Design Thinking for Successful Digital Transformation

In today’s time, especially in the post-COVID-19 era, digital innovation is the key. Businesses don’t just need to innovate but they are looking at ways in which to scale up and accelerate the innovation process. However, most companies are optimized for incremental innovation and not for disruptive innovation that requires creative problem solving. Design thinking can fuel and scale creativity across your organization and speed up your digital transformation journey.

Digital transformation is about reimagining and rethinking your business processes by leveraging digital technologies. It is more than adopting and implementing digital tools and platforms. The transformation from a traditional business to a digital business is no easy feat. The digital landscape is unpredictable and rapidly evolving. The digital world is not easy to understand and conquer. Design thinking can help your organization in staying ahead of the curve.

Apple, Disney and Google are a few of the names that have made design thinking a part of their organizational culture and have benefitted significantly from it. Design thinking has helped them better understand customers and find optimum solutions to cater to their needs. And their huge customer base is a testimony to their success in doing it.

Digital transformation is about creatively solving undefined and complex business problems. As the problems are undefined, usual solutions or a templatized approach to problem solving doesn’t work. Many companies struggle with their digital transformation projects due to these factors. According to McKinsey, the success rate for digital transformation efforts is less than 30 percent.

Design thinking is a multi-step, user centric process that examines the past, present and future details of an enterprise to suggest a set of solutions. It helps organizations to identify the optimal customer experiences and highlights the problems that require creative solving. Design thinking consists of 5 steps.

• Empathy: A critical element to design thinking is empathy with the users to understand their goals, motivations and pain points.
• Define: Here you define the problem from the insights gained in the first step.
• Ideate: Once the problem is defined, it is time to find the solutions by generating ideas by collaborating with people across the organization.
• Prototyping: Create prototypes of various ideas, test and validate them. Collect feedback from users.
• Test: Continuously test your prototypes, capture the feedback and revisit your solution to find the optimum one.

At Gemini Consulting & Services, we understand design thinking and its effectiveness in the driving digital transformation of a business. We provide strategy, consulting and implementation services to businesses in adopting design thinking and digital transformation projects. Click here to know more about our design thinking services.

1. Invest in Customer Research: The core of design thinking is the user and his goals, needs and pain points. To understand your customer, you need to go deeper, use various qualitative and quantitative techniques to identify his needs. The better you understand your customer, the better solution you will arrive at.
2. Break the Silos: Design thinking is collaborative and not just the responsibility of one team. Make it as collaborative as possible by creating an interdisciplinary team. Every department needs to focus on customers and share their experiences.
3. It is a Continuous Process: Design thinking is a continuous process. Your customer’s motivation, needs and pain points keep evolving and changing and so you need to continuously better your design to cater to it. Keep invested in optimizing the customer experience.
4. Quick Prototyping: A solution on paper is not match the prototype of the solution. You can see how a prototype works and how your customers are using the solution. Prototypes allow you to quickly test your ideas, gather feedback and revisit your solution. It is also cost-effective and saves time-to-market.
5. Build a Customer-Centric Culture: Customers should be at the center of your design thinking and digital transformation strategy. This can only happen when customer-centricity is part of your organizational culture with every employee focused on understanding customers.
6. Be Brave: Digital transformation and design thinking both require unconventional thinking and approaches. That’s what separates the leaders from laggards. Disruptive innovation is also about being bold and going into unchartered territories.

In today’s digital world, digital transformation is a must, and design thinking is an effective way to tackle the various challenges that come up. It is also essential for building innovation-driven companies. Adopting design thinking will help you drive your digital transformation project.