What is Design Thinking?

Digitalisation enables companies to significantly boost productivity and thus increase the value they deliver. Its implementation has quickly become a major strategic challenge that raises a fundamental question: 

Design Thinking aims to deeply understand user behaviours and motivations in order to provide solutions tailored to their needs.

This design methodology stands out due to its user-centric approach and the articulation of user needs. It is based on 5 key stages:

In a digital development project, the worst thing that could happen would be to spend months developing a tool that, ultimately, absolutely fails to meet the needs of its target audience and goes completely unused.

To avoid this pitfall, a simple principle, yet far too often not applied, is to co-build the solution with its future users. 

For instance, for the development of a web application allowing architects to track and manage their projects, it would be recommended, even before beginning to imagine the solution, to gather a panel of architects. Ideally, this panel should be as diverse as possible, including architects with practices of different sizes, working with various client types.

Once this panel has been assembled, the project team's objective is to gather a maximum of information – both qualitative and quantitative – on user expectations, whether through questionnaires or interviews. 

It is at this precise moment that empathy is paramount, as it allows the project team to put themselves in the users' shoes and fully grasp their needs and the friction points they encounter.

Once this data has been collected, clearly and precisely defining the problem to be solved helps to frame the project. This problem, once definitively established, will serve as a compass throughout the project. It is established by synthesising user feedback. 

Let's return to our example of a project management application for architects. During the initial phase of this design, their feedback might indicate that they spend more time managing administrative tasks (sending documents and reminder messages to their clients) rather than actually working on their core profession (creating plans and monitoring ongoing construction sites). The question then arises: how can information flow between these architects and their clients be made more efficient in order to optimise their working time? 

Once the problem has been established, stakeholders gather to discuss and brainstorm potential solutions. The initial idea is to list all possible solutions that could address the defined problem.

After settling on a list of potential solutions, each idea must be evaluated against the problem: we are looking to measure the impact the solution could have and to what extent it addresses the stated problem. In practice, several solutions can be aggregated. The aim is to address the problem as perfectly as possible.

Each idea is assessed based on its ability to effectively address the problem, whilst minimising the resources required for its implementation.

Following discussions, our architects might, for example, decide on implementing a web platform to centralise sent documents and communications with their clients. This would allow their clients to find all documents related to their project on a single source of truth. What about reminders? We could imagine a system where architects could see if their clients have indeed viewed a document, and if not, send them a notification via email or SMS, inviting them to consult the pending documents.

Once the optimal solution has been found, it must now be materialised as quickly as possible to measure its real impact. Prototyping tools are then used to create wireframes and graphic mock-ups. Wireframes schematically represent user journeys. They allow for the validation of user experience quality.

In our example, if using the web application took even more time than sending emails and chasing their clients multiple times, the architects' user experience would probably need optimising. Therefore, user journeys would need to be reworked until a general flow is achieved that genuinely saves them time.

When wireframes are validated, they are then transformed into graphic mock-ups. It is only at this stage that the project's graphic charter is integrated. Graphic mock-ups are a high-fidelity representation of the final rendering of the solution to be implemented.

More than a linear step in the design process, continually testing each advance and checking whether we are moving closer to or further away from the objective constitutes a key success factor for the project. We always aim to address the stated problem as fully as possible whilst optimising the resources needed to achieve it.

Therefore, the addition of a feature must be studied and tested in isolation - does it address the problem? - and relatively: is there another solution that addresses the stated need just as well, or even better, whilst requiring fewer resources?

This process must be repeated until a satisfactory solution is obtained in terms of user experience and resources to be deployed.

Once the optimal solution has been designed, the logical next step is to implement it.

The Agile methodology fits perfectly with this design methodology, as it allows for the development of the solution whilst continuously incorporating user feedback to ensure that their problem is never deviated from.

When the project team encounters unexpected obstacles during development, they can easily revert to the design stages recommended by Design Thinking by finding new ideas, testing them against the problem, prototyping them, and finally integrating them into the current development roadmap. 

The advantage of these two methodologies is that they offer optimal flexibility and adaptability, which are inherent to the success of a web, mobile, or artificial intelligence development project.