4 Fastest Growing Industries for Design Thinking
How can companies ensure that they are providing useful and satisfactory products and services for their clients, even in a rapidly-changing landscape? One answer is to embrace the design thinking process. While this methodology is nothing new, it has gained considerable momentum in recent years, providing a new paradigm for companies to understand their customers, identify key pain points, and develop innovative solutions. By embracing this more user-centered approach, companies can ensure that their products and services are more personalized and effective.
One of the reasons why design thinking is so popular is that it’s adaptable to a broad range of industries and professional settings. A good way to understand the breadth of design thinking is to explore some of the fastest-growing industries that put design thinking principles into practice. A degree or certificate program can provide additional clarity into how design thinking works.
What Is Design Thinking?
Before getting into specific design thinking examples, it might be helpful to more fully define the term. Design thinking is an iterative process intended to provide a better understanding of the end user, challenge assumptions, redefine problems, and create meaningful prototypes that can be tested. The design thinking process aims to arrive at alternative solutions or strategies that might not have been initially apparent.
The Tenets of Design Thinking
Design thinking revolves around a few core tenets, including:
- An interest in developing a deeper, clearer understanding of the people for whom the product or service is being designed.
- Real empathy with the target user, including clarity regarding their pain points and their actual experience with the product or service.
- An enhanced ability to think critically and challenge assumptions or implications.
- A willingness to seek and address problems that are unknown or ill-defined.
- A spirit of innovation manifested through various sketches, prototypes, or experiments.
The Design Thinking Process
Design thinking can be fairly nonlinear. Nevertheless, the design thinking process can be summarized through five basic steps:
- Empathize. During this first phase, the designers try to gain an understanding of their end users.
- Define. By seeking clarity about end users, designers can then more carefully define potential problems, pain points, or obstacles that need to be addressed.
- Ideate. The next step is to simply brainstorm potential solutions that might be effective in addressing these problems and pain points.
- Prototype. The designers then create a prototype product or model that can put these solutions into action.
- Test. The proposed solution is carefully tested, then either revised, scrapped, or finalized as appropriate.
Design Thinking: 4 Fastest-Growing Industries
Due to the fluid, flexible, and adaptive nature of design thinking, it can be readily applied across different industries and contexts. With that, it’s time to consider some of the fastest-growing industries for design thinking.
Design Thinking in Education
Design thinking is not confined to for-profit or consumer-driven enterprises. In fact, one of the fastest-growing industries for design thinking is education. Consider a few examples of design thinking in education.
How Design Thinking Enhances Educational Outcomes
In a classroom setting, teachers sometimes struggle to create and deliver lesson plans that cater to all students—including those who have learning disabilities or different learning styles. The design thinking process provides a unique framework for educators and education administrators to develop student-centered solutions and creative classroom strategies.
Here is a brief synopsis of what design thinking might look like in the education sector.
- The Empathize Stage. The first step in the design thinking process is empathizing with the end user. For educators and administrators, this might mean gaining a clearer understanding of what students, parents, or even teachers might need in order to succeed. Interviews, observational checklists, polls, surveys, or informal conversations can all help them develop greater empathy and understanding.
- The Define Stage. Next, design thinkers seek to define one key problem that can be tackled. In education, this problem might be that parents are worried about safety at drop-off because not every car follows the defined route; or that kids are bored during school spirit week, as the spirit day assignments are the exact same year after year. For teachers, the problem might be inadequate space or time for a particular activity.
- The Ideate Stage. Design thinking in education requires brainstorming unique solutions to this one clearly defined problem, whatever it may be. This can be done by articulating the problem statement. For example, if the statement is: “parents are concerned about safety at drop-off due to inconsistent use of the predefined routes,” the decision-makers will need time to reflect and process, then come together for a brainstorming session in which no idea is off the table.
- The Prototype Stage. What does the prototype stage look like in education? It could be a sketch, storyboard, doodle, mock-up, wireframe, diorama, floorplan, or any visual representation of a potential creative solution to the problem that was defined.
- The Test Stage. The prototype might then be discussed with key stakeholders, which can include teachers, parents, or administrative team members. Feedback is solicited and revisions can be made before the idea is finally put into action—or in some cases, before the team scuttles the idea and goes back to the drawing board.The flexibility of this process goes to show why education is one of the fastest-growing industries for design thinking.
Design Thinking in Business
Design thinking can also be applied in a business setting, where it can unlock fresh perspectives and lead to real innovation for products or services. There are a number of ways to implement the principles of design thinking in a business context.
Using Design Thinking in Business
According to McKinsey and Company, there are four basic principles for businesses to keep in mind as they seek to build success through the power of design. These principles include:
- Understanding the audience. A truly design-driven company doesn’t simply seek answers to what a customer wants but also tries to figure out why they want it. Design-driven companies conduct in-depth market and consumer analysis to learn more about how their users experience a particular product or service, what motivates their purchase decisions, and what ultimately turns them away from certain products or brands. McKinsey cites the example of Sephora, a popular makeup line. The company observed that many of its website users would leave the site in order to find YouTube tutorials on how to use makeup products, prompting Sephora to produce and embed some tutorial videos of their own.
- Bringing design to the executive leadership table. Another way to implement design thinking in business is to actually appoint an executive-level leader to spearhead the design thinking process. This might be a chief design officer, a chief marketing officer, or a chief digital officer. This person’s job is to bridge different departments and stakeholders, incorporating everyone into the design thinking process.
- Design in real time. Third, McKinsey advocates for businesses to develop a three-pronged design thinking model—combining design, technology, and business strategy. The goal should be to enable business leaders to identify trends, co-create using data and feedback, prototype, and validate.
- Act rapidly. Finally, the design thinking process requires agility, particularly in a for-profit business context. This means ensuring that users get a new product quickly, then iterating based on the initial feedback or user experience. Design thinking allows businesses to release products even when they are not totally perfect, understanding that further refinement and iteration are always on the table.
With these principles, businesses can leverage design thinking to deliver a more satisfying experience for their customers and clients.
Examples of Design Thinking in Business
A number of well-known businesses have used design thinking principles to innovate superior customer experiences. Consider just a few examples:
- Netflix discovered that their customers were often frustrated by the long wait times between DVD deliveries, and so they innovated a way for customers to stream content via the internet, eliminating inefficiencies in order to provide a superior user experience.
- Uber sought feedback from drivers and passengers alike and came up with a number of smart ideas to minimize bad or disruptive behavior. They established app-based payments to reduce fraud and developed a rating system for drivers and passengers.
- Apple famously practices the design thinking model. Their initial operating system was created to be infinitely adaptable, meaning it could be iterated again and again for new devices and applications. The operating system has since been adapted for the Macbook, iPhone, Apple Watch, and more, providing more and more utility to address different consumer needs.
- GE Healthcare realized that many pediatric patients became upset during extended MRI scans, so they iterated different versions of the scanner to create a more positive experience. One MRI, made to resemble a pirate ship, proved a big hit with kids and minimized distress during longer scans.
Design Thinking in Healthcare
Another one of the fastest-growing industries for design thinking is healthcare. In many ways, design thinking is a natural fit for healthcare, as the iterative process closely resembles the diagnostic process. In other words, physician leaders may already have the skills required to implement design thinking in healthcare.
Implementing Design Thinking in Healthcare
Consider some of the parallels between design thinking and medicine.
- The Empathize Stage. Just as design thinkers must take stock of a user’s needs and pain points, physicians and nurses always begin with a careful understanding of patient concerns. Empathy is at the heart of healthcare, and it can be manifested through the initial collection of patient history and symptoms. In much the same way, health administrators can apply a diagnostic mindset to determine potential barriers to efficient, safe, and satisfying care.
- The Define Stage. A good medical expert will use diagnostic tools to develop a “problem statement,” in the form of a diagnosis. In much the same way, the application of design thinking in healthcare might involve identifying a key bottleneck or inefficiency that prevents physicians from doing their job effectively, or that prevents patients from seeking the treatment they need.
- The Ideate Stage. Just as a medical professional might use differential diagnoses to brainstorm potential treatments, evaluating each for potential risks and rewards, the design thinker might ideate multiple options for addressing concerns within the care delivery process.
- The Prototype Stage. When treating an individual patient, doctors usually come up with an initial treatment plan, which may involve further testing, pharmaceutical intervention, or other types of therapy. This plan may be assessed for its efficacy and recalibrated as needed. In much the same way, decision-makers within the healthcare space can develop initial plans to improve care quality or efficiency, then tweak them as needed.
- The Test Stage. A doctor will always measure the effectiveness of their treatment plan, perhaps by doing blood work or perhaps simply by asking the patient how their symptoms have improved. In much the same way, a healthcare administrator who is implementing a new policy, procedure, or model will want to seek feedback from physicians, nurses, and patients.
These are just a few of the reasons why healthcare is one of the fastest-growing industries to adopt the principles of design thinking.
Design Thinking in Marketing
Another industry where design thinking has made inroads is marketing. Here again, it is easy to see how the stages of design thinking overlap nicely with existing marketing principles, providing an efficient and human-centered form of problem-solving.
Implementing Design Thinking in Marketing
The American Marketing Association explains some different parallels for design thinking in marketing:
- The Empathize Stage. Good marketing always begins with a clear understanding of the target audience since it’s impossible to effectively market a product without knowing who it’s being marketed to. Marketers may use third-party data collection (like cookies) but are increasingly gravitating toward first-party data sources such as surveys, polls, responses to social media inquiries, and more. Learning about buyers’ needs, values, preferences, and pain points is essential for creating a winning marketing strategy.
- The Define Stage. According to the American Marketing Association, marketers can use all the data they’ve aggregated to identify important trends, including potential pain points or opportunities. They can ask: “What themes or patterns are bubbling to the surface? What unmet needs came out of left field? What unexpected barriers might shift our focus? Are we asking the right questions, and do we need to reassess our assumptions about the task at hand?”
- The Iterate Stage. Marketers who know their audience and are able to identify one clear, well-defined problem can then develop a good, creative solution. This may involve brainstorming different types of creative content, considering new channels to promote content, rethinking brand messaging, or even reimagining the target audience.
- The Prototype Stage. When it comes to design thinking in marketing, the prototype stage means bringing some of those creative brainstorming ideas to life, perhaps debuting new content to guide the consumer journey or new mechanisms for capturing qualified leads. “Throughout this stage, proposed solutions may be improved, redesigned, or rejected through a series of reviews and critiques from the broader team,” the American Marketing Association notes.
- The Test Stage. Design thinking always requires the collection of meaningful feedback, and in the case of marketing, that might mean reviewing web analytics, checking sales data, or simply going back to the surveys and focus groups to see if the problem has met its proper solution.
What About UX Design Thinking?
It’s difficult to talk about the fastest-growing industries for design thinking without commenting on UX, or user experience. The UX field is all about ensuring the smoothest, most frictionless experience for the users of a particular website, app, or software product—and in many ways, UX and design thinking go hand in hand.
The connection between UX and design thinking begins with empathy. To do UX properly, designers must place themselves into the shoes of potential website or app users, empathizing with their experience and with any frustrations that accompany it. This can lead to the definition of a clear problem statement: The website loads too slowly, the app is hard to navigate, key information is missing from the site, fonts are difficult to read on a mobile device, etc. Such considerations are often the heartbeat of the UX design thinking process.
From there, the UX design thinking practitioner might collaborate with other designers to iterate different human-first solutions, develop prototypes, then test them to see how effective they are at solving the problem in question.
The connection between design thinking and UX is so close that it’s almost difficult to separate them, making it essential for any UX professional to become familiar with the basic tenets of the design thinking process.
Explore the Possibilities of Design Thinking
There are many models for effective problem-solving, but design thinking is unique for its emphasis on the actual human user experience. For this reason, design thinking has proven popular across the fastest-growing industries, including education, healthcare, marketing, and broader business applications.
One way to learn more about design thinking and implement it into virtually any career path is to pursue a formal education. Consider options like the Design Thinking Certificate offered by Suffolk University’s Center for Continuing & Professional Education, an all-online educational path that can supply foundational skills leveraging design thinking principles. Find out more about this professional certificate opportunity at your convenience.
Recommended Readings:
Growth vs. Fixed Mindset: What’s the Difference?
Sources:
American Marketing Association, “The 5 Phases of Design Thinking”
Flatiron School, What Is Design Thinking In UX / UI Design?
Henry Harvin, “7 Examples of Design Thinking in Business”
Interaction Design Foundation, What is Design Thinking and Why Is It So Popular?
KevinMD, “Design Thinking in Healthcare: Physicians Already Have the Training to be Educators”
McKinsey and Company, “What Is Design Thinking?”
Technokids, “Discover the 5 Simple Steps to Design Thinking in Education”