A successful digital adoption strategy for the process of digital transformation, needs to consider a technological solution and change existing mindsets. In other words, you need to ensure that your employees are enthusiastic about a new technological system before they can use a digital software adoption platform to its best potential. In this way, you can holistically transform your business by involving users in constructing your new solution right from the beginning.
Design thinking can help you put people first by assisting your company in crafting the discovery and design part of a digital transformation journey, which makes the later stages of development and delivery easier.
What Is Design Thinking In Business?
Design thinking is a procedure that aims to solve complex issues and create innovative solutions for a company using an approach that is focused on human needs. By designing for the wants and needs of a user, design thinking helps a business envisage a problem in a human-centric manner, can help develop a variety of solutions and allows the adoption of a hands-on perspective towards prototyping and testing.
Although the process of design thinking typically has five stages, these can simply be a flexible guide to your activities. These particular stages can be run simultaneously, switched with other steps or repeated numerous times to get the most information about your users and expand your ability to create the best solutions for them. This process also means that any knowledge gathered in the final stages can influence repeats or iterations of an earlier stage. Design thinking can create a loop where your business can continually gain a new understanding and develop new ways to solve a user’s problem with a relevant product or service.
Similarly, digital transformation is also a journey where a business might be in a perpetual loop to constantly test and improve the ability to choose technology that suits its people and processes. So here are the five stages of design thinking that can help you select the technology your users need before deciding on the best digital adoption method.
Empathize With Your User’s Needs And Wants
The first stage in the design thinking process involves using empathy to consider users’ needs affected by a problem. In other words, you set aside your assumptions and step into the shoes of users when researching a problem and any solutions that have already been tried. Gaining an understanding of the failed solutions is also a helpful insight as it will prevent your company from crafting a similar solution that is not suitable for users.
When identifying how its product or service could be more inclusive for female drivers or ridders, Uber empathized when its female users by recognising that safety can only be a guarantee for some individuals and not all. As a result, it is currently running a pilot of an app feature in some countries, including places in Latin America, Australia and the Middle East which permits non-binary and female drivers to opt for women-rider-only trips. Moreover, Uber believes that solutions like this can only be possible if a product team comprises a diverse range of individuals who can empathize with a broader range of users.
Define The Problem In A Human-Centric Way
The next phase involves analyzing the observations gained from the previous stage to create a list of the primary user problems your team have garnered at this point. Any problem needs to be defined from the perspective of the user. For example, a problem statement from a human-centred perspective could be ‘Women under the ages of 35 find it harder to progress than those over 35.’ Once this problem is defined, you could think of ideas for resolving this problem in the next stage. But at this phase, you can also help your designers source ideas for functions, features and other elements to solve the issue.
After establishing needs using discussions with the local community and school groups in the area, The National Health Service (NHS) found a dependency on practitioners and trusted adults to signpost and access various mental health support. However, this meant limited access to relevant support for mental health for children and young people. So, the NHS’s problem here could be defined as ‘Children and young people need a way to access relevant mental health services directly.’ Once this problem was defined, the NHS designed, tested and created a support finder platform which could signpost young people to mental health services depending on their needs gauged through a series of questions.
Create Innovative Solutions To The Human-Centric Problem Statement
After defining your problem, move on to looking for new ways to reframe the problem to identify unique solutions. For example, at the start of this ideation stage, you could opt for using techniques like Brainstorm and Worst Possible Idea to encourage a wider variety of ideas. Then, other ideation techniques like SCAMPER can help you test out your ideas.
For example, HP aimed to make buying printer ink less tiresome. Through the HP Instant feature, a user could rely on the HP printer to automatically order another cartridge when it knew that its ink was about to run out. This innovative digital solution increased loyalty among HP customers as it meant that customers no longer had to think of doing this task and could now focus on other tasks.
Build A Prototype Of The Best Ideas
This experimental phase aims to produce scaled-down versions of a product or service so that any possible solutions can be investigated and then accepted, improved or rejected depending on whether they meet the user’s needs. For instance, if you were developing a prototype for an app, this could include signup, login and onboarding screens, and details of how it could function. First, you could start with a low-fidelity prototype to gather initial feedback from users and other stakeholders in the team. Then, as the list of viable solutions gets less, design a better functioning prototype for another round of testing.
Test Your Solutions To Gain A Better Understanding Of The User Perspective
Lastly, test your prototypes with your actual users. This stage can help you gain more of a realistic understanding of how these users will feel toward a proposed solution. These findings could lead you back to a previous stage so you can make further alterations. This type of desire to arrive at a better solution through constructive criticism, competition across teams in the company and collaboration are prominent features in Nike’s footwear process. Additionally, when developing a solution for users, it believes that designers are as crucial to the process of innovation as footwear engineers, business leaders and factory developers.
Users do not automatically care about a solution that is creative or efficient. Ultimately, your digital transformation process will need to involve a solution that resolves your users’ pain points. So, before using a digital adoption tool to implement new technology, use the design thinking process to craft a technological solution based on needs and wants.
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