Innovative Ways Companies Are Incorporating Design Thinking To Embrace A Changing Business Landscape: Use Cases

Running a business is quite complex. One needs to deal with constantly changing business dynamics, manage multiple stakeholders, meet ever-growing customer needs and deal with an unknown future with certainty. Design is more about providing the right solutions & solving real problems. It focuses on identifying the right questions & core problem that is important for the users. It involves interactions with users and a deep understanding of their environment.

The most successful companies like Airbnb, Nike, Pepsi, Google, & Apple have all embraced design thinking. These companies use design thinking to rekindle creativity, narrow down focus areas & communicate goals with clarity. Many companies are adopting design leadership for driving important business decisions.

Below we explore real case scenarios in which design thinking is creating an impact and helping companies in various facets of business:

1.

Service industry: Starbucks

When the food and refreshment industry was encountering a huge drop in sales, Starbucks decided to talk with many customers to get more readily what they anticipated from their coffee shops. The prevalent understanding acquired from these communications was that clients needed an air that gave a feeling of having a place and unwinding.

Expanding on these experiences, Starbucks situated round tables deliberately to make solo espresso consumers more agreeable and less unsure.

2.

Financial Services Industry: Bank of America.

This institution was searching for a method for expanding the usage of their investment accounts by clients. They applied the design thinking strategy and began drawing in with customers and uncovered that individuals preferred the demonstration of saving more than the genuine sum they save. For instance, customers would get a similar nice sentiment if they kept $50 a month contrasted with $600 toward the year’s end.

From this knowledge Bank of America fostered the gather together an idea, an item that permits clients to save with each transaction that they make. Customers, thus, can get that equivalent positive sentiment after each exchange. The outcomes were faltering with Bank of America acquiring more than 10 million new clients and $1.8 billion in reserve funds for them.

3.

Technology Industry: IBM

The software giant IBM is planning to flood its firms with the most effective versions of design thinking, by practicing new enterprise core design thinking techniques.

They start by bringing together a series of traditional design techniques, such as personas, empathy maps, as-is scenarios, design ideation, to-be scenarios, wireframe sketches, hypothesis-driven design, and minimum viable product (MVP) definition. This helps them generate ideas faster; design,

evaluate, and test them faster; and develop code faster. Most importantly, they can deliver value to their customers faster.

4.

Health care products: P & G

The first step towards delivering a user-centric solution is understanding the user. The P&G team ran thorough research on their target group and came up with a few valuable insights which had the potential of transforming the brand.

The research revealed that consumers were already familiar with the brand name “oil of Olay” and it had the potential to capture the market with the right strategic moves. Their design thinking research further revealed that Olay’s existing customer demographic mostly included women over fifty who were not ready to pay a hefty price on skin care products. Due to their various findings they relaunched the brand as a skincare company that produced skin wellness products and not just anti-ageing products.

P&G changed its strategy to focus on value innovation where they increased their value offerings to users. This meant tapping into a new uncontested market. P&G scientists started working on and developing better skin-care formulations to meet the new value propositions.

5.

Automotive industry: Toyota

Toyota completely redesigned their customer contact center using design thinking to analyze one of its West Coast customer-contact centers from the ground up, engaging a cross-functional team of frontline call reps, software engineers, business leaders, and change agents in a redesign process that transformed the service center experience for both customers and associates.

6.

Technology Industry: Apple

Co-founder of Apple, Steve Jobs applied design thinking characteristics using the consumer-driven strategy which reflected his vision for Apple products. Steve Jobs applied design thinking by focusing on People’s needs and desires, rather than only the needs of the business, building empathy by helping people to love Apple products, designing simple yet user-friendly products rather than complex hard-to-use products

Although other competitors focus on the features and product capabilities, Apple focuses on a holistic user experience.