Design Thinking: The Way to Breakthrough Innovation

When developing a product, service, or any kind of human experience, the end user is your final customer. The end user is the person you care the most about from a product development perspective because they are the ones actually using your product or service. Design thinking is the mindset that enables you to drop your sense of self and focus almost exclusively on the end user, their needs, sensations, pain points, and aspirations. Once you empathize with and understand the end user, you can build a product or service that is tailored to their needs. This increases your chances of success because you listened rather than imposing your views and beliefs.

Dropping yourself and focusing attentively on the end user and their needs may feel uneasy and discomfiting at times. Building a product or service would be faster if you skipped that part right away. You would have the final product ready much earlier if you followed your instincts and secondary knowledge (i.e., through secondary research using existing available information). You may be faster in the development stage, but you may lose track of the end user, and you may risk having to go back to square one for prototyping your product right after you launch it to the market.

To create impactful innovation, you need to drop the ego and get into the mind and body of the end user. Mix that careful listening and research with your creative instincts and forward-looking attitude, and you get the design thinking mindset. There are multiple stages in the design thinking process to solve a pressing problem. We will explore them below. One key principle of the design thinking process is to let go of the mental barriers and limitations you have built up throughout your life and drop into your childhood self instead. Your child self is open, genuinely curious, capable of learning quickly, and willing to fail through novel experimentation. This is the design thinking process: unpredictable like the life of a two-year-old exploring a new park.

According to Tim Brown, executive chair of one of the world’s leading design thinking organizations (Ideo), “Design thinking is a human-centered approach to innovation that draws from the designer’s toolkit to integrate the needs of people, the possibilities of technology, and the requirements for business success” (source).

This is important: design thinking is an “approach” to seeing life and product development. It is not only tied to the practice of a designer. Design thinking is for everyone building innovation. It takes into account the business, the surrounding environment, and, most importantly, the end user. There are different stages in design thinking. Each stage calls for a different nuance of the human-centered approach. Sometimes, especially in the early phases, you want to drop your preconceived notions of the world and listen and ideate freely. Other times, you want to address practical and business challenges to ensure the applicability of your prototype and idea.