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At Fabric Group, we utilise design thinking to co-create innovative solutions that address the business needs of our clients - helping organisations approach their challenges in a more agile, direct and efficient way.
Design Thinking enables a team to quickly identify and explore a problem or market opportunity. The approach fosters collaboration with stakeholders and helps elicit the insight required to prioritise and identify critical business and user solutions. Once a number of possible solutions are explored, the team can compare the value provided by each solution, merge ideas and co-design the product or feature that will ultimately be built together. At Fabric, we incorporate Design Thinking into our Design Sprints, Discovery Workshops and Inception Workshops to ensure that we deliver the best possible outcome, every time.
In order to reap the rewards offered by applying Design Thinking, we've discovered that it's critical that teams develop a Design Thinking Mindset. This involves shaping the teams attitudes, soft skills, and readiness to think outside the box. We have listed 4 key soft skills that help cultivate a Design Thinking Mindset.
Design thinking is all about curiosity. To create an original and valuable product, you will have to observe your surroundings and question why society operates a certain way, why certain things don’t work, or why people behave the way they do. Once you cultivate a curious mindset, you release fear and judgment in the bid to understand what’s going on around you. When seeking explanations to ideas or concepts that you don’t understand, you will ultimately connect with individuals in the design thinking process and determine what they need, providing new design perspectives to apply to your product.
The more curious you are about people’s behaviours, the more you’re likely to empathise with them. After all, you’re designing solutions and products for people who will use them, which means you’ll need to understand them. Designers and software engineers often make the mistake of assuming they know how their end-users experience the world, thinking they face it the same way they do. However, it’s essential to understand the user’s mindset, past experiences, needs, and perception of the world. Empathy helps a software design team achieve this, which is why it is crucial to engage directly with your audience through co-design sessions, user research, and interviews to reveal how and why they see value in what you offer. When used in tandem with user-centred design practices, you’ll have a solution that meets your customers’ real-world needs and expectations.
Making a ruckus helps disturb the norm and opens space for better solutions. There is often an emphasis on optimising products and processes that already exist. However, design thinking calls for innovation instead of continuous improvement of current products and solutions.
Innovators like Steve Jobs revolutionised the way we use our phones. Before the iPhone, dial pads on cellphones were the norm, and the thought of having a powerful minicomputer that could fit in our pockets seemed like a fever dream. However, these people dared to challenge the norms and offer something new and creative; the spirit of innovation. By subverting assumptions and subconscious restraints, you’ll find better ways to approach problems, helping you develop original yet practical products and solutions. Instead of fixing the symptom, address the cause, and you’ll create the permanent change your target users want.
Software design requires keen attention to detail, which usually involves the little bits that users sometimes gloss over because it helps make their experience smoother and more seamless. Still, it’s essential to keep the big picture in mind, as it will remind you of why you’re designing the product or solution in the first place. It will also help you reflect on how your users’ belief systems and mindsets relate to each other and how your product fits, ensuring you equip it with as much value as possible. With extra focus on providing value, you’ll develop something that customers are willing to adopt.
At Fabric Group, we utilise design thinking as a vital part of designing successful solutions to address our clients’ and their customers’ pressing needs. Although it is a process, it is, more importantly, a mindset that encourages the team to observe the challenges around them and innovate new ways to solve them.
Let us know if you are looking for a reliable partner who can guide you through creating the best innovative software solutions. Fabric Group can help your team adopt the right design thinking mindset and get better at bringing the best ideas to the market with lower risk ahead of the competition.
