Design thinking is putting ‘human centricity’ at the core of your strategic decision making to create innovative solutions, drive efficiency and achieve competitive advantage. Not limited to an industry or job function, it can be adapted by different sectors and departments. Whilst it can also be used to improve internal performances, here we examine how it can help to surpass customer expectations. How it can help create products of excellence that consumers will love and how by adopting it, your approach to customer experience will be transformed.

Sumit Singh is Senior General Manager-Product Planning and Head of User Experience and Industrial Design at Havells. Creating excellent product solutions via design thinking methodology.

“Design thinking is at the core of all design practices” Sumit explains. “It is all about being able to empathise with the consumer; being able to address all the technical boundary conditions and understand the viability. In my case, the product solution is a tangible entity. Viable, possible and desirable are the three key aspects a design thinker needs to capture”.

Focus is on producing fresh and value creating products, those that people use in their daily lives. By using design thinking the goal is to create humanised products that stand out and provide a pleasurable experience.

“We design from the standpoint of HOW usable, HOW meaningful and HOW beautiful our solutions should be. Design thinking is a co-creation process with all organization stakeholders which continuously ask these questions. Such thoughts and observations enable a deep understanding of the customer and businesses articulated or unarticulated needs and this thoughtful ecosystem helps generate superior experiences and solutions for all. It’s the buildup of a common belief and motivation to deliver winning designs.

How do the team use design thinking to arrive at a new product design?

“A lot of consumer understanding, for example ethnographic studies, contextual enquiries and task analysis” explains Sumit. “We also build study prototypes (physical and virtual) that demonstrates how it’s handled and how manoeuvrable the product is to root out any issues and derive the necessary experience. The designer then looks at all these issues together with a diverge/converge/ diverge approach. By this I mean first diverge to find all the information on issues and possibilities, then converge to redefine the problem and then diverge again to create more ideas. Lastly you converge again to filter out the most meaningful idea based on viability and possibility. Overall it is a process which enables the most collectively exhaustive and mutually exclusive design solutions.”

For example, the so called ‘simple daily use objects’ are enormously challenging.

Recent products include an award winning clothes iron, a ceiling fan which has less sound and provides light at the same time and a juicer-mixer-grinder which caters to low noise level and superior hi-touch interface. These are designed and developed from the viewpoint of humanizing technology and future life trends. How do people do the mundane chore, what the pain points are, how light weight it is, how pleasant the user interface and interaction is, what are the delighters We want to give a lively experience. The need to improve products from a sensorial perspective. As experience design is coming into the foreground it entails dialling-up the overall user experience, pleasure, ease of use and desire of product solutions, touch, feel, finish, sound and aroma. That’s at the core of experience design.

“If companies want to stand out, Sumit believes adopting design thinking is the best way to do it. “I feel that design is one of the key differentiators from one brand’s solution offering to another. Design thinking is a strategic tool therefore, it is extremely important for all organisations to invest, participate and imbibe. Build a design thinking culture and creative ecosystem. If not, they will lose out soon. The customer today is discerning. They have plenty of choices in brands, features and prices points. They are constantly making that decision based on their resources and sensorial experience in addition to product performance and quality.”

While the benefits of adopting Design Thinking as a way of life in the organization are huge, there are some inherent challenges. “Inertia to change is a big challenge for any company when it comes to culture and process” says Sumit. “The best way of convincing everybody towards design thinking is to have results on the table, to have desirable and performing solutions from all aspects. Which the design thinker does through the creative expression. People are aware of the very big companies who’ve worked marvels with design thinking, so it’s a case of showing the impact in your domain.”

How will design thinking progress in the future?

“Design thinking is a strategic tool and will become vital for any organisational success. Going forward designers role will be in influencing company results and be involved in key decision making for the organization along with business stakeholders like sales and marketing. I perceive that soon you could have CEOs coming from design leader backgrounds.

Design thinking as an Org Strategy can help in defining future product roadmaps, customer value/ experience index, brand loyalty and recall, acceleration of new product adoption, market margin projections, sustainability and overall position of the company amongst competitors. People, organizations and stakeholders have realised the need of bringing design thinking in the mainstream and its widespread impact”.

Design Thinking is a great way of rethinking your strategic approach to customer experience. Julee (Hyunju Lee), Chief Design Officer and Design Thinking Facilitator at UXStudio (www.uxstudio.co), explains that even though it is in the title, ‘Design Thinking’ is not just thinking because ‘thinking’ doesn’t deliver action.

Design thinking is “actually doing and practicing” and is a “practical methodology to learn problem solving skills.” It is about innovating through design-led thinking and doing with both product and experience in mind.

There are many examples of organisations taking on a design culture says Julee; Google created a design method called ‘Design Sprint.’ a five-phase framework of problem solving process through rapid prototyping and user testing. Airbnb uses Design Thinking to their projects actively, the process created by Standford d.school.

Intuit has run the program called Innovation Catalysts for decade to transform into a customer-centric culture. Intuit has used a Design Thinking practice to build an innovative customer focused culture. One of their popular products is Turbo Tax.

US professionals can take a photo of their W-8 form which the software uses to automatically tell them what tax they need to pay. A perfect example of turning a traditionally time consuming and tiresome task into a user friendly experience.

The immense value that design thinking offers has prompting companies across the APAC to position it at the core of their strategy development and organisational change to create a culture that is focused on a human-centric way of problem solving.