Design Thinking – An approach every Web or App Designer should own

Design thinking is all about coming up with an idea wherein a human centered design approach is practiced to solve problems, allowing people to be right at the epicenter of the entire process of problem solving. The core of design thinking lies in the fact that an entire goal is taken into consideration rather than just one specific problem. Not just it helps in solving the most complex global problems, but even web based issues that you encounter in your day to day lives.

Let us take an example to understand this. If one fine day, your online marketing manager comes to you and talks about increasing web traffic by a certain percentage. Now what would be your approach? You possibly might switch to traditional strategies such as opting for paid methods for paid traffic building, running social campaigns all over the place, or raising the budget of advertising, and lots more. However, when you have design thinking in place, you might have a “why” present just about everywhere to question every single stage problem solving. This leads you to focusing on the existing customers and traffic, rather than approaching new ones whom you are not sure about them visiting your site.

What is the need for design thinking?

Since design thinking is customer focused with customer problems on a higher priority than business goals, it can be beneficial to any business for winning the hearts of customers. Rather than promoting your products bluntly, asking for customers email addresses, and sending personalized emails to them including all sorts, is just one aspect of design thinking, and will do more good. The need for design thinking is simply because, you can have problems reframed in a lot different manner, especially when traditional approaches fail to prioritize.

In addition, design thinking always allows being lean, as well as agile from all respects. Rather than spending a lifetime on building a product, and sitting back to see what really happens, you can have tasks divided into small modules to build them faster, and them early on as soon as a module completes. You need not to wait till the end for the product to work or not. When you think about the benefits, they are just endless, allowing users to be the part of a whole macro process. They feel both cared and loved about. Ultimately, this will even help you to be safe, even when they encounter any technical issues, since they will forgive you.

This is what is popularly known as “halo effect” wherein users feel like promoters and become your friends and advocates for life, encouraging their social circles as well to buy from you. The methodology helps big time in avoiding a model wherein you invite customers, have a review of a website that is just a mockup or partially functional, and leave with a dissatisfied feeling of not contributing in any way possible to make things right. The thinking can be useful especially for organizational employees to encounter any situation with great courage, resolving problems with user centered solutions.

Conclusion

You have tons of literature present online telling you on how to go about with the design part. But, in reality, are those strategies practically implemented? They come with their own set of flaws leading to feasibility issues, and hence owning to this design thinking strategy is rather a more viable choice focusing towards creativity and user needs at the same time.

Designers first need to adopt this strategy and then teach them same to the fellow colleagues so that everybody’s thinking can land upon common grounds, resulting in a more innovative and user friendly product. It is the practicing approach that will help you to be an expert with this approach.

By adopting it on a daily basis, you can have the actual hands on this methodology, ultimately streamlining the communication between all level stakeholders. Design thinking as we saw have surely a major role to play in focusing on small but correct problems first, solving them, and then bringing them all together to result in one big error free product. This way, designers do not have to waste unnecessary time in building useless product devoid of user focused design approach.