Design Thinking: A Human-Centered Approach to Problem Solving

Design Thinking has its roots in product design, but the core principle is that everything should be human-centered, no matter what you are designing. This concept is just as valuable to building rocket ships as it is to making a website. It has had a significant impact on how we interact with computers kinesthetically today (think touch screens, gestures, etc.) and influenced design of the mouse and first notebook computers.

If you want to see the outsized impact of embracing design thinking principles, look at Apple. It sparked a revolution in how we interact with technology and led to the rise of the iPhone, the standard bearer for human centric technology today.

Organizations that embrace Design Thinking principles are highly successful and lead their industries. According to Jeanne Rae, creator of the Design Value Index: It no longer takes 10 years to build highly functional design organizations. With the right leadership and senior level support, an enterprise-wide design function that produces results can be built in less time.

There are four critical reasons why you should consider Design Thinking for your organization:

1. Embrace Change as an Asset

Change is constant. New competitors surface, technologies shift, tastes and behaviors change. To make ongoing change an asset, embrace faster ways to interact with stakeholders and receive immediate direct feedback through a virtuous feedback loop.

2. Simplify Complex Challenges

Without a clear process and set of guidelines, feedback can create complex challenges and additional organizational stress. Problems become unnecessarily daunting and it can be difficult to know where to start. Design Thinking shines a light on a better path forward.

Design Thinking principles focus people on gathering feedback from clients and stakeholders, looking for meaningful patterns in data, patterns in behaviors, and patterns in pain points. Deciphering these patterns allows you to quickly hone in on a specific area of focus and determine how that area interacts with other areas to crystallize your solutions priorities quickly.

Patterns create ideas. Pattern recognition reframes problems into opportunities. This solution-focused approach allows an organization to look at their challenges from new perspectives. Leaders can see challenges more clearly and develop strategies for each challenge to facilitate incremental changes, moving each piece forward as part of a more cohesive strategy.

The idea is catching on. There may be more non-traditional organizations practicing design thinking today, including nonprofits, management consulting firms, and governments, than ever before.

Design Thinking is always about understanding people. This idea gives fuel and direction to a solution that is tailored to the audience: the people the organization impacts every day. Even though the design process is not entirely linear, the starting point for everything is understanding people. And to understand people you need to empathize with them. It's the only way.

Understanding empathy is so much more than user feedback from a survey and a UX checklist. Empathy provides critical insight into emotional states and surfaces the opportunity to identify with them as an individual. The understanding of empathy should not be limited solely to designers but should be imbued into all aspects of interactions from face-to-face to digital channels.

Without empathy, it is impossible to create a long-lasting solution where you are treating the underlying cause and not the symptoms. Design Thinking and human-centered design are always about empathy and how to use a deep understanding of empathy to design solutions that solve the REAL problem and not the symptom of the problem.

There are numerous effective tools that help bring empathy to light to enrich the user experience and ultimately create better outcomes for organizations. The most common tool is persona development, which provides a constant, documented benchmark of who is being designed for that overlays the numerous ways in which an organization interacts with its customers, employees and other stakeholders.

Role Playing

Role Playing allows you to empathize with others through storytelling. It helps highlight the needs of the user by putting yourself in their shoes and understanding how they think and feel in various situations and circumstances.

Direct Observation

Direct Observation allows you to witness and experience behaviors and interactions in a real time environment. We have a natural, humanistic reaction when we observe someone's struggle or pain. We subconsciously identify the problem, define it, and look for a solution. Observation is a natural way to inspire new ideas and solutions.

Active Listening

Direct Communication leverages Active Listening techniques to unmask pain or frustration beyond the symptoms. The goal of Active Listening is to get to the source or kernel of what is driving the issue, to look at all the reasons contributing to a pain and consider the relationship between the pain and its causes. Don't confuse the symptom for the ailment.

Ideas don't have to be perfect initially, and most likely won't be. Putting ideas out quickly, in beta, and soliciting immediate feedback is enlightened trial and error. Until something is in a tangible form that people can interact with, it is impossible to fully plan for all the ways an audience will use something or additional ways something could be used.

To make this always changing world an asset, Design Thinking principles focus on smaller goals with a wide range of people to unlock a plethora of ideas and intuition from different perspectives to get solutions faster and get them out to market quicker.

Rapid prototyping allows problems to be broken down and solved in manageable increments. By adopting a rapid prototype approach you increase the chances of uncovering greater value from your products and more use cases than initially imagined.

Through the examples we have outlined here, you can see exactly why Design Thinking and human-centered designs have become so popular. These 40+ year old concepts have always been valuable, but the dual dynamic of a technological climate that continues to rapidly evolve coupled with a market that constantly demands better, more, faster tilts the balance heavily in favor of those who are able to embrace change and leverage it to their benefit.

In the end, that is what Design Thinking principles are all about: leverage the intelligence of your assets to give customers what they want, better, more and faster. The concept of Design Thinking is adaptable to the organization using it while the core elements remain: Start with people. Observe and Empathize. Identify patterns which spur ideas. Share these ideas. Solicit feedback. Repeat.

As organizations explore adopting a Design Thinking model, leveraging resources with experience in the Design Thinking processes can help accelerate the transition. Design Thinking represents an opportunity for organizations to leapfrog competitors when it comes to effective and efficient problem solving and connecting in meaningful ways with valuable audiences.