As the market competition is constantly growing, companies are relying more on statistics, data, and sales to target customers. This is the reason that new product designs fail to meet the expectation of the customers and sink into the market without putting up the right fight. Companies do not focus on customer needs while designing a product. But what they fail to realize is that user wants cannot be clearly expressed in form of data.
The reason behind such a failure is incompetence of the companies to understand the needs of the real user. The business organizations fail to create a specific user-driven strategy to devise a right product designing process. At the very base of product development lies the most crucial concept – thinking. Design thinking requires the team of developers and product designers to look at various aspects of the process from inside out. This procedure allows a company to get a view from the customers perspective.
Design thinking allows companies to come up with an empathic design that increases the success rate of the products. With design thinking, a human-centric approach is integrated into the process of innovation and design. Product designers can integrate the needs of people into latest technological possibilities that come parallel with requirements for business success.
There is much evidence to back that design thinking for the creation of empathic design works well for business organizations. The Design Council analyzed that companies that had a wide and positive perception focused on creating an empathic design. These companies also outperformed the FTSE 100 index by 200% over 10 years.
The Design Management Institute (DMI) kept a track of the growth of companies with a user-centric design from 2003 to 2013. In their research, they found that these design-centric companies grew 299% in comparison to their counterparts that showed a growth rate of 75%. This proves that companies which made empathic design their priority outperformed.
Tim Brown, CEO, and president of IDEO emphasizes design thinking being human-centric in approach incorporates problem-solving into innovation to focus on needs of people. Therefore, to develop a successful product with out-of-the-box design, companies need to shift their focus from product technicalities to finding solutions for user’s needs. A company can come up with w success product and design by simply identifying the problems of users and putting up ‘why’ questions throughout the whole process of brainstorming and development.
When the product designing and development is in question, teams should always work in continuous feedback based environment. Constant questioning and feedback system will assure that all the needs of a user have been addressed.
You need to work with your teams to churn various information available to you and come up with ideas and solutions that not only work in your flavor but also provides value to the users. Unless you focus on the needs of end users, products and designs will have very little chance of creating the desired mark on the market. Design thinking and agility in the workflow has helped biggest names like Apple to come up with successful product designs every time.
