Design thinking is a multi-stage process that prioritizes the end-user human perspective. You achieve a resolution based on how it impacts the thinking, feelings, and behaviour of the audience involved. Design thinking has an immense importance on problem-solving for a wide variety of businesses. It can be applied to product design, marketing, tech innovation, and even AI development.
Design thinking guides you through a thought process identifying by the humanity in a problem. The process boils down complex concepts into simpler, manageable problem statements. After you’ve gone through the design thinking process a few times, you may find yourself noticing things you didn’t before. You begin to perceive problems that affect real people before they occur.
With a design-thinking approach, you grow more open-minded as a businessperson. You can identify conflicts early on which is an advantage in any category of work or development. Let’s learn more about the advantages of design thinking for a business.
1. It presents solutions for the end-user
Design thinking is so effective because it keeps the end user in mind at all times and problem-solves accordingly. The problem-solver arrives at a solution that supports the human being in the problem, rather than arriving at a resolution in favor of the problem-solver.
2. It re-humanizes data
We have more data than ever. This data informs a lot of our decision making, but it can also dehumanize the problem-solving process. Design thinking re-centers the troubleshooting on the most important element. That is how a problem impacts the target audience, user, or human being.
3. It facilitates innovation
With design thinking, you get to troubleshoot and bring forth new ideas from new angles that wouldn’t have been otherwise introduced. There is an openness to design thinking. No idea is a bad idea. In the ideation stage, everything is brought forth, recorded, and can be tested to determine the validity of a given idea as a long-term solution.
4. It makes yourself unafraid of failure
Failing sucks. In the prototyping phase of testing ideas, however, a lot will fail. This is actually a positive. It normalizes failure. You become unafraid of it. The real benefit is that it makes your finished work better. It eliminates what won’t work and allows you to sink your teeth into what’s worth pursuing.
5. It allows you to test your solutions
Design thinking requires prototyping and testing out ideas. It leverages effort and investment, ultimately leading towards insights. This can, at times, create a feedback loop. You refine a solution, minimizing the likelihood of failure and addressing possible objections before they present.
6. You challenge assumptions
There may be preconceived notions on how to solve a given problem, due to past solutions or untested assumptions. In design thinking, it’s a process by which assumptions are challenged. Ideas have to be prototyped and proven to work, turning an assumption into a truth. If an assumption fails in the prototyping process, it saves you the embarrassment and guides you towards a better, more reliable idea.
7. You save a lot
Even if you don’t necessarily work design thinking quickly, you can still end up saving yourself money, time, effort, and more. You cut out the proposed solutions that would come up short, eliminating them before you’ve gone too far down that path. Even with limited time or a limited budget, it is still very important the utilization of design thinking. This is why organizations from Google to Apple, Amazon, and lots of small-to-medium-sized small businesses use it.
8. You build camaraderie
A team undergoing the ideation and testing phases will build camaraderie. Team members will not rush to judgment. Instead, they bring forth their perspectives in an open and accepting forum. It’s meant to be a stimulating team-building activity. The teamwork is a unique by-product of adopting this type of open approach to customer-centric problem-solving.
9. You create a better product
No brand wants to arrive at a solution or product that’s untested, imperfect, and is the bare minimum for what gets the job done. More innovators are using design thinking to get a better product, one that’s better than existing options and which beats out the competition.
Design thinking gets a lot of attention as a product development method, but it can also be applied to systems, protocols, and experiences, among other things. Without fail, every time, design thinking creates value for the user. You are driven more by service to a human being instead of being led by engineering, a product-centric mindset, or being marketing-focused.
10. You turn a solution into storytelling
Stories inspire. They are framed around real people and the lives they are living. In terms of the marketability of a product, service, or solution, design thinking firmly attaches you to the storytelling component rather than focusing in on an abstract statement or scientific data.
