Organizations encounter design difficulties every day. Design lays the groundwork for a wide range of business decisions and improvements, from customer experiences to products and services. Traditional tactics, however, are no longer viable options in today’s society. The difficulties of today necessitate new ways of thinking, new tools, and new approaches.
Which is where Design Thinking comes in.
Design Thinking is a human-centered design methodology. It emphasizes empathy, creativity, and experimentation in order to produce solutions that fit the demands of the people for whom you are designing. Any firm can use this highly immersive strategy to suit the needs of their target audience.
The Pearl Lemon Consulting team has extensive expertise of Design Thinking garnered through years of practical practice. Through Design Thinking consulting interactive workshops, engaging but effective classroom training, and tailored one on one activities, we help businesses of all sizes unleash creativity and understand their audiences on a human level.
Working with Pearl Lemon Consulting will leave you feeling invigorated, inspired, and armed with solid understanding of the Design Thinking method, which involves
- Thinking creatively and innovatively
- How to properly apply your new knowledge in real-world business scenarios
- How to employ empathy, teamwork, storytelling, and leadership in the workplace
- How to use prototypes, experimentation, and iteration to move quickly from idea to action.
When it comes to talent management, HR professionals need to look at more than just job openings. The first step is to figure out what the firm wants to accomplish and how your personnel plan fits into that picture.
Talent management is a challenging task that warrants strategic planning. Talent management became an essential component of most businesses as a result of this vision for the future.
At the very least, that is the ideal in terms of talent management. As we frequently uncover in our work as a top talent management consulting firm, the truth can be quite different.
Success Result
What is Design Thinking?
When you look at these well defined processes, you might see a fairly logical sequence with a predetermined order. The Design Thinking process, on the other hand, is not linear; it is flexible and fluid, looping back and around and in on itself! With each new discovery brought about by a new phase, you’ll need to rethink and reinterpret what you’ve done before—you’ll never be traveling in a straight line!
What are the Benefits of Using Design Thinking In Business?
Design Thinking is a method for tackling practical and creative problems. It is mainly based on the methods and processes used by designers (thus the name), but it has grown from a variety of professions, including architecture, engineering, and business. Design thinking can be applied to every field; the approach does not need to be design-specific.
Design thinking is very user-centered. It prioritizes humans over all else, striving to understand people’s needs and devise effective solutions to meet those needs. It’s what we call a problem-solving strategy based on solutions.
Solution-Based Vs. Problem-Based Thinking
Solution-based thinking, as the name implies, focuses on identifying solutions; coming up with something constructive to effectively address a specific problem. This is the polar opposite of problem-based thinking, which focuses on hurdles and restrictions.
As previously stated, the Design Thinking approach is progressive and user-centered. Before delving deeper into the approach, we should consider the four Design Thinking principles articulated by Christoph Meinel and Harry Leifer of Stanford University’s Hasso-Plattner-Institute of Design, which is generally considered to be the gold standard explanation that an understanding of Design Thinking should come from.
The Human Rule
Whatever the context, all design effort is social in nature, and any social innovation will return us to the “human-centric point of view.”
The Ambiguity Rule
Ambiguity is unavoidable, and it cannot be eliminated or simplified. Experimenting at the boundaries of your skills and knowledge is essential for seeing things differently.
The Redesign Rule
Every design is being redesigned. While technology and societal situations change and advance, fundamental human needs do not. We essentially need to rethink the ways of meeting these needs or achieving the intended goals.
The Tangibility Rule
Creating prototypes of ideas allows designers to articulate them more effectively.
Design Thinking Consulting and The Five Phases of Design Thinking
According to the aforementioned Hasso-Plattner-Institute of Design at Stanford (also known as d.school), the Design Thinking process can be divided into five sections or phases based on these four principles:
Empathize
Empathy is an essential starting point for Design Thinking. The first step of the process is spent getting to know the user and learning about their wants, needs, and goals.
This entails seeing and interacting with people in order to comprehend their psychological and emotional states. During this phase, the designer attempts to set aside their assumptions in order to gain genuine insights into the consumer.
Define
The problem is defined at the second step of the Design Thinking process. You’ll compile all of your empathize phase results and begin to make sense of them: what issues and impediments are your users encountering? What patterns do you notice? What is the major user issue that your team must address?
You should have a clear problem statement by the end of the define step. The idea here is to define the problem in terms of your user; rather than saying “We need to…”, say “Customers in the London area need…”
Once you’ve articulated the problem, you may begin to generate answers and ideas, which leads us to stage three.
Ideate
It’s time to start thinking about potential solutions now that you have a firm grasp of your users and a clear problem statement. The third stage of the Design Thinking process is where the creativity occurs, and it is critical to emphasize that the ideation stage is a judgment-free zone!
Designers will hold brainstorming sessions to generate as many different viewpoints and ideas as possible. Designers can utilize a variety of ideation techniques, including brainstorming and mindmapping, as well as bodystorming (roleplay situations) and provocation—an extreme lateral-thinking strategy that requires the designer to confront established views and explore new ideas and alternatives.
You’ll narrow it down to a few ideas to move on with near the end of the ideation phase.
Prototype
The fourth step in the Design Thinking process is all about experimenting with new ideas and turning them into practical things. A prototype is essentially a scaled-down version of the product that includes the potential solutions identified in previous stages. This step is critical for putting each solution to the test and identifying any restrictions or weaknesses.
Depending on how well the proposed solutions perform in prototype form, they may be approved, enhanced, redesigned, or rejected throughout the prototype stage.
Testing
User testing follows prototyping, however it is crucial to highlight that this is rarely the conclusion of the Design Thinking process. In practice, the testing phase’s results will frequently bring you back to a previous step, offering the insights you need to rephrase the initial problem statement or generate fresh ideas you hadn’t considered before.
As a designer, you have a significant impact on the goods and experiences that your firm brings to market. Integrating Design Thinking into your process may provide significant business value, ensuring that the things you design are not only desired for clients, but also financially and resource-wise sustainable.
With that in mind, consider some of the primary advantages of employing Design Thinking at work:
Design Thinking, with its emphasis on problem-solving and identifying feasible solutions, can drastically reduce the amount of time spent on design and development—especially when combined with lean and agile.
Cost savings and a high ROI: Getting successful goods to market faster saves the company money. Design Thinking has been shown to produce a substantial return on investment; for example, teams using IBM’s Design Thinking techniques have computed a ROI of up to 300%.
Improves customer retention and loyalty: Design Thinking provides a user-centric approach, which in turn increases user engagement and customer retention over time.
Design Thinking promotes creativity by challenging assumptions and established beliefs and encouraging all stakeholders to think outside the box. This generates an innovative culture that reaches well beyond the design team.
Can be used across the organization: The nice thing about Design Thinking is that it is not just for designers. It promotes cross-team collaboration and utilizes collective thinking. Furthermore, it may be used by almost any team in any business.
Whether you’re attempting to develop a company-wide Design Thinking culture or simply seeking to enhance your approach to user-centric design, Design Thinking will help you innovate, focus on the user, and eventually design products that solve genuine user problems.
But as is the case for any new process, Design Thinking needs to be learned, and you do need great teachers. The experienced Pearl Lemon Consulting team can be those teachers. Their knowledge of, and enthusiasm for, the Design Thinking process is extensive and their consulting and teaching methods are highly effective, as our previous consulting clients can attest to.
We’d love to show you and tell you more about how making use of design thinking in your business can change it for the better in many ways. Contact us today and let’s talk about it!
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