these questions should focus on your prototype’s functionality and how users experience them. In the prototyping process, you and your end-users will likely continue to test different product versions and try out many features. However, the results will be satisfying when your audience will enjoy the service/product you’ll offer since it’ll be created from design thinking. Conclusion You can have many ways to connect with your audience and gather feedback. After that, you can create a Design Thinking group from your team. These methods will give you insight into your users’ thoughts, feelings, and behaviors. Each method aims to improve the understanding of the target market and audience. Also, it’ll help you understand what your customers want the most from your products. Observation methods are not just helpful for gathering raw data, statistics, and demographics, and they also provide opportunities to gain insights that you can use to design a solution. Ref 1 – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prototype Ref 2 – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MVP_(disambiguation) |
