The speed of information consumption requires an increasing ability to change. Time-to-market becomes the most important criteria in the digital era.
Design Thinking creates innovative solutions for complex problems by combining the right people, the needed space and a supporting process. It allows you to design a variety of things within the company at
Digital Interfaces
In person interactions
Conversations
Products
Services
Environments
Wicked Solutions
Designing means thinking and making at the same time. While traditional approaches were rather to push technological innovations into markets by creating new problems, design thinking pulls current needs of people to create solutions. Among the technology and business relations, it also considers the human centric dimension in its research and development process.
Creating a T-Profile about involved individuals is part of the preparation. The simple requirement is to express oneself within a T picture, were the horizontal part of the letter should include facts about additional skills and experiences. The main academic expertise should be expressed in the vertical section. Once the team assessment is done, project leaders have to be sure, if people have different mindsets and experiences before starting. Furthermore, a supportive space respective to the business, research and development field should be provided to the team.
Empathy is the core of every human-centered process. The main goal is to understand, why users are using things / acting, in a way they act. We need to deconstruct the personal motivation of the user in order to understand his behaviour and contextualize the action. Working as a Design Thinker, you are mostly solving the problems of others. To be able to do this most effectively, it is necessary to be able to understand the context of others. This is best possible, if you dive into the world of your users.
OBSERVE the user in his usual context. Conduct observations in addition to interviews, to get a holsitic picture. Try to find contradictions between what the user says and how he may act.
INTERVIEW the user in order to understand his motivation and his experiences. Try to make him tell you the story behind his motivation.
WATCH AND LISTEN. The combination of both is what will bring you most insights. Therefore, try to combine both tools, or even slightly adjust them.
Thinking & Making
The process approach is to first research and solution after, while the research part is estimated to take 80% of the effort. The solution part only takes 20% of the effort.
Despite both parts consist of 3 steps, human centred innovation demands high efforts to understand people’s real needs. Namely, those, which they usually don’t express to researchers. One common technique is to ask five times “why?” to a certain problem, to get a deeper background-insight to the individual’s mind.
According to experts, the outcome of every proper design thinking project is a user validated concept to a prototype in an early staged customer enablement and optional user story map or business idea.
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