Successful businesses are making billions by recognizing the value of integrating “design thinking” into their process.
Great design is simple, beautiful, and easy to use. It creates a sense of purpose and place. It responds to user needs, and it just works. Aside from these characteristics, how can we know whether a design is “good”? Moreover, how can a business know whether the investment of time and money into a design was worth it?
The proof is in the numbers. Businesses have slowly come around to recognize that design can be used as a differentiator to respond to changing trends and consumer behaviors. Time and time again, Fortune 500 names such as Apple, Microsoft, Disney, and IBM have demonstrated the intrinsic value of “design thinking” as a competitive advantage that impacts the bottom line and drives business growth.
They’ve come to recognize that design innovation happens at the intersection of desirability for customers, viability at the business level and feasibility for technology. Design Thinking—a product design approach that has been slowly evolving since the 1950’s—integrates all three.
What Exactly Is Design Thinking?
Design thinking is an approach to creative problem solving that is widely recognized as a valuable course to human-centered product innovation. It has been called a methodology, a culture, and a philosophy. Design thinking, fundamentally, recognizes that design should achieve purpose and business goals, not just beauty.
Design thinking was born out of big corporations’ lack of ability to be creative and create new products and services that serve the unmet needs of their customers. At its core, the methodology arises from and revolves around the customer. The design thinking process considers people’s ethnographic background, behavior, thinking, motivations, habits, and needs. Think of a person in their everyday life and all of their interactions with a variety of products and services throughout their day.
Design thinking shifts the focus from a business-centric engineering solution (we invent a product based on a bunch of assumptions and cross our fingers that it will work for customers), to a customer-centric solution (we explore cultural phenomena, observe how people behave and think, gain insights into what they need, and design a product around that).
Design thinking puts understanding context and continuous engagement with people at the heart of the practice for determining what problem to solve, what metrics drive success, and what business will emerge from solving the problem.
Designers have hundreds of tools and ways to ascertain problems, conduct research, ideate solutions, and explore use cases to find the best path forward. While designers study and train to create value for the product and for customers, the design thinking methodology can be used anywhere, from product development and finance to customer service.
What Is the Business Value of Design Thinking?
All businesses have a never-ending list of goals, from constantly releasing new products that increase sales by resonating with customers to providing better customer support.
When a business decides on a new product, a massive, expensive machine shifts into high gear, especially at large corporations. The costs are enormous. Applying design thinking can help save vast amounts of money right away because it directs attention to the specific solutions people need—immediate cost savings are realized as part of the ROI of design thinking.
According to the report, why projects fail, three are related to user-centered design failure:
1. Badly defined requirements
2. Poor communications among customers and developers
3. Stakeholder politics
While every business is different, the first step to understanding how design thinking can help a business is to consider the challenges it’s currently facing.
What are they, and are there solutions already available that match a business’s needs and budget? If not, why? What are the things prohibiting those solutions, and where do those blockers stem from?
Proven ROI Gains from Design Thinking
Measuring the return on investment (ROI) of design thinking can be a challenge in any organization. More challenging still, the changes to your business’s operations may not directly reflect the product’s overall change in performance compared to the previous workflow.
However, many cases show very clear signs that a design thinking methodology provides significant, positive change throughout the organization.
Design thinking doesn’t guarantee better products or solutions. Instead, it drives experimentation, data gathering, and analysis, and empowers designers to view their daily challenges in new ways. The results are promising. Moving from the “standard” model to one following user-centered design processes is a smart way to invigorate any organization to be faster, more organized, and more creative—all of which in turn drives a greater return on investment.
Startup companies that adopt the design thinking methodology tend to do better than their peers when it comes to fundraising and profits. Uber, Airbnb, Warby Parker, and Etsy have achieved great success and have a history of Design thinking in their methodologies. Over time, these brands outperformed their peers and their investors realized a greater return on their investment.
Summary
The value of user experience as a result of design thinking is especially compelling when comparing a user experience project to another investment with similar business goals. There were countless smartphones before Apple’s iPhone burst onto the scene. There were taxis before Uber and social networks before Facebook. There were plenty of vacuum cleaners before Dyson, retailers before Bonobos and Warby-Parker, and electric cars before Tesla.
All of these companies share one thing. It is their relentless focus on the customer and delivering the best user experience possible—which is deeply rooted in their Design thinking methodology.
