Transforming Your Product Development Process with Design Thinking

Regardless of the nature of your business and the various factors that contribute to its success, proficiency in product design is essential for achieving optimal outcomes. A solid grasp of product design principles is crucial for meeting the needs of your ecosystem and ensuring that your business thrives over time.

Product design involves identifying an opportunity in a specific market, understanding its demographics, and identifying the needs of the customers. This process leads to the development of innovative solutions that meet those needs.

To facilitate innovation, it's crucial to find a solution for the identified market opportunity. Regardless of your role - marketing manager, owner, developer, or designer - possessing knowledge of design thinking is vital to creating exceptional product designs in today's competitive economy. Design thinking is a powerful approach to achieve this, and it involves a structured process that encourages collaboration and user-centric design.

What is Design Thinking?

Design thinking is a customer-centric process that aims to create innovative solutions by understanding and empathizing with the customer's needs. It involves a series of actions, starting with ideation and culminating in the implementation of the creation. Although design thinking can be applied to various tasks and organizations, it is particularly useful in product development, where the focus is on creating a product or service that meets a specific need. By employing design thinking, businesses can gain a deeper understanding of their customers and develop more effective solutions that satisfy their needs.

By guiding a design team through the processes of questioning and refining the assumptions made about what product or service is in need, the gradual clarity of what the consumer may need becomes solidified.

The design thinking process is that which enables a team to collectively elaborate and expand on new ideas through the collection, development, and reworking of the insights derived about a customer base and the business ecosystem. By spending time brainstorming, re-hashing, and focusing many ideas into a few good ones, the most promising solutions make it through the trials of refinement.

The theory of design is often related to being a part of a series of three
overlapping circles of inspiration, implementation, and ideation. Though
this process is meant to be less of a sequence of steps, and more of a
continuous task of revisiting how each of the interesting themes (inspiration,
implementation, and ideation) ebb and flow with each other.

The consideration of these elements is a way of discovering intersections where human value, technical capabilities for industry, and commercial viability meet. Simply put, design thinking is recognizing a problem and then using innovation to inspire the creation of a solution.

Steps in Design Thinking

Design thinking in terms of product development, though this method can be applied to any product or process, typically follows a logical and predictable set of steps:

Empathizing with a User's Need

This is the initial step, and though this may technically be the first, it will be revisited throughout the entire development process. To do this well, a product design team needs to be able to ascertain and regularly clarify the needs of the existing or potential customer. By asking questions, presenting solutions, and determining their responses you begin to refine what is important to them.

What comes to the surface is a collection of values, needs, and desires which connect with their daily lives— likely to satisfy their own customers' needs. This process of empathy really looks like a conversation but is accomplished best by listening and asking the right questions.

If done well, the design team will come to a clear understanding of what matters to the client. With the right resources, the appropriate skills, and knowledge base, a team can begin the next step: defining the development process.

Insights: Defining Goals

After a design team has spent a significant amount of time trying to understand the needs of a client through conversation and empathy, a proper definition can be presented which helps to solidify the next steps to take. This is the process of clearly grasping the needs of the client or potential customer and then projecting them as insights of ideation.

Ideation of Solutions

This is typically the step that is the easiest for design teams to skip ahead to. Once a customer base's needs are known and defined, the process of ideation for resolution can begin. This is where the team starts coming up with potential solutions. It's the fun part but can also be a bit too drawn out at times.

While there are hundreds of good ideas, the goal should be finding the best one for the time.

A great example of this and the next few steps (prototyping and testing) is
Thomas Edison and his invention of the light bulb: He recognized consumer needs by empathizing with their situations and then, having defined the need, came up with the idea for the light bulb. However, that single-object idea took hundreds of variations before a final product took shape.

In the same way, a design team will need to take that centralized, defined need, and begin selecting potential solutions for the next step -Prototyping.

Prototyping

This is the stage where solutions are beginning to be realized. Ideas in this
step can become more tangible. These are ideas that take on enough of a form and function to be tested to determine their usability and efficacy in satisfying the previously empathized and defined customer needs.

While some people may think that a prototype needs to be highly creative and visually pleasing, at this stage in the design thinking process, it's not as important. That comes later.

Spending too much time worrying about those points is where teams can get really bogged down in the creative production process. What happens is that if too much time is spent on the aesthetic details before testing has proven and worked out all of the foundational functions, then those clever and beautiful features might have to be scrapped later.

Instead, spending more time focusing on meeting the defined goal and its necessitated foundational function is best here. However, some thought should always go into how the functions will inform future aesthetics.

To not consider those at all will likely leave a team with a great product, but nothing that a client or their customers will be excited about using. The balance between form and function is key during this stage. Great design teams have mastered this.

Testing for Feedback

Here is where a prototype, in its singular or various forms, can be presented for client feedback. This is where the ideas, which a team may be excited and proud of, are quite literally held up to the fires of critique.

While your team may love and think about the world of the prototype, it is a rare occurrence indeed that a first idea is met with resounding favor and acceptance.

Being aware of this process and remaining open to what feedback a client provides is necessary to the product development process. It is in this fifth step that the previous four are called upon again, because what is being practiced in the presentation of each prototype (and there may be many) is, again, the step of empathy through understanding.

These conversations will happen over and over, continuously informing the processes of refinement throughout the revisiting of each stage.

Every time that process gets back to this fifth stage of testing, and each instance the prototype will again be held up to those fires until the client is
satisfied to a degree that allows for final testing.

Final Product

Having followed the steps, observed, respected, and embraced the stages, a product will have formed. This will be the synthesis of all that has been uncovered and manipulated through the design process until a final product is created.

How will a team know when it's done? When the client is satisfied. It is important to remember this because, theoretically, this process can go on indefinitely depending on the problem or requested solution.

Even if the team feels that there is more that can be done, control has to be relinquished. Ideally, this process has been not just enjoyable, but
stimulating. What can be learned about a company, team, and even on an
individual level carries immense value which, and when recognized, can be
capitalized on again and again.

Summary of Benefits

Companies that practice the design thinking process often report higher customer satisfaction through their ability to empathize with and thus eventually meet client, customer, and market needs.

By following the processes, attending with keen attention and openness in each stage, and allowing the inevitable setbacks and complications to have their space and time, eventually, a worthy product is created. Attendance to these processes can reduce problems, lower production costs, and create lasting, happy customers.