Design Thinking; What's it all about?
- charlotte lloyd
- Oct 23, 2022
- 5 min read
As consumers, we know what we want, and this is a fixed mindset that often goes unchanged. And in turn marketers, smart marketers tap into this. What we buy from the grocery store, the tyre shop, or even a story you’re drawn to in your local bookshop. The people behind the scenes use strategies for you to invest in their product. They know their consumer, and that is you, me, or the elderly lady across the street. We all have preferences for products, services, and everything in between, and you best believe the marketers know this inside and out. Most of this comes down to a strategy called ‘Design Thinking.’
What is Design Thinking?
Design thinking is an approach that companies use to solve problems and prioritise their consumers' needs and wants. It takes a tap into the humanity of all of us, empathy. It relies on the observation of a particular target market in their environments. It follows a conjunction of steps that allow for the initial steps in empathy towards consumers to create an ideal product eventually. Tim Brown, a British Industrial Designer and President of IDEO, said, “Design thinking is a human-centred and collaborative approach to problem-solving, using a designed mindset to solve complex problems.” As consumers, we all want to use and find products that suit out needs, and for this, a defining mindset in design thinking utilises the basic idea of understanding people and their views and, from this creating something that is tailored to our lives and down to our very personal beliefs.
There are 5 steps in the process of Design Thinking. This includes empathy, defining, ideate, prototyping and testing.
Empathy is the first, foundational and imperative step in the design thinking process. The effects of this step speak for themselves. And if a company chooses to skip straight to the definition stage, the risk of failure spikes. By showing and conveying empathy towards consumers, businesses have a clear path of who they’re targeting, what life these people lead and the beliefs and values they uphold.
Following this, the definition of a plan going forward allows for a clear objective of what you hope comes out of this idea or product and the purpose this holds for consumers, small or large.
Putting this definition into a simple foundational idea is the whole reason for the ideate stage. To put what you’ve learnt from the empathy and define stage and come together to think of an idea that will tap into the empathy revealed for the consumer.
Along with the last stage, the prototype stage of the design thinking process puts all the information gathered in the past stages, into their physical form. Creating a product on service that could work and fixing any niggles or problems before an actual release.
And the very last stage of the process is the testing stage. This stage gives consumers a taste of what their preferred company or products have released. From a business standpoint, this can be released as a trial, such as limited edition offers. This is a much safer way for companies to protect their high risk of failure and something that can be retracted at any time. Hence the ‘testing’ of the product or service.
This process provides brands with a much deeper understanding of their consumer market and pushes companies to delve into the deeper aspects of marketing and marketing, especially for a targeted group. By using design thinking, companies have a higher guaranteed success rate, rather than just diving straight to the ideation stage without the former understanding of who and what their product stands for. This can be seen below in the case study of how bypassing the empathy and defining stage, companies miss the mark on their product or service's success.
Putting this into play
One company that has used the design thinking process successfully is of Airbnb. Through BBVA’s website (Banco Bilbao Vizcaya Argentaria), a customer-centric global financial services group, the story of Airbnb’s success story is documented. This is shown especially through their design thinking process and revenue turnover after putting this process into action.
The company, although not well known at this time, actually launched in 2008. This was a time when the idea of a digital marketing strategy was not a top priority, and it showed. In 2009 almost a year into the venture, the company was on the verge of bankruptcy and was practically unknown. The revenue was topping barely $200 a week. At this time, however, the company had around 40 ads published in New York, and from this, co-founder, Paul Graham realised there was a commonality between them all. The pictures, if any, were of low quality and didn’t always show the full homes that people were booking, essentially the marketing was off because consumers couldn’t see where they were staying and where their money was going. A simple change was needed.
The solution, though not overly complicated, made all the difference. To put themselves into the consumer's shoes and see where people were staying for themselves. When reflecting on the design thinking process, their former marketing strategy had zero empathy, and they did not know or understand their consumers. Joe Gebbia, one of the other founders, went to New York, visited all the places available to book, and took new and updated images of every place on the site. This immersion technique taps into every aspect of the foundational elements of design thinking, and empathy. By getting into the heads of the people using their services it was a simple use of digital technology.
The results thereafter saw an almost immediate turnover with twice as much weekly revenue. The founders’ backgrounds, although in coding, couldn’t help them in this instance. And by using instinct based on what they would want as consumers, the solution was not scalable but took the company off the edge of bankruptcy.
As an extension, the Airbnb site designer was told to examine the use of star ratings and soon decided to replace these with a heart. This showed a deeper connection with consumers and went through the empathetic mindset that so many companies lose sight of. And this saw great success. After replacing the star, the company’s business increased by more than 30%.
From the starting days of Airbnb, the company has revolutionised tourism. They have more than 1.5 million ads in 192 countries and 34,000 cities with a total number of roomers of more than 40 million.
Recommendations
Looking at this case study of Airbnb, it is clear that the switch from print to digital booking and reviewing has become easier and easier through the use of technology and its advancements. Based on this instance, I think it would have been helpful to categorise their places according to budget and what consumers they were and still are targeting. Many variations of stays can be chosen from different categories through today's app. However, as a starting point, when this instance took place, to place themselves in the shoes of the consumer, categorising their places and ‘Airbnbs’ would have contributed to figuring out and targeting the main demographic that the website and/or app attracts.
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