What is Design Thinking?

Design thinking is a problem-solving approach focused on understanding and empathizing with the needs and wants of users. It is a human-centered approach to design that emphasizes understanding the user's perspective and creating solutions that meet their needs.

The process of design thinking normally involves several stages:

  1. Empathize: Understand the needs and wants of users by gathering data through observation and interviews.
  2. Define: Clearly define the problem or opportunity that needs to be addressed.
  3. Ideate: Generate a wide variety of ideas for potential solutions.
  4. Prototype: Create a physical or digital representation of a potential solution.
  5. Test: Test the prototype with users to gather feedback and make improvements.
Voyce adopts the principles of design thinking to help with the Empathize, Define, and Ideate phases of the innovation process.

Design thinking tends to be a flexible and iterative process where it's okay to experiment and return to any one of the earlier stages at any point. The goal is to create a solution that is not only functional but also desirable, usable, and sustainable.

One of the key advantages of design thinking is that it encourages creativity and experimentation. It wants you to take risks and explore different possibilities, rather than being limited by preconceived ideas and existing solutions. Design thinking can also help to promote collaboration and teamwork, as it brings together people with different backgrounds and perspectives to work on a problem.

Voyce helps you follow a design thinking based approach to problem solving in a number of ways:

Firstly, Voyce provides a simple, functional, and elegant repository for you to capture and store insights and feedback from your customers. Gather interview notes, observations from your analytics tools, snippets of conversations you've had, screenshots of problems seen... anything that reflects the experience of your customers. By making these insights easily accessible to you and your team, and by helping you to organize them with workspaces, folders and tags, it's easy for you to spot and understand the biggest and most important problems facing your customers.

Secondly, once insights have been captured and organized, Voyce helps you define the problems facing your customers using specific and focused language. This makes it easy to talk about these problems in a consistent way, and linking back to insights means you'll never lose sight of why you're working on a specific problem, or why it's a real problem in the first place. All relevant evidence stays right at your fingertips, making it easy to prioritize the problems to work on.

When working on solutions to the problems you've found, Voyce encourages you to learn through experimentation. Create hypotheses that focus on adding value for your customers and your business, and as you implement each idea record the real business outcomes you observed. Compare against what you thought would happen - did you win or lose? Voyce helps you keep track of the decisions that were made so you never lose sight of the things you tried as you went down a particular path.

Voyce has been built from the ground up as a piece of focused, usable, functional software optimized to help you make sense of feedback from your customers. In addition to keeping you focused on your goal, Voyce helps you collaborate with your team so you're making the strongest and most inclusive decisions possible.

Want to dive deeper into Design Thinking?

If you’re interested in Design Thinking and want to know more, check out some of these great reference articles which cover the topic in more detail:

How Voyce helps with Design Thinking...
A range of product insights can be collated.

Capture and centralize your customer insights.

Voyce is a beautiful repository for all your customer research, insights & feedback.
Organize problems by severity and scope to help find those that should be fixed first.

Define, validate, and triage customer problems.

Link and convert your insights into clearly defined problems, to find the 'why?', and identify those that are critical to solve.
Easily generate multiple solutions to the problems you've identified.

Discover opportunities and build the right things.

Create smarter solutions that deliver real value and delight your customers. Understand when to say 'go' or 'no'.