Every app owner wants their app to have an intuitive design. They want it to be more humanized such that it generates a feeling of familiarity to the users. Many approaches have come and gone to create an intuitive design. But one approach that seems to have stayed and made a mark is design thinking.
Usually, people associate design thinking with analyzing the product’s design, app’s navigation, button placement, and other things about the app’s layout. But in reality, design thinking goes far beyond that. It is about rethinking the app design from a human point of view.
What Is Design Thinking?
A simple way to define design thinking would be to think about product design with the human-centered approach. It infuses empathy and the users’ emotions in the product design process. This iterative process allows the product teams to understand the needs, challenges, and expectations of the people who will be using the app and identify the apt solutions. It takes product designing to a deeper level where it is centered on the people that it is designed for.
It is a non-linear approach Innovators are using design thinking to:
- Understand their users’ needs better
- Minimize the risks associated with launching a product without the market need
- Iterate the design process through questioning
Unlike general norms, design thinking should not be limited to app designers. It is a way of working that revolves more around how humans would interact with it. Hence, it can unleash the full creative energies of anyone and can be applied to any part of any job.
Today, one can apply design thinking to improve processes, enhance systems, implement new procedures & policies, or simply improve a brand’s customer experience. The gist remains simple – rethinking every aspect of the app, product, system, or any other thing with the user in mind.
Why Design Thinking Is The New Way Forward?
It isn’t something new that design thinking is the way forward for all businesses. It gives everyone in an organization a new perspective to look at things. One follows some specific steps in design thinking like observe, understand, define, ideate, prototype, test, and validate. This approach can be followed in almost every aspect of any job to make it more humanized with improved processes to better suit user needs. And most importantly, the reason why design thinking is the path every tomorrow-looking company should take is that it makes even a traditional thinker into a creative creature. It makes them assess the current app, product, or any other approach through the customer’s eyes to humanize it.
But that’s not all. There are several reasons why design thinking is the new way to move forward. Some are:
It Helps Frame And Reframe Problems
As design thinkers, product teams need to think about the problem in ways no one is approaching. Adopting the process of design thinking changes their perspective towards the problem. They take multiple perspectives to determine the problem and find the right solution with out-of-the-box thinking.
They get into the users’ shoes to identify the issue and break it down to find what type of thinking at the users’ end could be the right solution.
It Fosters Innovation
The next reason why design thinking is a new way forward is that it fosters innovation, which is crucial for any app development. It provides an innovative way for app designers to handle issues. It challenges the existing assumptions about the app and its said features to create something out of the box.
Many companies hire angular developers, java developers, or other remote developers from external companies to infuse their app with a fresh perspective. However, even when hiring remote developers/designers, companies need to build a culture of design thinking where even the offshore tech talent follow the design thinking process or approach to build more user-centered products or apps.
The design team working with design thinking shuns the established beliefs about how the app users’ minds would work and fosters innovation within teams. They are encouraged to think outside the box, which is what today’s customer demands.
It Increases Customer Retention
Design thinking urges designers and developers to understand their customers in ways they never expected. It forces them to take the user-centric approach in all aspects of designing the app. It gives them the power to peek inside the minds of the app users and how they’d react to different triggers.
And when they build an app that ticks off every question, every challenge, and every obstacle, they impress customers in ways unimaginable. With a human-centered approach around the target buyer personas, it caters to all the requirements of the customers, thus leading to higher customer retention.
It Allows Seamless Move From Prototype To Production
Iteration is at the core of design thinking. But unlike many other approaches that throwaway the mockups or prototypes, design thinking is founded on building apps that have evolved from their prototypes. It inspires the app design team to adopt the MVP development approach where they build a minimum viable product first and then scale it up as per the reviews and feedback received from the users. It works in a phased manner where the succeeding phase is always a better or evolved version of the preceding phase, based on human behavior.
It Minimizes Risks
There are several risks associated with launching a mobile app with a new idea. This approach assists rapid learning and iteration which minimized the majority of the risks. There are different phases in design thinking – observe, understand, define, share, prioritize, prototype, test, implement, and validate.
As it happens in different phases, with research, prototyping, testing, validating, and then development, it reduces the risk of launching a new idea. App designers are not only able to define the app on the basis of the target audience but also create an app that is built on numerous iterations.
It Promotes Fail-Learn-Iterate Approach
No one has been able to launch the perfect product in one go. There are some features of the product that will gain accolades from the uses while others will fail to cast the expected impact. For any successful designer, failure should never be a roadblock. Instead, it should be a stepping stone. And this is what design thinking promotes.
It encourages designers to embrace failures as a stepping stone that imparts learning lessons, which can be incorporated into the product. Product designers become innovators who do not stop with one failure. They learn from the mistakes, analyze the feedback, and make iterations based on the same.
On An Ending Note
Design thinking has enabled companies to outperform their competitors for a few years. The design-driven culture has encouraged more organizations to move ahead with a not-so-perfect product, an MVP. This enables them to test it again and again on its target audience or early adopters, learn from the customer feedback, and iterate the product design.
This approach is no longer exclusive to app designers. Today, most software development companies, product companies, and many other organizations are looking forward to enabling design thinking in every part of the process. This would ensure the organization is designed in a way that makes the entire organization more user-focused.
About The Author
Tanya Kumari leads the Digital Marketing & Content for Classic Informatics, a global web and custom software development company. She is an avid reader, music lover and a technology enthusiast who likes to be up to date with all the latest advancements happening in the techno world. When she is not working on her latest article on tech dynamics, you can find her by the coffee machine, briefing co-workers on the perks of living a healthy lifestyle and how to achieve it.
