Saturday, January 4, 2020

Design Maturity

Design thinking has a broader scope with interdisciplinary knowledge, you need to think about long-term business positioning and branding based on rigorous user understanding. 

The digital world is dynamic, nonlinear, uncertain, and volatile. Design becomes the strategic business driver at the higher-level organizational maturity. Good design is much more than decoration. The distinctive advantage of being design-centered is that you prioritize in making things likable rather than just making them functioning. The art, science or engineering are all interconnected disciplines at the core of problem-solving to improve design maturity.

From design-by-default to design –by-practice: Design thought has different stages of maturity, from design-by-default, in which design just happens and design is dictated by status quo policies, procedures, tools, and old mindsets to design –by-practice in which design becomes the key ingredient of innovation strategy. 

In practice, there are a lot of reasons why the design results are something different than intended. Because design-driven innovation has been supported by cohesive business capabilities, fine-tuned organizational processes and high-skilled talent teams with an open mind working in a creative business environment.

There are gaps existing in the design because there are no effective processes to handle uncertain situations, the unrealistic design could not be implemented in the organizational system. It’s actually very critical to embrace design-centered development when you have a highly competitive environment around functionality. Design maturity requires a design-driven, cross-functional paradigm and cross-domain disciplines, also figuring out ways to make people involved in the design, prototyping, and implementation processes and practices.


Leverage design thinking and tools for improving design maturity: Design thinking is a collection of methodologies and it is often bottom-up. The strategic objective of design thinking is to understand what your customers need and to help the business orient itself towards those needs in pursuit of its objective. 

The forward-thinking leaders understand how things like design thinking can fundamentally change organizations, build a strong brand, improve the overall organizational maturity and make the societal impact.

Tools for design are user personas, scenarios, and storyboards. Rather than focus on one method, as a team with broad expertise across a range of disciplines, there are choices of tools or methods appropriate for the challenge. It’s important to visualize user experience, design and develop an experience that fits them and their needs, foster better ways the application can perform and optimize every touchpoint of user experience. The exceptional customer experience offers the “WOW” concept as the necessary success factor to ensure you stay ahead of the game, particularly with your peers in business. A customer persona, also known as a buyer persona, is a semi-fictional archetype that represents the key traits of a large segment of the audience, based on the information you've collected from user research. It helps to build great relationships with the end-users that personalize the customer experience.

The exceptional customer experience offers the “WOW” concept as the necessary success factor of design. Forward-looking designers seek a different kind of inspiration, determine what will be considered aesthetically pleasing tomorrow rather than today! When businesses really understand or attempt to capture the insight about the customer actually wants, that is when they can really design and develop an experience that fits them and their needs or desires. Customer-facing applications are critical at the end of the day as they generate revenue for the business. First, aesthetics as trends in public taste. Second, exposure to the designed environment as a direct influence on those trends!

High mature design-driven innovation is not spontaneous or serendipitous, but a managed process: Design is largely considered a byproduct of solid engineering discipline. Design-driven innovation takes planning and fine-tuning that must take place to deliver great products or services. The structural design innovations most often require design teams to attend to the total system of all valued interactions and related opportunities to systematically create new design features that efficiently enable value creation across wide ranges of current and new product interactions.

The best way to design delightful products and win customers’ hearts is to hide the complexity; what is left visible to them should be intuitive and easy-to-use products or services for improving their productivity and keep them engaged. Being design-driven is when innovation meets the products/services to fit the design proposed as long as costs meet the criteria, not over-engineering with quality and performance meeting expectations of customers.

Design Thinking is not just about wireframes and visual designs. It has a broader scope with interdisciplinary knowledge, and you need to think about long-term business positioning and branding based on rigorous user understanding. In the industrial era, very few companies can arrive at the top of the design maturity pyramid due to the reductionistic management discipline focusing on efficiency and functioning. When an organizational maturity about design increases, design maturity moves from superficial afterthought (branding a design) to competitive advantage (branding through design).

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