Design thinking pedagogy, a road to digital transformation
If you ask me to define the 21st century market scenario, I would call it VUCA. The abbreviation has nothing to do with any complex code or tech lingo. It is instead an accurate representation and reflection of the markets today, which are extremely Volatile, Uncertain, Complex and Ambiguous. Business problems have become hugely demanding and complex. The clear understanding and application of technological advancements that enable creating personalized human interactions is the need of the hour. This is why constant innovation is key to driving digital transformation to cater to the needs of the constantly evolving markets.
I have often found that the term ‘Digital Transformation’ is misunderstood as specifically being the technical application or complex technological advancements to address and solve any problem. However, digital transformation is in the true sense not just the output of the implementation of digital technologies. It is more importantly how different industries and business units actively leverage these transformational technologies to enable continuous change and improvement in how their businesses operate and deliver value to customers. Since the end objective for all businesses and organizations is customer value, it is key that they always take a customer centric approach when crafting transformational solution and this where the role of ‘Design Thinking’ comes into play.
Design thinking is one of the key pillars of digital transformations. With more emphasis on user-friendly products and services, a strong design philosophy is what helps designers and marketers deliver solutions and products that are realistically in sync with the consumers’ needs. What is at the core of design thinking is taking a human approach, where the customer is always at the center of focus. Design thinking practitioners who strongly leverage a user-centric design methodology observe and analyze user behaviors to gain consumer insights. These key insights and information is what enables these practitioners to create customer centric digital products and services. This is a key enabler in helping businesses acquire new customers as well as retain the existing customer base.
Design thinking in itself is a 5-step process that helps practitioners seek and solve problems that users might face
Step 1: Get into your Customer Shoes
To be able to create differentiated experiences for customers or end users, the very first step is to put yourselves in their shoes. It is very important to understand their requirements, needs, pain points and empathize with them. Gaining a deep understanding of the customer’s touch points in their digital journey is what would get one on the road to solve their problems.
Step 2: Problem Definition
Having analyzed the information, it’s time to formulate a problem statement. Definition of a problem brings clarity to the objective and helps clearly define what we are trying to achieve. There is definite tendency for smaller problem statements to come to the fore at this stage. However, the aim should always be to make these problems clearly understandable and focus on prioritizing them into manageable opportunities with clear and attainable deadlines.
Step 3: Ideation
I would call it the brainstorming phase where by using the collective minds of a group one can create distinguishable solutions from ideas that are brought to the table. Cross-functionally, vertical interaction is highly recommendable. The ideate phase is quick, creative and, most importantly, collaborative.
Step 4: Prototype
Prototyping is the phase where the team will experiment with a variety of models to test and validate the solutions ideas. It should ideally be done on a small set of test users to collect feedback and then use this information to adjust and optimize the next step. The prototype phase should be very fast paced, with quick improvements on the go. By the end of this phase, one should have a good idea of what works and what doesn’t and how would real customers ideally think and feel when interacting with your service or product.
Step 5: Testing
Continuously testing and validating the obtained prototypes acts as an opportunity to improve. Every interaction with prospects or customers is an opportunity to learn and then enhance the customer experience. In the testing phase, we capture the details needed to re-think and re-visit the previous stages and accordingly take corrective actions to constantly improve our solutions.
In this VUCA environment, digital intervention and transformation is a must for all business practices and the design thinking methodology is an effective practice to tackle the problems that this transition presents. They key to creating differentiated customer experience today is that whenever any of the above stated design thinking stages are being followed or even a unique design thinking process is being put into play, one thing should remain constant and that is always follow a user-centric approach.
