In business, nothing gives you greater satisfaction than seeing your users or customers delighted by a new product or service offering launched into the market. It’s the clearest evidence that there is a reason for your business existence, a purpose beyond your profits. The intangible rewards are not only customer loyalty but also an army of loyal brand ambassadors not to mention the tangible benefit of revenue growth.
This is an impossible outcome for any business that doesn’t first seek to understand its customers before designing a product/service. Human-Centered Design is a research approach that seeks to understand what potential consumer needs are and how best to meet those needs in a manner that is simple, easy and convenient to intended users.
Some of the gains of deploying design thinking in your research process are:
- Forming loyal, lasting connections with consumers
Brands can achieve greater success and impact by innovating around customer pain points. Apart from gaining deep insight into your customers habits, human centered design better helps understand their needs and effectively meet them. Using design thinking, you will get to empathize, observe, interact, and talk to your customers/users thereby creating meaningful points of engagement and connection with your customer which outguns all manner of sales tactics.
- Informed Decision-Making
Data is the new currency of the 21st Century. It unlocks hidden value and spotlights obscure insights that turn potential into momentum in business. Human-centered design helps turn a bumpy road map of Design Maybes & What Ifs into a clear highway of innovation that you can confidently invest in.
- Higher ROIs
Legacy brands with solid reputations can ill afford to make missteps around new innovations. The costs notwithstanding consumers can easily churn from poor consumer experiences when they have come to have high expectations of a brand. Before investing a lot of money and manpower, in creating a product that flops in the market, it helps to take a step back and first invest in a data guided ideation process that is driven by the understanding of the intended user’s pain points. This not only reduces wasted time and resources creating products no one wants, but also optimizes resource allocation and ready returns on products that are an instant hit in the market
- Competitive Advantage
There are a lot of unknowns about launching new products, new markets and targeting new users. The one KNOWN fact that every brand should always have in mind through is that the customer is human. The person making the decision whether to use or pass on your brand innovation is and forever will always be a human being. Immersing yourself in the decision-making process of your very human consumer gives you a competitive edge in designing, customizing products and solutions that outperform competitors in any given industry.
Picture Cred: David Travis/Unsplash