How Design Thinking Can Improve Your Business

Imagine this for a second. You've graduated and now have your diploma. You go to start your business... but don't know what to do when it comes to improving your business. How do you improve your work ethic? How do you improve relations with customers? Well, today we will be going through the Design Thinking Process to help you with improving your business.

5 Steps

First, we will quickly go through the 5 steps one at a time and explain their meaning. First is Empathy, the foundation of in which you Observe your users and their behavior, Engage with and interview users, and Immerse yourself in your user experiences. This is the most important step because Empathy allows you to understand how your users think and feel, as well as what's important to them. For example, when you immerse yourself in the experience of your users you gain a much better understanding of their lives by sharing those experiences rather than passively watching.

Now we will go over the rest of the steps of the Design Thinking process. These won't take as long. Second, there is Define mode, in which you take what you learned from using empathy and find the focus of it in order find the deeper understanding of your user.

Third is Ideate mode, where you take the focus you found in Defining and explore how you can take that focus and expand it. Here you, and your team if you have one, will generate and evaluate ideas and bring them together.

Fourth is Prototype mode, where you will take your ideas and give it a physical form, whether it be through notes, role playing a scenario, or an storyboard. This is the phase where you use what you've learned to explore and create test scenarios before actually using them on your users.

Fifth and Finally Is Test mode. This is where you will take your prototype into the world and see how people react to it. You may fail, but, as we discussed in the previous blog, that's fine. You will never get anything right on the first try, which is why you should focus on doing your best and giving your users the best experience.

What do we do from here?

Method

From here, you will use those modes and combine them to do methods in which you can learn about your user and use what you've learned to enhance the experience of your users.

For example, let's use the" What? | How? | Why?" method. In this method you have a photo, and with said photo you ask What are the users doing in the photo? How are they doing it? And finally Why are they doing it this way? As you move from What to Why, you will go from a concrete understanding to an emotional understanding.

Starting with What, you will observe the situation in the photograph and write down details you notice.

Then you will ask yourself How they user is doing what they do in the photograph? Are they happy or angry? Does it look relatively easy or require hard work? Does the user seem to have an understanding of the work or do they look confused?

Finally ask Why are they doing it? How is the user doing what are doing and how exactly are the doing it. Are they doing it to benefit themselves or someone else? Why do they have differing expressions on their face as they do their activity? These are questions that you want to ask about why your users do what they do.

The "What? | How? | Why?" method in an important step because it allows you to use your imagination to immerse yourself into another person's situation without actually being there. Let's imagine you see a picture of teens washing a car. Don't worry, I will fill in missing blanks for you. What you are seeing is teens washing a car. Simple enough. Next you see how they wash the car, by using soapy water and sponges. You also notice that some are smiling, while others are wiping sweat off their face with exhausted expressions. But why are these teens washing cars? You think it's just free extra credit, but then you see "back to school" on a board on the side of the picture. Are they doing this for money for school supplies? And if so, why do they need extra money? Isn't it a bad thing for a school to be desperate for extra cash?

Example

The "What? | How? | Why?" process is a great way to understand your audience without being there. You allowed yourself to empathize with the teen group and why they are going through. You were able to define why they had to wash cars and see that the school is going through a financial crisis. Now you can ideate solutions to their problem. Solutions could be making a new budget to allow them to save more money and buy school supplies. Or perhaps you could donate money towards the school. You could then make prototypes based on your research see how they would affect the school before going through with your plan. Finally, you could test your plan to help the school.

Let's assume you go with the budget plan. You test it, be see that the school has so little money that taking money from one area to another just makes the school worse off. Now you test the donation plan by donating 20% of the total you plan to donate. You notice that students and faculty are doing less overtime activities for school money and that classrooms have more books. You donate a more and more each week and you see that the school is in a better spot that it was before. I know that this is only an example and that you may not find and solve solutions so simply, but this is a good starting point for learning how the Design Thinking Process works.

Final

So what do you plan to do? Are there any current problems that you plan to solve with these steps, or do you plan to hold off until later. Whatever you do, I know that you can do it. Thank you for reading!