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Design Thinking in the Digital Age

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Leveraging Technology for Creative Solutions

Design Thinking in the Digital Age

GUEST POST from Chateau G Pato

At the intersection of innovation and problem-solving lies design thinking. This unique methodology provides a solution-based approach to overcoming obstacles and has been at the forefront of some of the most creative solutions and remarkable inventions. In today’s digital age, design thinking has transformed, leveraging the boons of technology to create more agile, dynamic, and user-centric products and services.

Navigating through uncertain times and complex challenges, businesses across the globe are utilizing design thinking to produce creative solutions. This article offers a glimpse into the process of design thinking in today’s digital era by exploring its role, benefits, and two enlightening case studies.

The Role of Design Thinking in the Digital Age

In the digital age, companies need to fully understand and meet the unique needs of their digitally-savvy customers. This is where the empathetic, human-centered perspective of design thinking comes into play. Technology not only provides a plethora of tools to facilitate design thinking but also prolifically influences the human experiences which are central to the process.

Leveraging technology in design thinking can help companies to better understand their customer’s behaviour and needs. Utilizing digital mediums like A/B testing, data analytics, virtual reality, etc., not only provide a wealth of insights but also allows for agility in designing, prototyping, and testing products or services.

Case Study 1: IBM

IBM exemplifies a company that has used design thinking to navigate business transformation. The tech giant adopted Enterprise Design Thinking, a framework which melds design thinking with agile practices for businesses. In response to advancements in digitization, IBM recognized a need to transform itself into a more user-centered business, with the goal of creating elite software that solves users’ problems.

IBM trained thousands of its employees in this strategy, fostering a company-wide shift that prioritized user experience. Their design thinking workshops enabled them to gather insights through collaborative creativity, and to iterate solutions based on valued user feedback using technologies such as AI, cloud computing, and machine learning. This demonstrates how design thinking, coupled with technology, can drive growth, profound transformation and outstanding business outcomes.

Case Study 2: Airbnb

Another exemplary application of design thinking and technology can be seen with Airbnb, now a billion-dollar startup. When Airbnb was on the verge of bankruptcy, the founders decided to focus on developing a better user experience to distinguish them from competitors. Thus, they turned to design thinking.

The co-founders traveled to New York and started living as Airbnb hosts. They met customers, learned about their experiences, and made necessary changes. Utilizing technology, the founders restructured and improved the website interface, resulting in an intuitive, appealing UI that focused on high-quality images of rental spaces. They mapped the customer journey, identified pain points, and provided innovative solutions. This approach resulted in a significant increase in revenue in just one week, reaffirming the power of design thinking in transforming businesses.

Conclusion

Design thinking delivers creative problem-solving strategies that promote a more empathetic, user-focused philosophy. In the digital era, leveraging technology enables real-time feedback, seamless collaboration, and a vast potential for innovation. As the examples of Airbnb and IBM illustrate, the combination of design thinking and technology can lead to transformative results for businesses ready to embrace change and focus on user needs. Indeed, as the world becomes ever more digital, design thinking will remain a vital tool for leveraging technology to foster creative, exceptional solutions.

Image credit: Pexels

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How to Identify Areas for Improvement with Human-Centered Design

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How to Identify Areas for Improvement with Human-Centered Design

GUEST POST from Chateau G Pato

Human-centered design (HCD) is an approach to product and service design that puts people’s needs at the center of the design process. HCD is a holistic process that looks at the whole customer experience, from researching customer needs and wants to prototyping and iterating product or service designs. It helps companies to create products and services that are user-friendly, efficient, and meet customer expectations.

Identifying areas for improvement with human-centered design requires you to analyze every aspect of the customer experience. Here are some steps to take in order to identify areas for improvement:

1. Research Your Customers – The first step is to research your customers. You need to understand who your customers are, what their needs and wants are, and how they interact with your product or service. Interviewing customers, assessing feedback, and conducting surveys are some of the best ways to gain insight into customer needs and wants.

2. Analyze Your Processes – Next, you need to analyze your processes. Look at how your processes are currently working, and identify any areas for improvement. This could include anything from the way customer inquiries are handled, to the way customer feedback is collected.

3. Identify Pain Points – After researching your customers and analyzing your processes, it’s time to identify pain points. These are areas where customers are having difficulty, or where there is a disconnect between customer needs and the product or service. Identifying pain points is essential to improving the customer experience.

4. Create Solutions – Once you’ve identified the areas where improvement is needed, it’s time to create solutions. With HCD, this involves creating prototypes and testing them with customers to ensure they meet customer needs and expectations. Implementing the solutions and collecting feedback is also important in order to ensure the solutions are working as intended.

Airbnb – Improving the Booking Experience

One successful example of HCD in action is Airbnb. Airbnb applied HCD to their platform and identified several areas where improvement was needed. This included the design of their platform, the customer experience, and the overall product offering. Airbnb implemented a range of improvements, including simplifying the booking process, improving the search functionality, and adding a range of new features. These improvements ultimately resulted in a better customer experience and increased user engagement.

Uber – Pimp My (Taxi) Ride

Another example of Human-centered design in action is Uber. Uber identified areas for improvement by analyzing customer feedback and conducting research. This included simplifying the user interface, improving the ride-hailing experience, adding features such as safety tools, and implementing a range of rewards for drivers and riders. These improvements have helped to increase customer satisfaction and engagement, and have helped to grow the business.

Conclusion

By applying HCD to identify areas for improvement, companies can create better products and services that meet customer needs and expectations. It is an invaluable tool for creating user-friendly and efficient products and services.

Image credit: Pixabay

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Think Like a Tech Company or Go Out of Business

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Think Like a Tech Company or Go Out of Business

by Braden Kelley and Linda Bernardi

Even in 2014, there are business sectors who feel they are not ‘tech companies’. News flash: Whether you are a consumer products company, an insurance company, a hotel, or a pharmaceutical company, your business is a technology business. Why?

Technology is the link between any business and its customers. To say technology is not core to your business strategy, means you think customers are not the key to your business success. So, your business is a technology business whether you want it to be or not.

Today technology is how you market and sell your products, make your business more efficient, and most importantly, how you stay connected to your customers. Some companies mistake the importance of technology to mean that they need to open a twitter account and monitor social media, put in an ERP and CRM system, and revamp their web site. But the importance of technology in today’s business environment is more than that.

ERP and CRM are common tools, a requirement to remain competitive, and while social media and the internet are important to sales and marketing success, they are becoming yesterday’s news as customers develop deeper connections to their mobile devices. If you aren’t on their devices and interacting in a meaningful way with them there in real-time, you won’t stay connected to them in the long run.

Let’s look at the impact on a few different industries whose members tend not to see themselves as technology companies:

1. Fortune 100 consumer product goods (CPG) companies
2. Hotel Chains
3. Big Box Retailers

1. Fortune 100 CPG companies typically manufacture large quantities of consistent products and have visually pleasing (static) web pages for consumers. But they don’t use technology well enough to detect what the market wants before it knows it, often fail to personalize or customize products to customer needs, and usually lack the online networks that could help connect other customer product needs together into new potential product ideas that the company could co-create with their customers. Often connection means post mortem analytics on data collected in the past, or, analyzing previous customer interactions with static web pages. Creating authentic customer connections requires online and mobile technology these companies usually don’t possess. I don’t mean apps (which often are pretty much the same as a website), but new physical/online/mobile engagement models that inspire customers to stay connected to the company (and each other) in a dynamic, evolving community. Rethinking is needed here. The customer is not just a buyer but an influencer. If CPG companies want to sell that next bottle of $300 facial cream, they better consider delighting, and not just marketing to, their customer base.

2. AirBnB has proven to be a major disruptive force in the hotel and hospitality business, grabbing a massive foothold in a market that the Homeaway.com member companies created and should have dominated. Resistance to AirBnB is massive and lawsuits are abundant, but for a moment let’s go beyond the hype and explore the angst of traditional hotels. AirBnB created a highly connected, effective community of property owners and property renters. This bi-directional ecosystem can only thrive if they are both happy and satisfied. To experience what they’ve created, first go to a traditional hotel website (pictures of room, building, lobby) and then go to AirBnB and browse the hundreds of customer experiences their property owners offer. On the hotel site you’ll see they’ve created the mechanics of paying to rent a hotel room, while on AirBnB you’ll see that they’ve created both an ecosystem and an experience.

3. Big box retailers have done a poor job of seeing themselves as technology companies capable of fending off challenges from online-only retailers. Target made the mistake of seeing themselves as a retailer, not a technology business, and so they outsourced their ecommerce to Amazon in the beginning, only to regret doing so because Amazon was able to learn which 20% of their inventory drove 80% of their profits, and when.

Meanwhile, Costco and Walmart, despite being two of the most successful retailers in the world, have struggled to find success online because they can’t get beyond their brick and mortar heritage to see themselves as a technology business with an integrated online/offline ecosystem. Seriously, it is 2014, do we still need to get our Costco circulars in the mail? Nothing has changed about Costco’s interaction with its customers. Walmart exacerbated the disconnection between the two sides of their business by creating a separate online division and exiling it to Silicon Valley. Costco sells different products online than offline. The results of both of these approaches have been far from stellar.

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Technology Lowers Barriers to Entry

In the history of the world, it has never been easier to start and scale a business to a global footprint, not in a matter of decades or years, but in months. And it is not just the other companies in your industry and technology-driven startups that you have to worry about if you choose not to view yourself as a technology company and move as fast as they do. You have to worry about competition from established technology players like Google and Amazon too, because one day they (or people that used to work for them) might decide that your market is attractive enough to enter and come disrupt your industry. For example, Amazon has become a book publisher and a financial services company.

Technology Enables Experiences

Technology enables the creation of customer experiences. I am going to choose my insurance company based on my experience. At the end of the day if all prices are comparable, then how the businesses you interact with make you feel, and the connections you’ve built with them will matter more. Without an emphasis on using technology to make your business a social business, you will find your company displaced by others that do. You must lead your industry in identifying opportunities to use technology to get closer to your customers. The future of business will be all about delighting customers and making their experience more personal.

Technology is not just a tool, but central to everything you do in today’s always on, always connected digital age.

Here are ten ways that technology can help you become a more social business:

  1. Building Connections
  2. Developing Networks
  3. Global Sensing and Prediction
  4. Sharing Recommendations
  5. Creating Experiences
  6. Personalization
  7. Customization
  8. Co-Creation
  9. Crowdsourcing
  10. Open Innovation

To give you an example of what things will look like in the future, the forward thinking health insurance company will leverage the mobile device for virtual ID cards, drug interaction warnings, personal triage, mobile care, wellness, cost sharing calculations, FSA/HSA administration, diagnostics, and more.

Conclusion

In conclusion, no matter what business you are in, it is very dangerous not to see technology as a competitive differentiator and a core driver of your business. Instead, you must constantly look at how you can become more of a technology company in order to enable deeper customer connections and more meaningful experiences. Today if you don’t connect with, understand, delight and start predicting your customer’s needs/wants, you may not thrive in your industry and your competition and new entrants who do embrace technology will replace you.

This article is brought to you by Linda Bernardi and Braden Kelley. Collectively, we have over 30 years of experience working with large, global multi-disciplinary enterprises. We write this with care and passion as we want your enterprises to succeed. We would love to hear your thoughts.

Guest Collaborator:

Linda BernardiLinda Bernardi is a Technology Strategist, Investor, and Founder & CEO at StraTerra Partners, The Bernardi Leadership Institute and a Strategic Advisor at Cloudant Inc. She is also the Author of Provoke, Why the Global Culture of Disruption is the Only Hope for Innovation. Learn more here about Linda’s work on disrupting large enterprise analytics.

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