Topic 2 How to apply design thinking and what type of tools to use
To apply design thinking to your own work, it does not have to be in big scale. You might choose to focus on one aspect of the design thinking process. For example, the process can assist you with getting to know your customers (or potential customers) and consciously be more empathetic.
For example, if the reviews you are getting are not very positive, you can conduct some user interviews to find out what your customers are missing.
Another way to apply design thinking could be to focus on the collaborative nature of the process. In this case, you can hold ideation sessions with representatives from diverse teams. Brainstorming sessions in a design-thinking style is a way to work on your marketing strategies.
Holding a design-thinking workshop can be a way to produce ideas for new products or services. If you want to improve an aspect of your team or to design new motive strategy for your employees, a design thinking workshop is a good way to go.
Below you can find some suggestions for activities to help you start applying design thinking.
Explore analogous inspiration
Choose a piece of the service, experience, or problem you want to focus on.
We want to increase participation in our company events.
Identify one emotion you want to evoke in your audience of focus.
We want people to feel enthusiastic and engaged.
Brainstorm services, experiences, campaigns or solutions that evoke that emotion
Make your event more relevant to people interested or needing your services or products promoted through your events. Make sure you engage your relevant audience to keep them interested in participating.
Explore how that service, experience, campaign or solution evokes that emotion. Get specific.
Design an event with a focus on participants, make it interactive so that participants will feel enthusiastic and engaged before, during and after so that participants will feel like a member of a wider community.
Fill in the following statement (or a similar one). How can we make our problem (our service, event, experience) more like (analogous service, experience, or solution)?
How can we make participation in our events more like feeling like a member of a wider community?
Use the statement used above as your framework for brainstormig to generate new ideas applicable to your context.
What if you included networking activities or other interactive activities about your company’s services/products and participants’ desired take outs from this event?
Design thinking Tools
This is the process of thinking in visual terms ,beyond written or spoken words. Through visualization a group (or an individual) is forced to unlock various brain functions which produce new ideas.
This is an approach through which the group (or individual) follows the customer’s journey from their first interaction with a company of service to a sale and the aftermath of the time they receive the service or buy the product. Throughout this process, the group follows closely the customer’s emotional reactions, both the highs and the lows and identifies their specific needs.
The value chain is constituted by all the activities a company performs to create and launch a product. The value chain analysis includes at observing and analyzing at the interactions the company has with the value chain partners who are any external partners in this process. Looking closely at these interactions will make it possible how value for the customer might be increased at every stage.
To assist you in the Empathy stage and researching your clients you can explore a tool like Lookback to help you get and organize your feedback.
Some other tools that help with defining your ideas or moving into the ideation stage after the empathy and define steps (or before) is the tools Boards that provide a flexible space to tell stories and share ideas.
A useful tool for brainstorming is Miro . You can use this platform to visualize collaboratively with your team or other colleagues and business partners.