The real benefits of Design Thinking
With 20 years of experience using Design Thinking (DT) tools and methods, we’ve found DT to be a practical way to tackle complex problems.
And today’s challenges are becoming more complex, interdisciplinary and interconnected.
New technologies are emerging rapidly. Brands are finding new ways to connect with people, consumers expect ultra convenience, and public services need to be more efficient and customer-focused.
However, many organisations find it hard to use DT in their usual step-by-step workflows.
And there is often confusion about what DT really is. People sometimes ask, ‘Isn’t that just for designers?’
In this post, we’ll highlight both the clear and hidden benefits of DT, drawing on our own experiences and academic research.
What is Design Thinking?
Before we get started, here are a few simple, jargon-free definitions of DT.
At its core, DT is a practical, people-first way to solve problems. It starts by understanding the real needs of the people you’re designing for, then coming up with ideas, testing them quickly, and improving them based on what works.
It helps you create better solutions by focusing on the people who will use them.
To put it another way, DT is a human-centred, collaborative, and step-by-step approach to problem-solving. It emphasises empathy, teamwork across disciplines, creativity and experimentiation.
When designing new products, services, business models, customer experiences, or strategies, DT usually involves these steps:
Understand
Turn your current research, analytics, and user insights into opportunities. Explore these further by observing, listening, and asking users and stakeholders questions to understand what they want to achieve and the challenges they face.
Define the real problem
Use what you’ve learned to define a meaningful problem you need to solve from the user’s point of view.
This helps you avoid wasting time and resources on the wrong problem.
Imagine
Come up with different ways to solve the problem, from practical to creative ideas. This challenges conventional thinking and helps you explore a range of solutions by involving stakeholders and experts from diverse fields.
Try, test and improve
Next, create low-cost mock-ups (prototypes) and storyboards. By showing these solutions and testing them with users and stakeholders, you can spot flaws in your ideas. Prototypes help you test your assumptions and gather feedback to find the best way to solve the right problem.
Note:
The process is not always linear. You need to stay flexible. For example, as you build prototypes, you might discover new insights you missed before, or incorrect assumptions, so you may need to go back a few steps to investigate and redefine the problem.
Five benefits of Design Thinking
Discover what consumers aren’t saying in shifting contexts
There is growing evidence that people often struggle to recognise what they need or explain why they do things. These are usually the things that surveys and focus groups miss.
By spending time with users and testing prototypes based on hypotheses, DT can explore both the problem (we think you’re solving this problem) and possible solutions (and we think this idea might help, because...). This helps uncover hidden user needs and test assumptions.
This becomes even more important as markets and systems change.
Finding the real problems users face, especially when they aren’t obvious, is crucial.
Make better bias-resistant decisions
Innovation and uncertainty come with many cognitive biases. Teams can get stuck on their first idea, ignore evidence that challenges their assumptions, or filter ideas through past experiences. These built-in biases can hold back innovation, especially in larger organisations.
By making decisions based on user and stakeholder feedback, involving different perspectives throughout the process, and treating ideas as testable hypotheses, you keep your options open before choosing a solution.
When data is incomplete or unclear, DT helps teams stay open-minded and focused on users. It also improves their ability to frame decisions as hypotheses and test them, filtering out the weak ideas.
DT can help overcome seemingly contradictory tensions
Resolve contradictions and tensions
Complex problems often bring contradictions that seem impossible to resolve.
For example, in healthcare, ‘how might we use rapidly emerging new technologies without risking patient safety?’ Or in CPG companies, ‘how might we exploit a new trend - and quickly - without hurting our main business?’
Because DT focuses on experimenting with different options and co-designing with functional experts, it brings in many perspectives.
By integrating different ideas and points of view, you can reframe problems to answer these tricky ‘how might we..?’ questions.
Collaboration and creative confidence
Traditional innovation and project management stage gates often involve handing off work to different functional teams, which can make genuine collaboration and tacit knowledge sharing more difficult. At worst, critical stakeholders only get involved too late in the process to influence decisions.
Collaboration is central to DT at every step. It connects different disciplines at the outset, improves how knowledge is shared, and helps teams find new (unexpected) solutions.
DT can also boost team performance by building a sense of belonging and productivity. It helps individuals gain creative confidence as they work through the steps with others, and see their new skills make a real difference.
Break out of the incremental mindset
In rapidly changing markets and amid the emergence of disruptive technologies, sticking with perceived less risky incremental solutions may not be enough to stay relevant to your consumers and meet them where they are with what they need.
Given that DT encourages divergent thinking in both the insight discovery and ideation phases, and generates multiple iterations of ideas which get feedback from stakeholders and users, you build evidence and confidence in breakthrough solutions that are feasible and desirable, while avoiding costly mistakes.
If you’d like help to jump-start design thinking with your teams, drop us a line. We’d love to help.