Digital Design Thinking

The world is rapidly forwarding to the digital world. And, the experience mechanism changed from text to gesture and voice commands.

Unfortunately, The Design Thinking was downstream in the past decade. Because the nerds were focused on building products and improving technology. So, no one cares about the design and its experience. Today, as a terrain of innovation expands to encompass human-centered processes for their services and products. Now, the era changed from technology to user. So, the companies just behind to catch-up mastermind designers to create awesome ideas to improve experience rather than simply dress them up.

The term Digital Design Thinking is a collective design activity of designers to follow the process of the creative way to solve a problem of the digital world like web, mobile, wearables, VR, etc. But, the design thinking is not only for designers. Basically, it's business-oriented process, just need an ability to solve the problem in a simple manner by providing the better experience.

The Strategy for Digital Design Thinking

Digital Design Thinking is a strategy making process by avoiding mistakes by applying available tools from the world of design and shifting the focus to human behavior. Means, design for the user. So, the designer must have the knowledge about both technical aspects and user.

Design Thinking has three main stages:

1. Invent for future: To understand customer and its behavior

2. Test the idea out: Conduct experiments using rapid-prototyping to understand about customer response

3. Bring the product to life

Here is a formula that clearly depicts the term “DESIGN”

Design = Experience + Appearance

Experience = Emotion + Solution

Appearance = Color + Layout

The Design has evolved beyond making objects based on the remarkable success rate of design-led companies. Now the organizations tended to think like designers and apply design principles to the workplace itself to improve the experience of their product and services. Design thinking is at the core of effective strategy development and organizational change.

See, a famous quote from the master:

“Most people make the mistake of thinking design is what it looks like. People think it’s this veneer — that the designers are handed this box and told, ‘Make it look good!’ That’s not what we think design is. It’s not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works.”

— Steve Jobs

What is exactly “The Design” and “The Design Thinking”?

Most of the peoples are misunderstood the terms Design and Design Thinking, really? Yes, unfortunately. They think both terms are same to make just colorful depiction. But that's wrong.

The Design is a solution to the problem by applying experience. The Design is like a car that how a car looks like and the experience of driving comfort. The Digital Design Thinking is a process to derive a solution to the respective problem for the digital platform. It’s like how a car manufactured in the factory.

Digital Design Thinking: Learning by Doing

Every human has the design capability. You might be acting like a designer in a lot of situations. Even at making a presentation or might be planning a home, and so on. You don't have to be a designer to think like one. It will take years, if you want to be a good designer by the way you experiment, learn, innovate, create, lead, and a lot. The design begins with setting a strategic intention. If you are mapping the strategies, yes! you are start designing.

Creative leadership is not just simply asked to do creative. It is about an individual who leads for creativity. It is not only the duty of a creative leader as well as the intention to set the condition for the organization to generate, embrace, and execute on new ideas. It’s a competitive imperative that will keep you ahead in the marketplace to think wide. It doesn’t matter about the industry.

How can develop Digital Design Thinking capabilities?

1. Develop mindset by doing best practices to improve and speed-up.

2. Connect with customers to discover more innovation in deeply by understanding their mindset.

3. Try to break the barriers.

4. Experiment the ideas by rapid-prototyping.

5. Develop a design culture to enhance creativity.

Design for Social Innovation should say; Design for User

The design is for peoples those who are living on the planet to improve their life and style. So, only design can impact the life and style of the people. According to the king of experience Don Norman, "The human-centered design process starts with the good understanding of user who needs the solution to meet."

The design is the creative thinking process of the brain. So, I would like to say:

“The design is what experience”

Conclusion

Today, the companies understood the use of the digital design thinking process to create remarkable products for the digital world. Especially, the startups built a culture of design to create incredible products. Now, the companies are the rush to hire designers who can think amazingly to create their product and a culture.

A good designer will be observing, interviewing, creating personas, empathy mapping, storyboards, associational thinking, create rapid-prototyping, and decision-making analysis to understand and break his/her barriers to create an awe-inspiring experience.