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It’s highly likely that you’ve heard the term “design thinking” used in a business or product context this year. Telling your developers, your engineers, your company to apply “design thinking” to their projects is in vogue. But what exactly is “design thinking”? And how does it apply to today’s workforce and the modern business world?
One of the best definitions I’ve seen comes from the Interaction Design Foundation:
“Design Thinking revolves around a deep interest in developing an understanding of the people for whom we’re designing the products or services. It helps us observe and develop empathy with the target user. Design Thinking helps us in the process of questioning: questioning the problem, questioning the assumptions, and questioning the implications.
Design Thinking is extremely useful in tackling problems that are ill-defined or unknown, by re-framing the problem in human-centric ways, creating many ideas in brainstorming sessions, and adopting a hands-on approach in prototyping and testing. Design Thinking also involves ongoing experimentation: sketching, prototyping, testing, and trying out concepts and ideas.”
It’s a mouthful, but to simplify things, design thinking is really all about three main things: challenging the typical way a problem is addressed, making sure you understand who the user is that has the problem or will be using the product – and adopting a hands-on approach to solving that problem or testing the design.
Thinking About the Digital Employee Experience
One of the themes that design thinking is built on – the need to better understand the end user and their ultimate usage of your product – connects closely to the digital employee experience. To provide an excellent digital employee experience, companies need to know how employees are interacting with their workplace technologies and business processes, so they can take these factors into account when designing a better workplace experience for everyone. Receiving continual, real-time, honest feedback from employees is an important part of the process, as an improvement may look good on paper, but have critical issues in reality.
Applying the themes of design thinking to the development of your employees’ digital workplace experiences will improve the efficiency and success of those employees at doing their jobs – and will help keep employees engaged and happy with their employer.
Change Isn’t Easy
That said, as anyone who’s conducted a changeover or implementation will know, enacting changes within an organization isn’t easy. You may be looking to digitally transform the workplace, or to give your employees better tools and technologies to make their jobs and work lives easier – but at the end of the day, you’re still asking employees to change how they work. Before you change everything up – even if it’s for the better – you have to be pretty sure that the outcome will eventually be successful.
Change is even harder when you are a large company with an established, successful business. The fear of getting change wrong often freezes digital transformation and employee experience improvements before they start. The risk of widespread change leading to failure – to inefficient and unhappy employees, missed deadlines and falling profit – is too great. But applying design thinking in small doses may be an approach to solve this issue without risk.
Designing Limited Change
When it comes to change, startups have it easy. They have less established processes and norms – and are freer to pivot or try something new. There is a way, however, that more established companies can work on changing their corporate practices and try out ways to improve their digital employee experience – by running limited tests of new practices in a division or department as a test case.
By using a division or a department as starting point, companies can try changing a business process that doesn’t seem to be working, or roll out a new technology – and see whether the initiative is successful. The division or department is not just a test case but can be a partner in providing feedback on a regular basis about what is and is not working, and about how to improve it.
This eliminates risk and gives you the valuable feedback needed to know whether to roll out the improvement to the entire company. If it fails, then you just close the trial, allow the employees to work as they had before, and go back to the drawing board.
Nexthink Can Help
So how can you make this work in practice? We here at Nexthink can help your transformation efforts and technology integrations by giving you a way to gather live feedback about your initiatives. With feedback being so critical to getting design thinking correct, setting up a feedback process needs to go hand in hand with any test implementations or process changes.
Our digital employee experience solution can not only help you break down the wall between IT and employees by providing a way to obtain real-time feedback – but can also help you understand any problems by correlating this feedback with technical and back-end performance data. This allows you to see the full extent of any problems, leading to faster corrections that are made with the understanding of the true employee experience in mind.
If you’d like to learn more about how Nexthink can help you make design thinking work at your organization, feel free to contact us here at any time.
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