pam on Nostr: At its core, one of the biggest differences between the design-thinking approach and ...

At its core, one of the biggest differences between the design-thinking approach and the traditional approach is the user-centric focus.

Design thinking revolves around understanding and addressing the needs, experiences, and challenges of end users or customers, whereas traditional thinking focuses more on the business itself rather than the customer.

A popular comparison is Blockbuster’s downfall versus Netflix’s rise. Blockbuster pushed for more brick-and-mortar stores, renting out DVDs, while Netflix switched to streaming after realizing its mail-order service was not user-friendly enough.

Traditional thinking is highly convergent, often jumping to solutions without thoroughly understanding customer problems. Design thinking incorporates both convergent and divergent elements. At first it diverges to understand the customers deeply, focusing on empathy and user insights. This foundation supports its convergent approach to creating innovative and meaningful solutions.

Children are highly divergent but as they get older, adults become convergent hence the lack of creativity in problem-solving approaches in adults. This is often due to how education, environment, exposure and knowledge shapes our thought processes.

Traditional thinking is also hierarchical and assumes upper management (and shareholders) have the best ideas, which the rest of the organization implements. In contrast, design thinking is highly collaborative, encouraging contributions from anyone, which can trigger productive ideas and solutions.

And the last comparison is that traditional thinking is linear and definitive. It imagines customer problems and implements solutions directly. I see many examples of this approach here. Design thinking is iterative and circular, starting with understanding the customers by engaging them, identifying problems, and designing solutions.

The design thinking process has a few elements. Over time, these elements have been made into stages but nothing set in stone.

1. Empathize: Understanding the user's needs, experiences, and emotions. This is done through engaging users via research, interviews, and observation to gain deep insights into their world.

2. Define: Articulating problem based on the info gathered at empathy stage. This leads to defining core issues to address.

3. Ideate: Generating multiple ideas and solutions via brainstorming and creative thinking, encouraging out-of-the-box thinking and having multiple perspectives.

4. Prototype: Creating tangible representations of the ideas, which can be sketches, models, simulations. Eventually leading to MVPs

5. Test: Evaluating the prototypes with real users to gather feedback. A very important process is refining and iterating on the solutions based on user input - so you go through few cycles until you hit a fairly stable product that can be widely adopted and has potentials to meet product-market fit. I've made this mistake here on not prioritizing this part, nor allocating sufficient time, budget and resources. And many entrepreneurs tend to make the mistake of forgoing this part.

For design thinking approach, the keywords are users and problem-solving for users. The focus is entirely around the end user. The solutions developed are directly aligned with their needs and preferences.

So is you are building or intending to build something, the initial questions to ask yourself would be - who are your target users ? Can you describe them ? Where can you find them ?