What is Design Thinking and what is it for?
The Design Thinking methodology is a set of procedures that aim to obtain solutions through creative and innovative ideas. This methodology is focused by and for people, and focuses on trying to capture the needs and problems that consumers and users may have in order to cover them.
Regarding digital marketing, the Design Thinking methodology can be a great tool to define value propositions and what key messages to communicate to our target audience. An increasingly demanding public that seeks proximity and the solutions that brands can provide.
The Design Thinking model is developed in 5 different stages: empathy, definition, ideas, prototypes, test and implementation. In this article we are going to recommend different tools that can be of help in each of the different stages of the Design Thinking method.
1. Empathy
When you start a Design Thinking process, the first thing you have to do is investigate and collect as much information as possible about users or potential buyers, to better understand their context, motivations and what needs we can satisfy. Another important point is to try to understand the entire process that users or clients go through when they come into contact with your company. Reaching this point of knowing your client or potential client is essential for the development of future strategies or campaigns.
Tools that we can find in this phase:
- SimilarWeb: This tool is very useful to collect all the relevant information about your competition and benchmark it through metrics, strategies they are using in the different marketing channels, keywords and comparison between different brands and competitors. This tool allows you to take advantage of what strategies and in what aspects your competitors fail to try to cover the needs that other brands cannot provide to customers.
- Typeform:It is a platform to create surveys and forms that are very useful to understand our customers. The surveys and forms are personalized, dynamic, interactive and can be adapted to any device. Once the information is collected, we can access the data to analyze the metrics they show us and thus be able to make decisions in the future in a more effective way.
2. Define
Once all the information has been collected and analyzed, we will focus on discovering the insights and identifying the problems and aspects that will be relevant to users.
Define with this information our buyer personas and our action focuses.
Tools that we can find in this phase:
- Smaply: It is a user experience management tool, it allows to obtain in a very visual, clear and simple way the interaction they are having and the user experience with a product, service, company or brand. It allows you to create the Customer Journey Map, Stakeholders Map and define the Buyers personas with templates.
Through the tools that it integrates and the maps, the platform allows you to record data and make future decision-making more efficient, empathizing with the needs, desires and attitudes of users.
- Niice: It is a platform that allows you to create mood boards, you have your boards where you can add images, texts, effects, visual elements in a simple and creative way. These tools can help you a lot to express your vision of the project and give you a starting point for ideas.
- MakeMypersona:It is a free tool developed by the Hubspot company, which allows you to develop your Buyer persona.
The tool asks you a questionnaire about your Buyer personas (profession, employment sector, objectives, challenges, social networks they frequent and in which media they get information). Once the tool is finished, it generates the Buyer person that you can share with your company or department.
3. Ideas
In the third phase of the process, we find the proposals resulting from the two previous stages in accordance with the problem statement. Once we have the information about who our client is, how he behaves and where he moves, we can begin to propose solutions to the problem by generating brainstorming.
Tools that we can find in this phase:
Stormboard and Ideaflip:They are two very useful tools if you intend to brainstorm or brainstorm ideas. It allows you to have collaborative boards so that you can use sticky notes to put ideas, images, videos, links, etc. that can help you in each of the processes. In addition, it offers different templates and designs that will help you according to your needs.
4. Prototype
In the penultimate phase of the process we have the prototype, in this phase we have the objective of producing or teaching something that allows us to show it to the target audience. Of all the ideas that have been proposed, those ideas that may be interesting for users have to materialize.
Tools that we can find in this phase:
- Figma: is a tool that allows you to do web prototyping, mobile applications and vector graphics editing, among many other options, which, unlike other tools of the same style, is hosted on the web. In addition, it offers as an added value the possibility of sharing the project with the members of your team and working collaboratively on the same project at the same time.
5. Evaluation
The last stage of the Design Thinking methodology is the evaluation, in which the experience that the users have had with the prototype that has been previously designed in the previous phase is measured. The objective of this phase is to measure the performance and quality of the product or service offered.
- UserTesting: It is a software specialized in customer experience, which is designed to help companies through audio tests, videos and questionnaires to know the results and opinions of users about the products, services or campaigns that the companies that hire the customer have created. software.
- Hotjar:It is a tool that allows you to collect data online, and analyze what user behavior they have had on a website, an app or in an online campaign. The tool offers different functions so that the company can analyze which aspects it needs to improve and which are the strengths of the project. For this they have:
- Heat Maps
- Recordings to visitors
- Conversion funnel analysis
- Form analysis
- Surveys of feedback received
- Surveys
- Recruit test users
This tool can be very useful for collecting information on the actions carried out by users.
As you have seen, the Design Thinking process is focused on responding to the user’s own needs. It places an emphasis on creating ideas based on how they think, feel, and behave. It is being able to offer your clients the best strategy so that they find the differential value to find what they are really looking for.
There is no doubt that there are more and more tools that are going to be used for the Design thinking methodology and that there are endless tools capable of helping to structure this methodology, so we always recommend experimenting with some of these tools and identifying which are best suited to the context to be addressed.
At Lifting Group we can offer you as experts in Strategic Consulting, an added value in management and analysis processes that can help companies increase their performance and boost the development of the business in question. All these facilities can help you improve decision-making in your company and improve its performance.
