Often, buzzwords enter the market and stir up our curiosity. Many are intrigued to give it a try and to be one of the first ones to understand and offer their own clarity on the topic. A majority, like me, start with doubts. Is this concept for me? Will I understand it? Will I be able to implement it in my work? What do I need to know prior to be able to learn it? Do I even need this concept? And the list goes on. In our inhibition to apply our reading or understanding of the concept we often end up missing the core point.

Design Thinking is one such buzzword that caught my attention in recent times and I with my doubts thought that it was clearly not for me.

Design Thinking is an iterative process in which knowledge is constantly being questioned and acquired so it can help us redefine a problem in an attempt to identify alternative strategies and solutions that might not be instantly apparent with our initial level of understanding.

Turns out the idea of Design Thinking can be simplified and put to use in various aspects of our lives, both work and personal.

At the end of the day, we work to solve a user problem. It is only natural that we empathize with the user to be able to design a solution that is feasible and provides the desired outcome.

A simple way to understand Design Thinking would be to understand the importance of the question “Why?”. Multiple iterations of “Why?” would let you unearth possibly a different requirement than the one at the surface of the initial problem statement.

Airbnb, on the verge of bankruptcy, did exactly that. They realized that something as trivial as the photos of their customer’s listings was costing them their business. Contrary to popular belief, to always build scalable solutions, the founders set out to New York to meet with their customers and click beautiful pictures of their homes and got rid of the amateur ones on the site. This “out of the box” thinking saved them their business doubling their revenues in a matter of weeks.

The ideology behind this move was very simple. With not-so-good pictures, people weren’t comfortable booking homes to live in. To attract customers they needed to show them what they were paying for in the best of light! Instead of working with making their site better, they got to the bottom of what the users thought.

More often than not, the marvelous problem-solving idea is as simple as it can be. In our technical world, or in any other world for that matter, we work day and night to fix something. Be it fixing an “if condition” or adding that extra pinch of salt. The key would lie in realizing what exactly the user wants.

Alas, we all can’t be Sherlock Holmes and come to conclusions using our impeccable skill of observation. And like the curious little toddler, we must repeatedly ask “Why?”.

So the implementation of Design Thinking starts with believing that we are not building products, we are solving problems!!