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The impact of new design thinking

By Hanfred Rauch.


Johannesburg, 05 Feb 2018
Ravi Naidoo, CEO.
Ravi Naidoo, CEO.

The customer experience has had such a profound impact on organisations across the globe that it has totally transformed the way we look at business. There was a time, not so long ago, that companies got by on looking like all-powerful behemoths - essentially intimidating their customers into buying from them. But since the financial crisis of 2008, we've gradually begun to lose faith in the Goliaths, leading us to make our decisions based on what truly works for us.

It emerged a few years ago that by 2020, the key differentiator in business would be determined solely by how good your customer experience is. Many would argue, however, that we are already there.

On the surface, this might not seem to hold a direct correlation to design, but in fact, it underpins it. By putting the end-user front and centre of our design process, we have begun to drastically reinvent our design thinking methodology by eliminating silo development within our organisation. As developers and designers now begin to work together on projects - facilitating better communication between individuals and departments - we have found that our whole organisation has become more customer-centric as a result.

A single guiding thought

First there must be a problem, or we would have no need to fix it. By identifying the problem, we simultaneously identify our end-user. Who is he/she? What's not working for them? What can we do to change that?

So, the seed becomes the design prompt - the single guiding thought for the entire event. Important at this stage is to realise that it doesn't have to be perfect, as our impression of our end user and his/her painpoints may change as we collaborate.

Devising a design prompt works in exactly the same way as identifying a goal. In a recent workshop in which we explored ways for developers to collaborate more effectively with designers, we asked ourselves:

* How might we make data collection more attractive for a developer?
* How might we encourage agile ceremony adaption for a developer?
* How can we design a better way for overstretched developers to get proactive assistance to help them meet their commitments?

Caution to the wind

But in identifying the right solution, we have to ask the right questions and avoid certain pitfalls:

1. Avoid generalisation. By being as specific as possible, you cut to the core of the problem, putting a face to it, which means you're more likely to focus on the right details.
2. Don't focus on the buyer. Ultimately, it's the end-user that will have to make this work. If the end-user is happy, the buyer is happy.
3. Ignore problems that have already been identified. For obvious reasons, this is a time waster, as the point of identifying a design prompt is to discover problems that you are not aware of, or else you would have begun to effect a solution.
4. Don't misread your participants. If your workshop delegates have no insight into the process due to lack of experience or because it's not really their field, you are unlikely to identify a design prompt of any worth.

To put our internal thinking around potential problems into practice, the next phase of Virtualscape's transformation to fully adopting new design thinking is to set up focus groups with real-life end users. By discovering first-hand what problems they face from day to day, we will create actual solutions for the most central person to the entire process - the customer.

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