Design thinking is all about placing the spotlight on the end-users of your product/service. It starts with a deep understanding of the user that you're building a solution for. What are their pain points as they interact with your product? What are the opportunities for you to address those pain points? What are some of the nuances and qualitative insights that you can gather from just observing and understanding deeply the needs of a person and then designing around those?

Disclaimer 👀: Design thinking goes beyond the user interface, most people tend to think UI & UX whenever they hear the term “design thinking” It’s simply a way of solving problems by thoroughly understanding and addressing the needs of your customers through creative solutions, largely informed by a deep understanding of their pain points. It's all about putting people at the center of the process, using empathy, brainstorming, creating prototypes, and testing to develop innovative solutions.

The processes begin with really learning about the customer and then using various methods to synthesize what you've learned. They start with a really broad ideation process or a really wide process of inquiry. We start by asking a lot of questions and don't have all the answers right away. The more we learn, the more questions may come up. We get many opportunities to deeply understand the person we're designing for. We then follow a method of narrowing down, prioritizing, and focusing on a hypothesis to reach our final solution.

I worked on a project a little while ago that focused on figuring out the challenges with banking in Africa, especially related to credit. The aim was to create a unique bank that goes beyond just saving money. They wanted it to give back, simplify banking, and be the first Credit-Led Digital Bank in Africa.

We began with a broad starting point, exploring how people think about money, how they save and spend it, and identifying their major problems with the current banking system. We also delved into what changes they would make if given the power to do so.

Then, we started brainstorming ideas, no matter how crazy they seemed at first, to tackle these challenges.

Long story short, while digging into users' banking experiences, we found a common gripe concern emerged, users perceived banks merely as custodians of their funds and facilitators of payments, maintaining a basic "save and spend" relationship. They expressed a desire for a more proactive role from their banks, such as providing access to credit based on their extensive financial history within the bank, assisting in the development of healthy financial habits, delivering personalized experiences, and more.

After a series of interviews with potential users, we gained valuable insights into unaddressed problems and the essential needs of our customers. Some of these findings were not initially considered in our product strategy. However, armed with these insights, the goal of creating delightful experiences and making our product something people love and can't live without became clearer and more achievable.

To arrive at really awesome end products through design thinking, I think the critical and distinctive thing about it is that you must have people with empathy. You have to empathize with the customer or the end user you're working with. Not just understand them from a demographic point of view or a data-intensive point of view, but put yourself in the shoes of that customer and see how they behave, what their motivations are, and how other things in their life are influencing them. And that's really how you get to the core of really touching the heart of that customer's needs. So that's what I think is the key difference of design thinking. Often, people think that design thinking is just for consumers or retail or things that are very close to you as a consumer. Design thinking is super powerful when you apply it to complicated internal processes, big manufacturing processes or things that you wouldn't typically associate with design thinking.

With these few points of mine, I hope I have been able to help you understand design thinking from a fresh perspective 😎. I encourage you to embrace design thinking as your superpower to build creative and impactful products 🔥.