Have you been curious to learn more about “design”? Does your team lack creativity? Are you worried about your competition? Or are you simply wondering how to better understand your clients?
Well, this article about Design Thinking is for you.
Design Thinking workshops, sometimes called “design sprints”, are often the easiest way to start making your company an innovative, agile, and client-centric organisation.
After organising many Design Thinking workshops for Orange Sénégal, Orange Côte d’Ivoire, or UNESCO, we wanted to share a couple tips on why you should be considering “Design Thinking” methods for your organisation.
What is Design Thinking?
Design Thinking is an innovation process centered around understanding the specific needs of clients. Its key components are:
- searching and understanding your users’ pain points/problems
- prototyping potential solutions
- fast iterations to improve the product or service
Design Thinking is at the heart of our UX design agency’s daily life, but it’s no longer an obscure method reserved for creatives. Its benefits and its principles are extremely clear and accessible to all.
It’s time to demystify Design Thinking, and explain why we all need it!
1. Design Thinking can be applied in every industry
Apple, Whirlpool, General Electrics, IBM, Lego, Marriott, Accenture, Daimler, Microsoft, BMZ,Airbnb, Toshiba etc…
These companies don’t have much in common, yet Design Thinking plays a key role in how they make decisions, innovate, and remain leaders in their respective industries.
Design Thinking is a methodology that can be applied to all companies and departments regardless of their size, stage of development, industry, or geographical location.
Why not you?
2. Design Think solves problems
There’s a common misconception that Design Thinking does not solve problems, and just creates new issues without solving them. That’s simply not true.
Design Thinkers take time to listen to clients/users before imagining pertinent solutions, testing them, making hypotheses about results, quickly iterating, and providing final solutions.
Thanks to this process, Design Thinkers, can create highly efficient solutions by developing products and services in a way that analytic thinkers cannot.
3. Design Thinking reinforces innovation
When companies grow they become less tolerant to risk. This isn’t always a negative development, but it can slow down innovation and lead to a dangerous stagnation for the business.
Throughout the Design Thinking process, teams can generate new and innovative solutions answering clients’s real problems, and help their organisation differentiate itself from the competition!
By creating these solutions, testing their efficiency, and iterating until they are optimised, Design Thinkers create new opportunities to give their company a competitive advantage on the market.
4. Design Thinking strengthens Leadership
Leadership plays an important role in a company’s capacity to understand and solve its clients’ problems. It requires from leaders the capacity to make the right decisions, but also the humility to start over when things don’t work.
Discipline isn’t always the right approach to dealing with failure, and this is particularly true for product development. This is why Design Thinking, based on quick iteration, can help teams transform failure into an essential component of success.
In addition, Design Thinking assures that solutions to the company’s diverse problems are based on data generated by clients, and not on whims from misinformed members of the board.
5. Design Thinking isn’t only for designers
Design Thinking isn’t a job, it’s a methodology that can be applied to every role in a company.
It’s based on understanding the needs of stakeholders, and quickly iterating to find solutions that solve commercial, technological, operational, and even HR problems!
A lot of companies have already trained their teams in the art of Design Thinking. These training sessions led by experts are a good way to learn the concepts of Design Thinking and quickly put them to use inside the company.
Design Thinking. Why not you?
Whether you’ve previously considered training your team to Design Thinking methods or not, today might be the right day to get started! In today’s perpetually evolving markets, one thing is certain: we all need Design Thinking to stay agile and at the top of our industries.
Don’t hesitate to reach out (hello@yuxdakar.com) if you’d like us to organise a workshop in which your team will learn how to adopt Design Thinking methods, work across skill sets and departments, and create a company culture that celebrates creativity and innovation!
