I’m pretty sure you heard before about Design Thinking is an innovative, creative and user-centric problem-solving process, that focuses on creating solutions and products by understanding customers´ needs and objectives.

However, today’s post is about the process and steps by itself, so let’s talk about Design Thinking.

1. Empathize. A common Design Thinking practice defines empathize as the understanding of users’ needs, wants and objectives. So far, that’s true but during the time most of the Design Thinking practitioners forgot the business needs. …

Content input is critical to successful user experiences because it informs what types of information are made available to your users, just be aware about content strategy is more about the way how we can present a certain kind of content according to the customer journey step and device used.

In the next below sections highlight content models, matrixes, and taxonomies, and the role each plays in the user experience design process. Note, not all the content is similar for al kinds of audiences.

Content input — Content models and content matrix

The content model and matrix help you to organize the content that is in your experience and prioritize it effectively according to the customer journey you’ve made. …

When I’m referring to design inputs, I include the visual components necessary for thorough and robust design experiences.

Two considerations form these inputs:

• Profiles or personas
• Customer journeys or scenarios.

Profiles and personas help frame which user behaviors are necessary to consider in your ultimate experience, while scenarios and journeys provide the different paths a user may take to accomplish a task within the experience. Keep in mind, journeys are not one single channel experiences, most of the time we’re talking about cross channels journeys.

Design inputs — Profiles or personas

There’s a fundamental building block of UX related with understanding of your target audience:

• Who are they? …

I usually like to work with at least these three UX inputs in a project, so far this approach was enough fair to start with, but at the same time in some other projects the needed of more inputs was an addition value in the success chain. Anyways, if you start with these three, you’re in the right way.

Business objectives

A fundamental input in the UX design process is a solid understanding of the underlying business objectives.

• What are you trying to accomplish?
• Do you want to sell products or services?
• Are you improving a process?
• There’s an issue in current digital channels impacting customers convertions? …

A few days ago I’ve been written down about the Steps in the psychology of storytelling in business innovation, and one of the key points was:

Touchpoints create internal and external experiences in your business. The sum of these experiences is your story.

So, if we want to tell a powerful story to the others or any specific audience, it is important to understand those to whom we tell our story, that is, our stakeholders in the company and outside of it.

Storytelling and innovation

We can have a clear idea of ​​what we intend our story to be, but we must adapt the narrative to the intended audience. In other words, we must carefully consider our stakeholders, the contact points with which they interact and what is their experience with them over time, that is, we must do a minimum exercise of prior investigation, the moment we start a process of storytelling and innovation. …

Company’s history helps determine its value, so it is essential that it is told well.

While it is true, that this always has been the case, today in a business landscape that is currently going through a global crisis as a result of the pandemic and is becoming increasingly volatile, uncertainly, complex and ambiguous, have a compass to guide your process.

Business innovation never has been so important, matter of fact, at this point it is vital to ensure that you can connect the daily actions of your work to the bigger picture so that you do not get lost in the process.

The cognitive behavioral link between storytelling and the expected results in business innovation.

To enable business change and innovation, first get fully understanding of the systems at play in your business. In the context of storytelling, this involves exploring the cognitive-behavioral link between your story and the expected results of business innovation. …

Innovation and Design Thinking, turning ideas into tangible

When we talk about innovation and Design Thinking as a process that allows the development of creativity and disruptive thinking, one of the steps to take care is about what usually we call “Rapid Prototyping” as a method that allows us to shape our ideas in a way that makes them easier to understand to others.

Create visuals closer to your idea

Definitely all the text we write to describe an idea falls short when we can replace it with an image that will carry a much stronger emotional charge. Therefore, Rapid Prototyping helps to better understand the idea that you want to share

“Use a picture. It’s worth a thousand words.” …

Our goal is about to generate ideas that promote innovation and Design Thinkning in the company.

Once you’ve been started an enterprise process of innovation and Design Thinking, it is important to put aside the old and obvious solutions of the past, to give a way to the disruptive and innovative ideas which we are going to work.

“The best way to have a good idea is to have a lot of ideas.”

- Linus Pauling, Nobel Prize in Chemistry

Passing through the barrier and going beyond the obvious

The problem

Imagine just for a moment you are working on a project that aims to redesign the children’s chair at school. What way would you take to overcome the obvious solutions?

How to tackle this problem?

When you focus on innovating, unexpected combinations of ideas generate new ways of thinking, pushing the team to solve the problem in a different way. Sometimes you just need to go a bit beyond the obvious solutions and adopt wild ideas. …