An Interview with our Design Lead
With increasing technological innovations and changing customerexpectations, companies are striving increasingly towards cutting-edge innovative approaches to stay competitive. Innovations in design thinking have developed as a human-centered approach and a powerful methodology to cater to these needs. This article elaborates on how design thinking can transform businesses through an example use-case checklist.

What Problem Does Design Thinking Solve?

Design thinking attacks all sorts of challenges that businesses are facing. At the very core, it solves the misalignment of products or services with the needs of the customer. Design thinking, at a very basic definition, is empathetic, ideative, and iterative in testing, hence ensuring that the solutions are user-centered and viable. On the same note, design thinking solves organizational silos through cross-functional teams. It does away with barriers that exist between different departments, thus making sure a unified approach towards solving problems is achieved. A holistic perspective is very important in the resolution of complex and multifaceted problems that cannot be resolved by a single
department working alone.

How might someone design thinking more effectively or efficiently?

Design thinking makes a business more efficient andproductive due to the structured yet flexible approach it gives towards effective design of the solution. It harbors rapid prototyping and iterative testing, so that a business can efficiently test out and reject a big group of ideas that do not work. That way, it cuts down on the time and resources used developing a certain product or service, which eventually cannot please and be accepted by the user. More than that, design thinking utilizes varied viewpoints and competences by involving heterogeneous teams in the ideation. It is through such collaborative setups that higher creativity is enhanced toward more innovative solutions, which will always bring up opportunities for process improvements and operational
efficiencies.

What are some of the benefits that design thinking has over competition?

What differentiates design thinking from any other methodology is the focus on consumer
centricity: while traditional ways of identifying and solving problems would start with technical
feasibility or market viability, design thinking starts with empathy. This user-focused view will really
ensure that solutions meet the technical and business requirements but are concerning on another,
deeper level with regard to the individual customers.

Furthermore, the iterative nature of design thinking aligns the ideas with continued feedback and improvement in the process. Design thinking welcomes failure as part of the learning process and promises more refined and effective solutions over time. This flexibility can also be a major key in the competition within the hidden market.

How Can Design Thinking Save Time and Money for a Business?

Design thinking helps risk-proof expensive product failures by operationalizing rapid prototyping and user feedback. And it allows businesses to identify problems more cheaply at an early stage of actually testing and iterating rather than investing great resources. Lean development ensures that time and
money are invested in refining successful ideas, not in refurbishing bad ones. Besides, design thinking is all about collaboration to cut down on redundancies and simplify work processes. Any design, no
doubt, involves a collaborative approach from all aspects, starting on a cross-functional day, that would reduce siloed efforts to bring up with an environment that may prevent unclear communication and duplicated work. This speeds up the timeline of any particular project while resource allocation can be done optimally.