What is Design Thinking? Why do you need it?
Design thinking is a creative process to solve problems.
By focusing on the people you’re creating for, you can make better solutions for them through your product or service.
How is the process of Design Thinking?
- Empathy: to fully understand user’s problems, what they want, and what they need.
- Define: to define the problem to understand the problem
- Ideate: Brainstorm to solve problems of the target group with solutions. Create mind map. Go beyond wild and crazy ideas.
- Create prototype: the physical form of the solution. It should be an interactive product.
- Test: if users don’t understand the prototype, something goes wrong. Write down the troubles, and then change to improve it.
Why do we need to know Design Thinking?
Having Design Thinking skills is a key to having progress. Not only for creative roles, it’s an important skill for any role in any industry.
Design Thinking helps your team and even organization to create better product as effective solution for your users’ problems. If you design or create something for people, people will buy your product.
Do you know that 80-90% of products are failed?
- Google Glass
“Smart glass” that was able to check your messages, search on the internet, take a photo, and record anytime in 3–5 hours battery life. Hi-tech? Yup. But creepy!
Imagine, you have a conversation with someone who wears Google Glass. You won’t realize if they record you or not. That’s why it affected many concerns about people’s privacy.
What’s its real value and function anyway? not clear. As a result, this product was banned in many places such as ATMs, banks, cinemas, sports arenas, classrooms, casinos, bars, etc.
2. Segway
This innovative balance transport with electric battery was banned in some countries because it doesn’t fit on roads, or sidewalks. Too slow on the road, and too slow on the sidewalk.
Moreover, what’s its real function? Where to park this? Who are the target market? Not clear. Many tragic complaints: users got injured after falling, some crashed, and some lost their control while using the segway. One of them was the owner of Segway company, James Heselde who died in a segway accident. He rode his segway, fell off a cliff, and into a river.
These products fail because the creator's expectations don’t fit with the user’s needs. Creators built solutions first (designer-centric), instead of identifying the user’s problem (user-centric) and what they need.
