Marketers and entrepreneurs are always thinking of ways to connect with their target audience. Through well-thought-out marketing strategies, brands can gain affinity from their audience. However, one building block in marketing that can boost sales is design thinking. With design thinking, brands can create better and more effective human-centric methods that resolve their audience’s pain points.
If you’re still not leveraging design thinking in your branding and marketing strategies, you’re missing out. Read on to learn what design thinking is, its benefits, and design thinking’s five stages.
What is Design Thinking?
Design thinking is a more human-centric way of attempting to resolve problems within your audience. As with any marketing tactic, design thinking defines for whom you’re creating the designs. Once you know the right people and their behaviors, you can apply design thinking to understand the user more.
Additionally, design thinking also revolves around the assumptions that can improve user experience. Once you define the user’s problems, you can then find ways to resolve them by creating solution-based methods.
In design thinking, developing empathy within your target audience is vital. Therefore, it’s crucial to understand and continuously get to know your audience to make every interaction more impactful. After all, design thinking is all about the user experience.
Design thinking’s iterative process enables brands to tackle problems and assumptions that establish trust in users. Designers and brands should always challenge the “unknown” in design thinking hence, its repetitive process and continuous experimentation.
Design thinking involves five steps, which we’ll tackle later in this article. These steps are:
- Empathize
- Define
- Ideate
- Prototype
- Test
Some of the biggest companies apply design thinking for scalability. One example is Airbnb.
Since its inception in 2008, Airbnb didn’t see an improvement in bookings and sales. In 2009, the startup was close to going bankrupt until the founders realized there was one missing element, which is why people weren’t booking rooms. And that was design thinking.
As they scrolled through their website’s photos, they realized the photos were low-quality and amateurish. The images didn’t tell customers what they were getting when they book a room. So the first thing they did was remove all the photos from the site and replaced them with professional photos that showcased the place’s beautiful components. The result? A doubled revenue — from $200 to $400 weekly! This was a groundbreaking achievement after flatlined sales within eight months.
Benefits of Design Thinking
Without a doubt, design thinking enables brands to determine, understand, empathize, and resolve audiences’ problems. Moreover, it helps resolves user problems creatively and innovatively. Here’s why brands must apply design thinking in both branding and marketing collaterals:
1. User-oriented
Whether you’re creating marketing campaigns or developing new technology, design thinking allows you to create better results by defining the people who will be exposed to your strategies. Design thinking is focused on the end-user, which will make the campaigns, products, or services more appealing.
2. Better collaboration
Design thinking banks on creative and innovative ways to create and develop something out of the box. This process involves different perspectives and draws inspiration from various creatives. This will allow growth within the company and its members by continually exchanging ideas and sharing expertise.
Moreover, design thinking can also boost morale within the organization. Through collective efforts and collaboration, members will feel they are part of a team. This will motivate them to ace their jobs for the sake of the entire company’s success.
3. Constant testing
One element of design thinking is continuous testing. Designers and brands should test the process repeatedly to materialize their creative ideas. This can benefit both the creatives and business leaders in creating groundbreaking accomplishments in the organization and making history. When members are open to feedback and communication, this leads to better work processes, regardless of how small or big the business is.
4. Boosts sales
Because design thinking is user-centric, the outcome speaks to the target audience appropriately. Brands can achieve their end goals once they focus on the user’s pain points and integrate proper design psychology and principles.
Design Thinking: 5 Steps to Better User Experience
To excel in design thinking, do these five steps for better visual communication:
1. Empathize
The first step in design thinking involves knowing your target audience. First, know what their demographics and psychographics are. Learn about their purchasing behavior and jot down their needs and empathize with them. Then you can assess your products or services and jot down all the features and benefits that cater to their needs. Determining real insight will allow for a more human-oriented design process.
2. Define
Next, put yourself in your target audience’s shoes and determine what their pain points are. This will allow you to present your unique value proposition in the best light. Once you know their problems, create a buyer persona, so you’ll know how it feels when you’re a buyer looking for solutions. Defining the precise issues should allow you to make better offers.
3. Ideate
The next step involves gathering various ideas from different perspectives. Don’t think of an idea as crazy. The crazier the ideas, the better. Don’t be afraid to think of unorthodox solutions and encourage your team to think outside the box.
4. Prototype
The next stage is creating prototypes of products to make your ideas take shape. This step is imperative to identify if the gathered solutions will resolve user issues. Creating scaled-down product versions is recommended in this stage.
5. Test
The final stage doesn’t mean it’s the last. Although this step involves testing the prototypes, it’s an iterative process. This means, designers and marketers, repeat the testing process and redefine the solutions to solve the problems better.
Wrap Up
Design thinking is arguably an excellent way to connect with your target audience and boost sales. When you see eye to eye with users, the design thinking process becomes easier and more convenient. Remember, design thinking isn’t stagnant. You must continuously define user needs, challenge assumptions, create alterations, and think of alternative solutions for a better outcome.