The Role of Design Thinking in Startups

What is Design Thinking? 

Design thinking is an analytical procedure designers use to innovate creative responses to customers' problems. It includes understanding users' needs and viewpoints, generating creative ideas, prototyping solutions, and iterating according to feedback. 

The design thinking process promotes innovation. A company needs to innovate to survive and stay competitive in a quickly changing environment. Design thinking motivates a mindset of researching to bring solutions that are also functional, meaningful, and impactful for users and the startup ecosystem. 

Design teams use the design thinking process to confront problems that are weak or unknown.  Wicked problems request teams to think further, and take action immediately- all of this being features of design thinking. 

The design thinking framework provides practical methods and instruments for innovation. Companies like Google, Apple, and Airbnb use the design thinking process. 

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The design thinking process aims to fulfill three aspects: 

• Desirability 
• Feasibility 
• Viability

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Desirability refers to `what people desire? ` The design thinking process examines people's needs, dreams, and behaviors. Empathy is an important key, so the team listens to understand what people want, not what the company thinks they want. Then, they come up with solutions to satisfy these needs.

Is it technically possible to build the solution?’. When the team determines one or more solutions, they decide if the company can implement them. It would be feasible if the company had infinite resources and time to expand the solution. At the beginning of the design thinking process, teams shouldn’t start with technical restrictions because this can restrict innovation. 

A company must be able to produce earnings and profits from the solution that was found. Viability is essential for commercial companies and non-profits. Usually, companies start with viability or feasibility, and after that, they try to fit the solution and oversell it to the market. However, design thinking requires the teams to start with desirability and proceed with the other two. 

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The stages of Design Thinking

Now that we understand design thinking let’s look at its five stages. The stages aren’t always consecutive; teams often use them in parallel and repeat them when necessary. 

• Empathize: This is a crucial part of design thinking. It allows companies to understand their users' needs, motivations, and preferences. Companies need to understand their customer’s pain points and come up with products and services that address those needs. This step is made through user research 

• Define: when the team finds their information, the next step is to analyze the observations and summarize them to define the core problems. After identifying them, companies can concentrate their efforts on growing targeted solutions. This part guarantees that well-defined objectives direct the design thinking process. What can be a solution is to create personas to keep efforts human-centered. 

• Ideate: When the foundation is ready, it’s time for the team to think further. In this stage of design thinking, companies devise numerous strategies to brainstorm and create inventive solutions. Usually, to generate creative ideas, the team uses brainstorming sessions, mind mapping, or role-playing. 

• Prototype: This step is experimental and very important. A prototype allows companies to test and polish their ideas. Shifting from simple sketches to creative mock-ups, companies can visualize their ideas and quickly collect user feedback. It also helps with identifying the strengths and weaknesses of their designs and making the necessary changes after that. 
• Test: After making the prototypes, the team tests them with real users to see if they solve the problem. The test can reveal new insights or return to the Define stage. Testing also helps provide valuable data and insights that shape future iterations. 

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The five steps explained above are just one of several design thinking frameworks. Designers worldwide have interpreted the abstract design thinking process in different ways and proposed other frameworks. 

Even if design thinking frameworks look very different, they share several common traits, like empathy and reframing the problem, where the exploration of the problem space is very important. Also, analyzing the solutions that come after the exploration is important. Later, the synthesizing step creates mature ideas, and finally, prototype testing and iterating. 

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How can you apply design thinking to your company?

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If you want to implement design thinking in your startup, let’s find the practical steps to follow.

• Mindset Shift: You need to start a culture change that emphasizes experimentation and iteration. It is also important to encourage the team to adopt failure as part of the learning process. This can help integrate design thinking resources like podcasts into the company’s learning programs. 

• Collaborative Environment: open communication and collaboration must be encouraged, and team barriers must be broken.

• User Research: This step must be prioritized to understand a customer's needs and pain points. 

• Tools for design thinking: The teams need tools for mind mapping and collaborative creation to allow them to generate creative answers. Tools like Miro, Hotjar, and Stormboard. 

• Team dynamics: Every company can apply design thinking by promoting active listening, respecting other viewpoints, and making team members feel equal. 

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Why is it essential to implement design thinking?

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Design thinking is essential for innovation and startup success. By adopting a human-centered technique, a company can transform product development or improve customer experiences.   

Design thinking can transform product development processes by introducing human-centered procedures. Design thinkers absorb themselves in the knowledge of users’ needs and pain points, iterating through prototypes and collecting feedback to create products and solutions that address the public’s problem.

When the design thinking process is implemented, it can improve the customer experience. Empathy with users and gaining insights into their behaviors can create important solutions. 

Design thinking offers startups strong frameworks for confronting major challenges and bringing innovation. With a design thinking process, the startup can refine its concepts based on feedback, making the products and services effective for the target market. 

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Now, once you find out what design thinking is and what its role is in your startup, you are ready to introduce it in your company!

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