Design thinking involves the use of the designers’ sensibilities and methods to match the customers’ needs and requirements with what’s technologically practical and what viable business strategies can convert into customers’ value and market opportunities. Design thinking is an effective and a good systematic approach to problems solving (Lindberg et al. 2010, p.210). Reine argues that the philosophy behind design thinking is that it recognizes and acknowledges that the customers are always at the center of everything that businesses do. Reine goes ahead to argue that design thinking is not simply a framework but is a culture which nurtures agile decision making and the customers’ centric-ways of doing of doing businesses (Reine, 2017, pp.56-60). There are five main phases or stages followed in design thinking to develop and test a suitable product which will meet the demands of the people. These phases are understanding the human needs (empathize phase), reframing of the problem, the creation of ideas through brainstorming, the prototyping phase, and testing before releasing the product in the market (Serrat, 2017, pp.129-134). In designing and developing our product, we gave close attention to all these five phases and applied all the phases as required to make our product development project a success.
To start with the first phase which is the empathize phase or the stage which involves understanding the human needs, before developing our product, we did a detailed research in the market where we studied the demands of various products and the customers’ perceptions towards those products and what improvements would they like to be made or what new products would they like to be introduced. The research involved talking to various customers, interviewing them, and having some discussions over various social media platforms for us to understand the customers’ demands well and their perceptions towards the available products and what improvements they would like to be made on the existing products or what new products would they like to have in the market (Reason, Løvlie, and Flu, 2015). This research was very effective as it helped us to understand our customers more and their demands and this helped us to develop a product (system) which met most of their demands.
The second phase which is the phase of defining or reframing the problem was also applied as required in our product development. After visiting various companies and businesses, we realized that the manual ordering system was very inconvenient for many companies and businesses as it takes a lot of time and resources for successful placement of orders. This is a major problem for the companies and businesses and this problem made us come up with the idea of developing a new product which would be in form of a system to solve this problem. The system we developed was an automatic ordering system which would help to solve the challenges faced by the companies and the businesses due to the usage of the manual ordering systems in their enterprises which made it highly marketable.
The other phase of the design thinking process is the phase of creation of many ideas through brainstorming which we incorporated into our project as required. We gathered and raised different important ideas which were very helpful in the development of our new system. By ‘thinking outside the box’ and using some ideation techniques to stimulate free thinking, we were able to come up with the most appropriate ideas to incorporate into our design and this helped us to develop a very suitable automatic ordering system which helped to solve most of the challenges associated with the manual ordering system (Gl?veanu, 2014).
The fourth phase of the design thinking process is the prototyping phase. A prototype is an early version of an idea or a solution which is proposed to solve a certain problem. The prototyping stage was very important as it helped us to propose the system to create and visualize how the system would be helpful in solving the problems existing in the market (Rix, Haas, and Teixeira, 2016). It’s still in the prototyping phase where we were able to analyze the proposed solution to see if it meets the demands of the customers or what more should be done to make it better and fulfill all the demands of the customers. We were also able to understand the customers’ views and perceptions about the new product (system) and how effective would the system be to the customers. Having understood the customers’ demands and expectations from the system, we can adjust the prototype to meet the customers’ expectations and this assures that the final product (system) will have been made according to the customers’ demands and expectations and thus will be highly marketable (Tih et al., 2016, pp.437-448).
The fifth and the last phase of the design thinking process is the testing phase which we used to test the performance of our new product (system). In testing of the performance of the new system, we used the best solution which we identified during the prototyping stage. The results we got from the testing helped us to understand the new system even more and also helped us to understand our customers more and how they felt about the new system (Andersson, 2018, pp.11-29). By getting to understand the system better and the customers’ feelings and perceptions of the system, we were able to make the final refinements and adjustments to the system and came up with the last version of the system which met the demands and the requirements of most of the customers.
The agile methodology
The agile methodology is a special approach used in software development where the requirements and the solutions evolve through some collaborative efforts of self-organizing and cross-functional teams and their end users or the customers. The agile methodology involves adaptive planning, evolutional development, earlier delivery, and continual developments which encourage rapid and flexible responses to change (Kulkarni, Barat, and Ramteerthkar, 2011, pp. 578-590). We have various approaches used in the agile methodology and the two main approaches which we used when developing our new system were XP practices and the hybrid approaches.
To start with XP practices, there are two main practices in the XP practices approach and these two practices are planning and execution practice and the development practice (Jayaratna, 2012). The planning and execution practice is very similar to the Scrum approach which is a framework which allows proper work management during software development. There are several considerations made and activities done during the planning and execution practice. These considerations and activities include the activities of the XP onsite customer of controlling the work of the other team in the project, the estimation of the ‘user stories’ which helps the developers in estimating the size of the project, releasing of the plan which helps to make various estimations of the project including when the project will be completed, doing the appropriate iterations and working at a sustainable pace, and finally coming up with the XP-daily stand up which is similar or the equivalent of the daily scrum (Moisiadis et al., 2011). During these activities in the planning and the execution practice, the team members keep on meeting on daily basis to make sure they are going according to their plans and when they realize they are not going according to the plan, they adjust their working or the plan. The XP development practice also has some considerations to be made and some activities to be done for the whole development practice to be successful. These considerations and activities are coming up with a simple design and the YAGNI, coming up with some spikes or some temporal codes which helps to understand the design problem better, collective development and ownership of the project codes, pair programming which helps in implementing the collective code ownership, test drive development (TDD) and refactoring which helps to improve the structure of the code and thus improve the whole functionality of the whole project (Kurapati, Manyam, and Petersen, 2012, pp.16-30). Both the planning and execution and the development practices help the team to come up with the most suitable code which creates a project working according to their desires and the customers’ requirements (Avison and Fitzgerald, 2012, pp. 179-193).
The hybrid approaches also helped us in a great way in developing our new system. The hybrid approaches can be generally classified into three main methods which are lean software development, the Kanban method, and the Scrumban method. The lean software development method mainly involves considering the interests of the customers during the development of the project. The whole organization is optimized for the benefits of the customers (Poppendieck and Cusumano, 2012, pp.26-32). The Kanban method concentrates more on delivery where it considers some aspects such as working on the most important items, visualizing the work-limit WIP, measuring the cycle time, and other delivery aspects which can help to improve the performance of the organization (Wakode, Raut, and Talmale, 2015, pp.2321-2363). The Scrumban method just like the lean software development and the Kanban methods aims at improving the performance of the organization, and it does so by focusing on the work progress and trying to limit the cycle time from the Kanban method. In Scrumban method, we have some specialized teams who are ever-working to monitor the weaknesses of the organizations and come up with suggestions to be implemented to address these weaknesses (Albarqi and Qureshi, 2018).
Having a deep understanding of the agile methods and using the knowledge of agile methodology (Scrum) helped us in a great way to design and develop an appropriate and a suitable automatic ordering system which helped to address many of the challenges which face the manual ordering systems in companies and businesses.
There were several assumptions which we made when developing the prototype. Some of these assumptions include:
The new product (system) will be sold in and out of the country.
The customers won’t have any difficulties when using the new system in their companies and businesses.
The new system meets the demands or the requirements of over three-quarters of the customers (assumption made from the results of the customers who we interacted with when gathering the customers’ views and perceptions about the new system).
The new system can be improved in the future if need be, among other assumptions.
Conclusion
From the discussion, we learn that design thinking process is very important as it helps the designers or the manufacturers to understand the needs or the demands of the customers fully and incorporate those demands in their new products or services or systems which makes their products or services or systems to have a ready market upon production. Therefore, we should be following the design thinking process keenly whenever we have to come up with new products, services, or systems, and these will help us to always be guaranteed of good market in the highly competitive global market.
References
Albarqi, A.A., and Qureshi, R., 2018. The Proposed L-Scrumban Methodology to Improve the Efficiency of Agile Software Development.
Andersson, S., 2018. Testing—an integrated part of the product development process. In Operational Reliability and Systematic Maintenance (pp. 11-29). Chapman and Hall/CRC.
Avison, D. and Fitzgerald, G., 2012. Reflections and opinions on 25 years with the ISJ. Information Systems Journal, 22(3), pp.179-193.
Gl?veanu, V.P., 2014. Distributed creativity: Thinking outside the box of the creative individual. Cham/Heidelberger: Springer International Publishing.
Jayaratna, N., 2012. Understanding and evaluating methodologies: NIMSAD. New York: McGraw-Hill.
Kulkarni, V., Barat, S. and Ramteerthkar, U., 2011, October. Early experience with the agile methodology in a model-driven approach. In International Conference on Model Driven Engineering Languages and Systems (pp. 578-590). Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg.
Kurapati, N., Manyam, V.S.C. and Petersen, K., 2012, May. Agile software development practice adoption survey. In International Conference on Agile Software Development (pp. 16-30). Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg.
Lindberg, T., Gumienny, R., Jobst, B. and Meinel, C., 2010. Is there a need for a design thinking process? In design thinking research symposium (Vol. 8, p. 2010).
Moisiadis, F., Stair, R., Genrich, R. and Reynolds, G., 2011. Principles of information systems. Cengage Learning Australia.
Poppendieck, M. and Cusumano, M.A., 2012. Lean software development: A tutorial. IEEE Software, 29(5), pp.26-32.
Reason, B., Løvlie, L. and Flu, M.B., 2015. Service design for business: A practical guide to optimizing the customer experience. New Jersey: John Wiley & Sons.
Reine, P., 2017. The culture of design thinking for innovation. Journal of Innovation Management, 5(2), pp.56-60.
Rix, J., Haas, S. and Teixeira, J., 2016. Virtual prototyping: Virtual environments and the product design process. New York: Springer.
Serrat, O., 2017. Design thinking. In Knowledge Solutions (pp. 129-134). Springer, Singapore.
Tih, S., Wong, K.K., Lynn, G.S. and Reilly, R.R., 2016. Prototyping, customer involvement, and speed of information dissemination in new product success. Journal of Business & Industrial Marketing, 31(4), pp.437-448.
Wakode, R.B., Raut, L.P., and Talmale, P., 2015. Overview of Kanban Methodology and its Implementation. IJSRD-International Journal for Scientific Research & Development, 3(02), pp.2321-2363.
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