All posts in Design Thinking

Design Thinking and Its Key Benefits

Design thinking is a business concept that has existed for many years. In fact, Thomas Edison is credited with some of the earliest ‘design thinking’ with regard to consumer goods. While many of us consider Edison to be the greatest inventor who created the light bulb, he actually surrounded himself with a team of brilliant minds and encouraged them to look beyond the ‘idea’ and to determine the ‘need’ that it could fill with consumers, the general public.

We think of the phonograph today as being the catalyst that boosted popular music through the 20th century. However, Edison envisioned it as a business tool for dictation, not music. This highlights the importance of design thinking from the outset of a project; one could devise a better system early on that could tap into the desires of the consumer public.

Design thinking can best be characterized as a

“methodology that imbues the full spectrum of innovation activities with a human-centered design ethos (Brown).”

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October 13, 2015 / Comments Off on Design Thinking and Its Key Benefits / Category: Design Thinking

The Service Experience Design – What Is It?

Service experience has become essential to businesses that want to succeed in today’s global and highly competitive market. Service experience is basically the customer experience, or the level of service they receive from a company during any transaction. Service design experience, then, is the process by which a company organizes its structure, employees, and communication efforts to create a positive customer relationship from beginning to end.

Without a positive customer experience, business suffers. Even the largest companies in the world have learned the harsh lessons about customer service. Those that tout the lowest prices have discovered that even being the least expensive brand on the market isn’t enough to retain customers and keep business growing (an essential component to long-term goals).

Take a Moment to Consider Your Favorite Brands

Each person who has any level of interaction with a company, whether it’s purchasing products, shopping for goods in a store, or contacting customer support, will inevitably have a list of their favorite brands. Looking at your list of favorite brands, what is it about them that puts them at the top of the list? For most consumers, it’s a combination of the best products at a fair price (notice ‘cheapest’ is rarely ever a consideration) with quality service.

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October 13, 2015 / Comments Off on The Service Experience Design – What Is It? / Category: Design Thinking, UX

Sales Personas Provide a Better Picture of Your Target Audience

Who is your ideal customer? Do you understand his or her needs? Do you know their personal history, what motivates them, or the concerns they may have about the products or services you have to offer?

A buyer persona, also known as a sales persona, is basically a made up representation of the typical customer whom you would target. In order to effectively create a buyer or sales persona, you need to understand what motivates them, the demographic or your target market, and purchasing behavior. In today’s business climate, that also means you need to understand their online behaviour.

Why Would You Need a Buyer Persona?

When sales and marketing teams within an organization don’t have a clear picture, a unified understanding of the target audience, the people whom they will be targeting, then how can the organization develop a message that will create the deepest impact?

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October 13, 2015 / Comments Off on Sales Personas Provide a Better Picture of Your Target Audience / Category: Design Thinking, UX

How Feedback Innovation can Improve Product Development

Do you know the true value of customer feedback when it comes to product innovation? When a company begins to develop new products or services, the end user is the target market for it, but sometimes when you invest a great deal of time and resources into research and development, it can be a frightening concept to them rely on feedback from that target audience.

Yet it’s the feedback that you can, and should, receive from your potential customers that can improve overall product development, pushing your business ahead of the competition. You should acknowledge that feedback is something that can be feared, but only if you view it through the wrong type of lens.

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October 13, 2015 / Comments Off on How Feedback Innovation can Improve Product Development / Category: Design Thinking, UX

Design Thinking at Virgin Atlantic

Design is often thought of as a means to create beautiful products and provide simple and easy to use access to specific services. However, at Virgin Atlantic, design is much more than that. It’s about problem solving and in order to be effective at proper design, one needs to become an expert in human behaviour.

This does not imply that every individual within a company structure must be an expert in human behaviour, but that the design team must be able and willing to think creatively and focus on the broader picture.

For Virgin Atlantic, service design begins with the understanding of basic customer needs. They don’t just look at emotional connections, but also the functional and practical aspects of their needs as well. They connect with their customer base through a wide range of tools, including feedback, customer satisfaction surveys, observing specific behaviours and tendencies, and other methods.

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October 13, 2015 / Comments Off on Design Thinking at Virgin Atlantic / Category: Design Thinking

Design Thinking at O2

In order to create the ‘best possible customer experience,’ design is one of the keystones to the process. At O2, an innovative leader of mobile services based in the UK, they have brought design thinking into the core basis of their business model. This company has built success around the notion that a good service design is essential to success for this type of business.

As a result, they developed a Customer Centred Design model, or process, which they label as CCD. What they have discovered through their processes at O2 is that connecting different departments through design, they are able to be more effective at new service development. For them, according to their Chief Marketing Officer, this is not about the ‘look and feel’ of design, but about “being deliberate” in their approach.

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October 13, 2015 / Comments Off on Design Thinking at O2 / Category: Design Thinking

Basics of empathetic design

The Empathic Design Process

How customers feel about a particular product can have a direct impact on marketing, sales, and even development of new products. The empathic design process is a user centred approach that places the reactions and needs of the customer at the focal point of new product development.

It is important to note that the empathic design approach is often confused with and referred to as the empathetic design approach. While the two words are actually interchangeable and have essentially the same meaning, empathic design is the proper term in business environments.

Aspects of Empathic Design

In order to utilise empathic design in product development, observation is one of the most important aspects involved. The ultimate goal is to determine what the basic needs of customers happen to be so that the company can address them in an appropriate manner during product development.

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October 12, 2015 / Comments Off on Basics of empathetic design / Category: Design Thinking, Psychology, UX

Sales Personas Provide a Better Picture of Your Target Audience

Who is your ideal customer? Do you understand his or her needs? Do you know their personal history, what motivates them, or the concerns they may have about the products or services you have to offer?

A buyer persona, also known as a sales persona, is basically a made up representation of the typical customer whom you would target. In order to effectively create a buyer or sales persona, you need to understand what motivates them, the demographic or your target market, and purchasing behavior. In today’s business climate, that also means you need to understand their online behavior.
Why Would You Need a Buyer Persona?

When sales and marketing teams within an organization don’t have a clear picture, a unified understanding of the target audience, the people whom they will be targeting, then how can the organization develop a message that will create the deepest impact?

Buyer personas allow sales and marketing professionals to understand their key demographic. They help to highlight the particular personalities, ambitions, and motivations of these potential customers.

The more insightful, more detailed, and more realistic that a buyer persona is, sales and marketing will be in a much better position to craft the ideal message that will reach the target audience and make an important impact.

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September 14, 2015 / 0 Comments / Category: Design, Design Thinking, UX

Customer Effort Score

Customer Effort Score works by asking clients one single question, ‘How much effort did you personally have to put forth to handle your request?’ Customers are to answer on a scale of 1 to 5, where 1 indicates the least effort and 5, the most effort.

According to the Harvard Business Review research, this metric system works in two aspects. One way is by gauging the reaction of customers on the very initial stage of the process. This way, the company would not have to wait till the end of the year or month to determine their client’s reviews. The other factor that makes CES beneficial is the ability to judge both negative and positive experiences. This too is great, as by knowing both kinds of customer experiences the company would be able to eliminate the bad ones and enhance the good ones.

You can read more on Customer Experience Score in these articles “All You Need to Know About Customer Effort Score”and “Customer Effort Score: Worthy of Application in Your Business?”. These articles from the team at Storm Insight explain the concept of CES and consider how effective it could be in your business.

You can also read the article “Stop Trying to delight you customers” published in the Harvard Business Review together with other articles.

August 21, 2015 / 0 Comments / Category: Design Thinking, UX

Voice of Customer

The key to Voice of Customer (VOC) is the simplicity to implement it and more importantly for the customer using the website to provide feedback.   The ‘Voice of the Customer’ (VOC) is a powerful force. It can benefit businesses in numerous ways. Today, there are many channels from which to garner feedback, to learn about what customers are thinking, how they act and react, what they want, what they don’t want, and so much more. There is a mass of dynamic information available that has never before been available so readily.

VOC can increase engagement with customers. This offers the potential for increased service from the business end while simultaneously creating an atmosphere in which the customers feel as though they’ve been listened to, as though their opinions actually matter. It can also help companies decrease their costs of reaching their target market because they will understand what their customers prefer.

Voice of the Customer can provide so much information to companies that it can boost research and development as the company refines its products and approach. It can maximize marketing potential when the company leadership understands how their key customers think, act, and find content. The primary focal point, then, is to be able to tap into the Voice of the Customer and be able to listen.

July 4, 2015 / 0 Comments / Category: Design, Design Thinking, UX