Design Thinking  

in Retail
Design Thinking, which is used by top brands such as Apple, Google and Samsung, focuses on
the human aspect of the user when ideating, creating and applying technology. It’s an approach
to innovation that any consumer-related industry Chief Marketing Officer would embrace.

With Design Thinking, smart digital-led technologies are just the starting point. Human emotions
and conduct are priorities. The Design Thinking process is highly iterative, with experiments and
continuous revisions to challenge assumptions and redefine problems. It’s about discovering
innovative solutions to better the customer experience.

Success stories from Design Thinking include smart user interfaces that give customers the
power to personalize their experience as per their preferences. Or automated chatbots/voice
agents that can understand voice or text and respond humanly.

A good example close to you would be Google Assistant, it actively provides contextual
notifications about flight status, traffic, product deliveries and more all without being asked.

Creating optimal customer experiences not only makes people feel good but also has true
business benefits.

Customer Satisfaction should be seen as a Profit Center

When technology decisions flow from a human-centered Design Thinking approach, consumers
will always have a superior experience. An experience in which the technology is an enabler
rather than a distraction. The information about customers that flows naturally from their
interactions with the products and services will provide valuable data insights. These insights can
make marketing leaders learn quickly from changing consumer habits and respond faster. Or
even to anticipate consumer needs and drive innovations to meet them.

As businesses and brands are rethinking how they offer value beyond product benefits, design
thinking methods continue to help bring fresh perspectives and new ways of doing things. It
allows them to consider innovation not just for the sake of creating a new product, but to solve
real problems or open new avenues of engagement:

 Serving greater needs (that could be social or environmental)

 Enabling individual involvement & participation, not just consumption
 Building experiences and communities

Colgate-Palmolive: Human-Centered Commerce Hub

The Insight
The new generation of professionals and family heads are increasingly conscious consumers
interested in “do-good” enterprises. They are also tech-savvy multitaskers using a wide variety of
digital platforms.

The Opportunity

Colgate-Palmolive (CP) is strategically positioned to leverage these behaviors:       

 Industry leader with a caring reputation

 Social responsibility trajectory in place
 Well-established online presence supported by e-commerce partnerships

The Solution

A human-centered commerce hub bringing together e-commerce, social responsibility, and brand
loyalty translates into a digital service that invites consumers to be a part of something bigger,
bringing to life Colgate’s caring mission.

How It Works

Consumers purchasing products via this commerce hub, a digital retail partner, or in-store will
have the option to donate to one of the 3 featured social initiatives they care about. The customer
journey will be one of convenience and social responsibility, allowing them more engagement
with the Colgate-Palmolive brand while also actively involving them as conscious consumers.

Design Thinking in Health Sector

 Design thinking is an approach to innovation that produces more-
comprehensive solutions than other process-improvement strategies.
 Design thinking involves four main components: empathy, multidisciplinary
thinking, rapid solutions deployment and continual improvement.
 Health plans and other healthcare organizations can apply design thinking to
solve some of the industry’s most urgent challenges, such as improving the
customer experience.

Many leading hospitals are starting to focus more on understanding the patient experience to
solve these kinds of problems, as well as to improve overall patient experience and to lower
costs. Yet it’s not always easy to get key stakeholders to consider nonclinical aspects of this type
of work.

One of the most promising approaches for understanding patients’ experiences has been design
thinking, a creative, human-centered problem-solving approach that leverages empathy,
collective idea generation, rapid prototyping, and continuous testing to tackle complex
challenges. Unlike traditional approaches to problem solving, design thinkers take great efforts to
understand patients and their experiences before coming up with solutions. This thorough
understanding of patients (for example, those who regularly miss appointments) is what guides
the rest of the process. And because design thinking involves continuously testing and refining
ideas, feedback is sought early and often, especially from patients.

Design thinking has already taken hold in health care, leading to the development of new
products and the improved design of spaces. Yet it remains underused in addressing other
important challenges, such as patient transportation, communication issues between clinicians
and patients, and differential treatment of patients due to implicit bias, to name just a few. If
more leaders embrace design thinking, they can leverage a deeper understanding of patients to
solve such problems, achieving better clinical outcomes, improved patient experience, and lower
costs along the way.

Designing a Patient-Centered Experience

How might design thinking be applied to the persistent and costly problem of no-shows? In
Mary’s case, she couldn’t explain her concerns through the standard patient experience survey,
which is initiated after an appointment and which comprises general questions focused on the
medical visit. Were it not for the hospital administrator’s initiative to ask Mary what was going
on, her concerns may have gone both unnoticed and unaddressed.

This tailored, human-centered approach of problem solving is the foundation of design thinking.
Hospitals versed in design thinking would identify this general challenge and then assign a team
or task force (ideally a multidisciplinary one) to spend weeks or even a few months studying the
patients it affects. The team would use qualitative research methods, such as surveys, focus
groups, and observations, to better understand people’s experiences. They would seek out
patterns and aim to define the real problem at hand. For instance, a team investigating several no-
shows would quickly see that many cases do not necessarily involve a patient’s forgetfulness or
time management. They’d find that the issue faced by patients like Mary is often more
socioemotional than organizational.

After this phase, the team would brainstorm possible solutions, and then begin rapid prototyping
to test them. Depending on the proposed solution, a prototype could be anything from a physical
mock-up to a skit or a flowchart. For example, if the team wanted to design a screening process
to identify individuals with transport-related concerns, they could design a simple computerized
simulation that illustrates how that process might look and feel to both patients and staff. Once
created, this prototype would be tested by relevant stakeholders and perhaps even outside parties
to collect critical feedback. Often, the feedback indicates when or how to modify solutions, or
whether to go back and gather more information. The result is a solution focused on what will
most help the patient.

Addressing a Broader Spectrum of Patient Challenges

There are already a few promising examples of design thinking being used to create a better
experience for patients. For instance, the department of obstetrics and gynecology at Mayo
Clinic used design thinking to reimagine prenatal care. They wanted to better meet the
expectations and needs of expectant mothers, who desired a greater emphasis on the emotional
experience of pregnancy, rather than just the clinical side of it. Through interviews with and
observations of local expectant mothers, the design thinking team learned that it was extremely
important for these women to have a sense of community. So, the department created online care
communities, facilitated by nurses and other pregnancy advisers. The result was an overall
improvement in how prepared and empowered these expectant mothers felt.

Design thinking can be used to address challenges in a variety of domains related to the patient
experience. Consider reimagining the emergency-room waiting experience. Because care is
prioritized based on the severity of a patient’s condition, wait times are difficult to predict.
Patients and their families often spend hours waiting to be seen and treated. Design thinking may
uncover new ways of helping patients feel comfortable and safe during such long waits. An
approach that starts with investigating the patients’ perspectives, including their greatest pain
points, may give administrators ideas for how to make the emergency room experience more
bearable.

The benefits the Design thinking vision can bring to healthcare are many, but the benefits related
to patients are probably those that cause more social concern, precisely because it is something
that affects us all, because at some point in our life will have to go through that.

Among the benefits design thinking application has brought to healthcare, we can highlight the
user experience improvement when interacting with machines (reducing anxiety and fear), the
improvement of the professional-user communication (the doctor-patient communication or
pharmacist-consumer) or the increase of comfort and mobility of patients.

Shift

1. Shifts to Value-based Care

Healthcare is moving beyond the walls of hospitals and into communities and the role of
healthcare providers is shifting. We’re seeing new questions like, what do we do about
loneliness; as it turns out loneliness is as much of a killer as smoking and diabetes. These types
of questions lead to a better understanding of patients and creating whole ecosystems of care.

2. Shift from Being Reactive to Proactive

Everyone is empowered to get to know their bodies and their health before anything is wrong
with them. Health is becoming this process of self-exploration, which creates entry points for
people into healthcare offerings. We’re seeing a shift from healthcare to consumer products that
can help us better understand who we are.
 3. Balance High Regulation with Experimentation

Privacy and risk committees often block tools out of security controls. But there’s opportunity to
invite people to be fully informed about the choices they make in terms of the technology they
use and give them the choice to opt into the tools. We should have high standards of privacy and
make sure our tools are secure, but there’s still room to experiment and use informed consent to
prototype tools that may not be ready for primetime yet.

Design Thinking in Finance

Design Thinking is a human-centred approach to innovation that draws from the designer’s
toolkit to integrate the needs of people, the possibilities of technology, and the requirements for
business success by making more desirable solutions for clients.

Corporate finance and financial services, disrupted by technology and endangered by the
FinTech firms, are in unprecedented need of Design Thinkers able to anticipate customer
preference shifts and innovate to respond to the ever-changing industry needs. This course will
help to understand the importance of Design Thinking in finance, teach the frameworks,
techniques and how to apply them in the daily practice.

Traditionally, finance transformation initiatives are driven by cost reduction strategies. The focus
is on squeezing out as much fat as possible and achieve efficiency. Take adoption of new finance
software as an example. Rather than view the adoption as an opportunity to relieve finance teams
of rudimentary tasks and focus on initiatives that require critical thinking, CFOs view this as an
opportunity get rid of employees and cut costs.

If a business is heavily dependent on analytical thinking, especially where performance and

rewards are budget and or forecast driven, maintaining the status quo often prevails. The
organization finds itself operating as it always has and is reluctant to design and redesign itself
dynamically over time.

When faced with a decision about investing in a new product, market or something new and
promising, but not in the current budget, the answer is always no. Many at times the argument is
that if something cannot be planned and budgeted for in advance, it is not worth pursuing. This
ultimately breeds conformity and stifles innovation as resources are allocated to business units
based on past performance.

The financial services industry is a good example of this hesitancy. Part of the problem here is
that while design thinking emphasizes understanding and empathizing with the user and then
building products and services around their needs, financial institutions tend to operate in the
reverse. Rather than focusing on customer experience, they develop products and services that
meet their own needs and then expect users to adapt accordingly.
Although banks, credit card companies, and credit unions have made a genuine effort to provide
a better user experience for their customers, they often suffer from the problem of top-down
thinking. The key decision makers behind their product and service strategy have a strong
understanding of the organization’s operations and possess financial knowledge that’s much
better than the average user. As a result, they end up designing products and services that may be
well-suited for someone who knows how the company does business, but are bewildering and
downright unfriendly to customers.

Even worse, they don’t put much thought into how to integrate the disparate elements of the
customer experience into a cohesive whole, which only leads to more frustration for users. Take,
for example, a typical bank. The key touchpoint for the interaction comes from the bank’s
mobile app, the bank’s website, a phone representative, and the tellers at the local branch. These
services each developed organically over time as new technologies changed the way people
interacted with their bank; in many cases, they are still organized and operated independently.
Some services can be completed over the phone, but not on the mobile app. Other services
require customers to physically visit a local branch office. For the average user, using the bank
can be a confusing and frustrating experience.

Finding a balance between exploration and exploitation

Balancing innovation and efficiency demands the organization’s resource allocation not to be
based entirely on past performance. Rather, a portion of the resources should be distributed based
on the unproved ideas and projects each business unit presents for the coming year.

One of the reasons why a number of promising projects fail to see the light of the day is because
management have created a culture that first seeks a predictable outcome before paving way for
the project. They seek reliability, which is in direct contrast to a designer’s mindset.

A designer seeks validity over reliability with the goal of producing outcomes that meet a desired
objective. The end result is shown to be correct through the passage of time.

The current business environment is awash with mysteries, which take an infinite variety of
forms. For example, we don’t know how our product and market segments will continue to
perform in future. We are not certain which technologies will have an immediate impact on our
business. Or we might explore the mysteries of competition and geopolitical tension.

Data on past performance might help us extrapolate future performance but the future is no
guarantee.

Given that the future is a mystery, the business should embrace a new way of thinking that
provides a simplified understanding of the mystery and in turn help devise an explicit, step-by-
step procedure for solving the problem.
An organization may decide to focus on exploration, which involves a search for new knowledge
and the reinvention of the business, or exploitation which focuses on business administration and
seeks to increase payoff from existing knowledge.

Intuition, originality and hypotheses about the future are often the driving forces behind
exploration. On the other hand, analysis, reasoning, historical data and mastery are the forces
behind exploitation. Both approaches can create significant value, and both are important to the
success of any business organization. However, organizations struggle to pursue both approaches
simultaneously.

More often, an organization chooses to focus on exploitation, to the exclusion of exploration and
to its own disadvantage. The solution is not to embrace the randomness of intuitive thinking and
avoid analytical thinking completely. The solution lies in the organization embracing both
approaches, turn away from the false certainty of the past, and instead peer into a mystery to ask
what could be.

In other words, balance exploration and exploitation, invention of business and business
administration, and originality and mastery.

Finance plays a critical role in helping the business achieve efficiencies, redeploy the savings
and redirect freed-up resources towards exploration of new opportunities.

Building design into finance

As design thinking is frequently associated with marketing and product development, finance is
deemed an unlikely place to apply design thinking principles. However, design thinking can be
applied to the finance function in every organization. The key is to identify and define the
customers clearly and approach their needs empathetically.

Unlike the marketing function which focuses its efforts on external customers, finance’s efforts
are focused on meeting the needs of its internal customers. To elevate design thinking in finance,
the function should think differently about its structures, its processes, and its cultural norms.

Quite a number of finance organizations are organized around ongoing, permanent tasks. Roles
are firmly defined, with clear responsibilities and reward incentives linked tightly to those
individual responsibilities. The problem with such a structure is that it discourages employees to
see the bigger picture. Individuals employees see their work as own territory to be protected by
all means.

There is little to none collaboration. It’s all about “my responsibilities,” not “our
responsibilities.” As a result, individuals limit their focus to those individual responsibilities,
refining and perfecting outputs before sharing a complete final product with others. This can be
routine production of monthly reports.
In contrast, designers are accustomed to working collaboratively with adhoc teams and clearly
defined goals in a projected-oriented environment. Rather than waiting until the outcome is right,
designers expose their clients to a series of prototypes that improve with each iteration.

Considering that finance business partnering extends beyond traditional month-end reporting
tasks and involves working on various business related projects, sharing performance insights
and creating value, CFOs should therefore foster a culture that supports project-based work and
explicitly make it clear that working on a project is no less important or rewarded than running a
business segment.

Industry Needs Design Thinking

 Design thinking can help resolve this problem by focusing less on how the financial institution
thinks its products and services should work and more on what its customers need those products
and services to do for them. The distinction here is critically important. Nobody wants to use a
banking mobile app just for the sake of using it; the bank is a means to an end. To put it another
way, people don’t want to use a bank; they want to manage their money effectively to meet other
needs in their life.

In fairness to the financial services industry, it faces many constraints that other businesses do
not have to take into account. Government regulations limit how much they can do with their
products and services, and security concerns make it difficult to provide the usability customers
want while still protecting their money and data. Despite these challenges, financial institutions
cannot afford to use them as an excuse for standing still. Amazon recently announced its
intention to provide its own current account service, which would allow people to make
payments without going through banks or credit card companies. Given Amazon’s success in
building a compelling customer experience that consistently keeps its users engaged, financial
institutions need to move quickly to keep ahead of a new generation of competitors.

Even working within the constraints of the industry, design thinking can still uncover new ways
of delivering products and services that empower users and meet their needs. The financial
services industry needs to move away from a model in which it dictates the terms of the
customer experience to one that’s catered to what the customer wants. Reframing their design
methodology to a more “bottom-up” model will help financial institutions to better understand
their users. But simply knowing what people want is only the first step. After identifying key
pain points and needs, design teams can get to work iterating products and services for testing.
This process must be every bit as responsive to users as the initial research. Simply designing a
solution from start to finish based on what users say they want often misses the mark. People
may think they know what they want until they have a solution in their hand that doesn’t feel
right. Through continuous iterative testing, design teams can be sure that they’re adapting their
solutions to the needs of intended users.

Although the financial services industry faces a number of challenges in implementing design
thinking practices, shifting customer expectations are making it more difficult for them to avoid
doing so. As newer, less rigid companies begin to offer their own financial products and services,
the competition promises to become more heated. Existing financial institutions have a legacy
advantage for the time being, but if they can’t find a way to adapt to the disruptions beginning to
shake up the industry, they may quickly discover that their customers are no longer willing to
tolerate a subpar user experience when they have alternatives.

Design Thinking in Education

Design Thinking is a mindset and approach to learning, collaboration, and problem solving. In
practice, the design process is a structured framework for identifying challenges, gathering
information, generating potential solutions, refining ideas, and testing solutions. Design Thinking
can be flexibly implemented; serving equally well as a framework for a course design or a
roadmap for an activity or group project.

Classrooms and schools across the world are facing design challenges every single day, from
teacher feedback systems to daily schedules. Wherever they fall on the spectrum of scale the
challenges educators are confronted with are real, complex, and varied. And as such, they require
new perspectives, new tools, and new approaches. Design thinking is one of them.

Design Support

Design Consultation for projects, session, and courses, including active learning and facilitation
strategies.

Brainstorming Kits including Post-it notes, Sharpie markers, and stickable chart paper.

Physical Prototyping Cart with dozens of creative, constructivist supplies, including felt, yarn,
foil, craft sticks, rubber bands, Play-Doh, Legos, and more.

Prototyping. Design Thinking use cases, collated workbooks, and curated research.

To Do:

 Developing and agreeing on criteria for their designs.

 Selecting tools and materials in this case, Makers Empire and 3D printing.
 Supporting each other to learn how to use the new tools.
 Producing a working prototype.
 The testing process for our first graders involved:
 Giving each other feedback
 Assessing their designs against the previous agreed criteria
 Making modifications and improvements to their designs
 Testing their designs in the context they would be used.
 Reflecting on their problem-solving processes and learning outcomes.
Think about projects you can do with your own students that will help enhance and deepen their
learning. How might you support your students to:

 Develop empathy, insights and understandings.

 Define a problem as an actionable question.
 Generate and visualise ideas.
 Develop prototypes; and
 Evaluate and test their designed solutions.
 Design Thinking in Infrastructure
 Design thinking refers to the application of a discipline that tries to understand human
behaviour in order to develop or improve products or services. As opposed to customary
approaches that rely excessively on analyzing and answering questions by working out
the last detail, the design thinking paradigm is centered on collaborative experimentation
and rapid prototyping.
 Traditional planning methodologies rely heavily on top-down approaches the plans are
first made and strategized, and only then are the citizens informed about it. These plans
are usually made without involving the citizens in the process, and as a result, often fail
to reflect the problems faced by citizens on the ground. Consequently, citizens naturally
have a lesser degree of ownership of these top-down plans and responsibility towards
maintenance of public infrastructure. While participatory planning approaches seek to
address these gaps by working with the citizens in understanding their problems, they
rarely ‘close the loop’ by seeking feedback from the citizens after the plan is prepared.
Thus, the ownership of the plan by the citizens is not guaranteed. Additionally, this also
precludes any further refinement of the existing plan.
 Design Thinking provides us a framework to overcome the flaws of the traditional
participatory planning approaches in the following ways- first, design thinking enables
the creation of an infrastructure plan that places citizens at the heart of the process. A
process of deep empathising (through household surveys, interviews, and charettes) will
enable the development of a granular understanding of the problems faced by citizens.
Second, the design thinking method also facilitates a process of refinement of the plan
through continuous prototyping and testing.
 It is hard to get excited about infrastructure, but it is crying out for a more holistic, multi-
disciplinary, innovative and longer-term perspective, one that can evolve and meet our
needs rather than the current band-aid approach that has resulted in a crippled
infrastructure not much evolved from the last great build period between the 1940s and
1960s. What is missing is strategic innovation: consider, for example, the impact of
intermodal freight transport and how that revolutionized the movement of goods; or the
development of the electric power grid, and how it revolutionized energy provision and
use. What new systems are required today? What new systems will be required for
tomorrow? Infrastructure also needs to be looked at in the context of some important
related issues such as sustainability, climate change (concrete production produces
significant greenhouse gases), migration (new centers of population, urban blight, etc.)
and local natural resource availability.
Design Thinking  in Retail
Design Thinking, which is used by top brands such as Apple, Google and Samsung, focuses on
the human aspect of the user when ideating, creating and applying technology. It’s an approach
to innovation that any consumer-related industry Chief Marketing Officer would embrace.

With Design Thinking, smart digital-led technologies are just the starting point. Human emotions
and conduct are priorities. The Design Thinking process is highly iterative, with experiments and
continuous revisions to challenge assumptions and redefine problems. It’s about discovering
innovative solutions to better the customer experience.

Success stories from Design Thinking include smart user interfaces that give customers the
power to personalize their experience as per their preferences. Or automated chatbots/voice
agents that can understand voice or text and respond humanly.

A good example close to you would be Google Assistant, it actively provides contextual
notifications about flight status, traffic, product deliveries and more all without being asked.

Creating optimal customer experiences not only makes people feel good but also has true
business benefits.

Customer Satisfaction should be seen as a Profit Center

When technology decisions flow from a human-centered Design Thinking approach, consumers
will always have a superior experience. An experience in which the technology is an enabler
rather than a distraction. The information about customers that flows naturally from their
interactions with the products and services will provide valuable data insights. These insights can
make marketing leaders learn quickly from changing consumer habits and respond faster. Or
even to anticipate consumer needs and drive innovations to meet them.

As businesses and brands are rethinking how they offer value beyond product benefits, design
thinking methods continue to help bring fresh perspectives and new ways of doing things. It
allows them to consider innovation not just for the sake of creating a new product, but to solve
real problems or open new avenues of engagement:

 Serving greater needs (that could be social or environmental)

 Enabling individual involvement & participation, not just consumption
 Building experiences and communities

Colgate-Palmolive: Human-Centered Commerce Hub

The Insight
The new generation of professionals and family heads are increasingly conscious consumers
interested in “do-good” enterprises. They are also tech-savvy multitaskers using a wide variety of
digital platforms.

The Opportunity

Colgate-Palmolive (CP) is strategically positioned to leverage these behaviors:       

 Industry leader with a caring reputation

 Social responsibility trajectory in place
 Well-established online presence supported by e-commerce partnerships

The Solution

A human-centered commerce hub bringing together e-commerce, social responsibility, and brand
loyalty translates into a digital service that invites consumers to be a part of something bigger,
bringing to life Colgate’s caring mission.

How It Works

Consumers purchasing products via this commerce hub, a digital retail partner, or in-store will
have the option to donate to one of the 3 featured social initiatives they care about. The customer
journey will be one of convenience and social responsibility, allowing them more engagement
with the Colgate-Palmolive brand while also actively involving them as conscious consumers.

Design Thinking Case studies in Banking

The banking industry in India doesn’t usually consider the human factor while developing
products and services. But several financial institutions are now starting to understand how
important it is. They are using proven business strategies to foster creativity and innovation. This
is called Design Thinking.

People mistakenly believe that design thinking is all about aesthetics a philosophy only limited to
creative types of people, who specialize in design. But that’s not at all the case. It does not mean
that you can ignore aesthetics, but a good-looking design that does nothing for consumer needs
or does not solve any consumer problems has zero chance at success.

Design thinking is about applying the design principles to the way people interact with the world,
rather than focusing solely on aesthetics. An iterative process in which you try to understand the
user, challenge your assumptions and redefine problems in an attempt to identify different
solutions that might not be easily apparent using conventional methods. Design thinking revolves
around developing a deep interest in understanding users of products and services. This helps
you develop empathy with the target user.
This is the complete opposite of how the banking industry in India and the credit institutions
traditionally design products and services. Financial institutions tend to develop products based
on their internal processes and operational efficiencies, instead of focusing on the consumers.
Finishing up the product with a pretty wrapper and calling it a day.

Financial institutions then wonder why consumers get frustrated with their products and services.
For example, a customer abandoning the online account, opening half-way through the process.
The process doesn’t meet the user’s need or address their problem; to open an account without
having to go to a branch. Design thinking, in theory, can help solve that problem.

Design thinking is growing in popularity, but not a new phenomenon

It is not a new concept. It’s been around in some form or the other since the 1960s. Today, it will
be difficult to find a Fortune 100 company that does not incorporate Design Thinking or at least
some aspects of design thinking in how they get products and services to market.

The banking industry in India and Financial services organizations are laggards in adopting
laggards, but there are some exceptions. For Example, BBVA launched a program “Design
Thinking for Leaders”, to help the bank innovate and design for its customers.

Rob Brown, Head of Marketing, Design and Responsible Business at BBVA, believes that “All
employees, regardless of their role, should begin to see themselves as a designer that contributes
to improving the customer experience” giving the bank an edge over its competitors.

Design thinking is big with technology companies that focus on the consumer experience first.
Making it likely that more financial institutions will turn to design thinking since they
increasingly find themselves competing against both mega-tech and fin-tech firms.

Empathize digital banking users

At the Empathize stage, we collect a large amount of data about business goals, customer needs
and pain points, and product features, thus researching the wire context around the product. Our
aim is to feel and emphasize with the problem we are trying to solve. To achieve this, we need to
step into the shoes of the customer and business owner.

Define core user problems and valueAt the Define stage, we analyze and synthesize collected
data to define the core problems and prioritize key data. The main purpose is to understand what
value we could bring to customers and why they would prefer it over other solutions. To achieve
this, we need to approach data analysis from these different angles: business, psychology, user
behavior, competitors, marketing, technology, etc.

Ideate digital banking solution

At the Ideate stage, we start to generate multiple hypotheses about what our solution could be.
Our main goal is to uncover the best way to solve the previously defined problems. To achieve
this, we need to step out of the box and create dozens of potential solutions.

Prototype digital banking product

At the Prototype stage, we take dozens of previously generated ideas about how our end solution
could look and work, moving toward designing the final version. We check all the solutions
based on previously generated user scenarios, business goals, etc. at the Synthesis stage. In this
way, we narrow down multiple solutions into one or more that are delivered as visual prototypes
and could be tested by users and business owners.

Test banking prototype

The final Test stage is needed to ensure that our visual prototype provides the needed solution
according to the previously defined problem. If it is not, we then return to the first stage and
repeat the process.

Design Thinking in finance determines success in digital age

Design and Design Thinking have never before played a more influential role in determining the
success of any business in any industry. This fact is well supported by the Design Value Index
(DVI), a summary of the market performance of 15 design-driven companies including Apple,
IBM, Nike, and SAP. Those companies share a high level of design strategy implementation
across their organizations. Their executives practice design in everyday work, and they have
design positions at the management levels. In the period from 2005 to 2015, design-driven
companies outperformed the S&P 500 by 211%.

Impacting customers

Bank is using design thinking to address big, knotty internal issues, like centralizing multiple
back-offices into one, to serve customers better. The big question is what impact have they seen
on customers?

Bank was able to see first-hand how design thinking can address such a question through its
work with its customers in the education space. Banks are governed and Bank is no exception by
Basel 3 rules, a regulatory framework intended to strengthen bank capital requirements by
increasing bank liquidity. Schools are liquidity-rich, yet they don’t need cash on site, so helping
them to reduce their cash on site and improve their overall liquidity, while getting more funding
onto the bank’s balance sheet, enables a bank to lend more. Sounds like a win-win proposition.
Wrong.
Using design thinking to uncover the real need, bank included teachers and educators their
customers in the process, in pursuit of radical collaboration. By doing this, they quickly
discovered that holding cash on school premises (parents pay a lot of cash into schools for trips
and other school services) is a risk, as it attracts thieves. But the real pain point for teachers is the
administrative overhead of collecting all the money for school trips, remembering who has paid,
who is going, and which parents still need to be chased. School outings enrich pupils’ lives, but
the administrative burden on teachers reduces time invested in lesson planning their core job of
teaching.

Once it understood the real pain point, bank collaborated with an tech partner to create a school
app, similar to Uber. This is how it works. The parents associated with a class will receive a
notice via the app and can sign up directly no more need for signing attendance sheets. Parents’
bank accounts or credit cards are linked to the app just like paying for an Uber cab so the
financial transaction takes place without cash. The app is also linked to Outlook, providing diary
management for everyone.

The more perspectives that are included in the initial design thinking stages, the easier it is to
commercialize the outcome, because you are uncovering real demand.

The greater good

Anything that reduces risk on school premises and increases the time teachers spend on teaching
rather than on administration has to be a good thing. But there’s more. Bank is already
contemplating the wider ecosystem of the desperate need for free education in South Africa.

“Design thinking helps us to solve problems at a higher level of thinking it makes you think
wider and bigger,” says du Plessis. “This is a thin wedge strategy. It opens our minds to how an
app like this might be used to offer free education in the future, especially to children in remote
areas.”

Giving back and nation building are the next steps on the agenda.

Design thinking is a powerful tool. Used properly, it opens the gateway to innovation that really
works for customers. But it also seems to be a recipe for cultural change changing the way a
business thinks about and manages itself.