People tend to resist change when change means altering or replacing existing norms of doing things. A new system might fail when users do not accept it even though the system might be effective. Adoption, or lack thereof dictates just how effective a new way of doing things is or isn’t. At the same time, an inefficient system might create value among users if users decide to adopt it. I think we can all agree that user adoption is the primary objective for all products.

User adoption is not something that evolves at a particular point of a product development life cycle. Instead, user adoption requires proper planning and implementation strategy when the product is just an idea. Various products around us have provided amazing user experiences that were useful and served customers effectively. However, they could not make the impact they were intended to make, and in the end failed. Companies should always consider the design of user adoption as a primary part of their entire product life cycle.

What Is User Adoption?

User adoption is a process through which new users become accustomed to products or services and become long-term users. In other terms, it is also known as onboarding. In this case, customers tend to leave using products or services and adopt the new products, if they get value out of it. As users become accustomed to new products because they are effective and are best suited to their needs and serve their purpose, that is when you have achieved user adoption.

What Is Design Thinking?

Design Thinking assists organizations in creating value for people. It aims to solve concrete problems that impact people and deliver solutions that align with people’s needs.

As designers unveil or identify issues, they can bring about innovative solutions. In addition, it enables designers to tackle problems that people find difficult to define or verbalize. Furthermore, Design Thinking assists organizations to lead with innovation.

For example, a human can’t imagine things that cannot be believed. Therefore, it creates difficulty for the designers to land on a solution that does not exist. Using an iterative approach more often leads to innovative solutions.

It makes any organization run more efficiently and faster because it focuses on creating prototypes and testing to check their effectiveness, after a lot of listening to people and defining the problems.

Design Thinking as a philosophy encourages experimentation before launching products in the market that ensures creating value for people. Multiple methodologies move forward the Design Thinking process. Design Thinking aims to gain a clear understanding of the issues before generating an idea. It involves an action-oriented process to collect data that enables the designers to understand issues deeply. The idea generation phase involves various possible solutions, then the designers start prototyping, gaining feedback, and ongoing iterations. All these step-by-step processes after idea generation eliminate bad design. The product or service design involves user input, thereby increasing the chance of user adoption when products are launched.

A deep and clear understanding helps idea generation and expands the chances of creating multiple solutions, which are then analyzed and selected for prototyping and customer feedback. The outcome is the result of prototype iteration and customer feedback. However, companies need to practice patience during the process to get to a proper solution.

Better Products for Better User Adoption

Design Thinking is a process through which companies can design better products to increase the user adoption rate. Better products bring in and retain customers. Thus, it can lead to better user adoption.

Designers can use the following process to gain better user adoption:

Seek Answers by Questioning

A mindset filled with curiosity is a must have in Design Thinking. It is curiosity that leads to asking more questions, conducting research, and seeking to dig deeper into the issues to find solutions. All these processes enable us to come up with a list of solutions and alternatives that can lead to various possibilities to solve the problem. When you surface a list of solutions, they might have a specific purpose to function and advantages to provide a solution. To apply Design Thinking, you must be patient enough to think critically and break down the problem to get a deeper understanding to find out the root cause of the problem that impacts people at an emotional level. As you learn that the emotional impact is, you can begin to seek to create the solution.

Understand the Customer

Design Thinking focuses on the qualitative process of study and then a quantitative approach. It is because Design Thinking is human-centric and looks forward to creating products and services involving people’s needs. When designers interact with clients, they have a chance to clarify their doubts by asking questions. This enables them to have a deep level of perception about the people’s issues, assumptions, desires, and experiences. You can then include the functions or things that fit the client’s use and check what items or functions can be added to the product. In the next stage, you can view the issue and generate ideas by being in their shoes for a moment.

Never be Satisfied

Iteration and feedback are the main part of Design Thinking. There is constant shift in customer’s problems since their desires and uses for commodities and services keep changing. Therefore, it is better not to assume that your understanding of them is enough. It is better to adopt a flexible and ever-changing mindset since, with Design Thinking, constantly questioning and learning about customers is a lifelong process. Adopting or internalizing this process will not only enable you to break down the issues easily and quickly but also enable you to create connections between various problems.

Know When to Switch Mindsets

Whatever the methodology of Design Thinking, it includes various stages of convergent and divergent thinking. Both processes are beneficial only when applied at the right time; otherwise, they can prove detrimental. For example, divergent thinking occurs when designers research ideas, issues or understanding. At this stage, allow yourselves to explore and note down everything and research various aspects, even if that might not be relevant after this stage. It is essential to keep yourself away from judging things during this phase since it might create a hindrance to your creativity.

In the next stage, converge by analyzing the conclusion of the previous phrase, consider the implication, assess limitations, and transform the ideas into essential concepts you can test after interacting with the customers.

Embrace Experimentation

Experimentation such as testing, prototyping, and iteration with the help of feedback is a big part of Design Thinking. Understanding solutions that works and does not work helps draw a line between a good and a bad design. In addition, involving customers in this phrase also ensures that you are doing everything right. It also ensures user adoption of the final product or services when launched successfully.

Recognizing the Impact Beforehand

It is equally important for designers to recognize the impact of launched products. Investing time to check and amend product and services is the key to launching a user-adopted product. For instance, when you have a major technology rollout, the users feel the impact and might have a major disruption. Likewise, users engaging in that technology will have an impact, and their productivity might decrease temporarily while investing time in learning the system. Therefore, designers must acknowledge and properly plan it as a part of the user adoption process.

Strategies to Gain User Adoption Using Design Thinking

Design thinking is a method to solve problems creatively by addressing the needs of people. However, implementing it is tricky. Mistakes in socializing, onboarding, and implementing can cause issues. Following are the strategies to implement design thinking for better user adoption:

Learn What Draws the Customer to your Product

You can put yourself into the customer’s shoes to learn why they prefer your products over other brands. Your sales team might clearly understand this since they are experts in addressing customer issues. You can discuss with them and conduct surveys with your clients to know your drawbacks and plus points. This way, you can implement Design Thinking into your organization to improve user adoption.

By interacting with your customers, you will know the common trends of your products, how the customers talk about them and how often they use them. This interaction will help you learn about your product’s value among the customers. Then while user adopt, you can introduce the parts that can be advantageous to them . This communication can provide your customers with a better experience with your products since you have created it to address their concerns.

Engage in Trial Periods

Trial periods have various customer benefits. Your users can introduce your interface and check if that fits them. However, free trial periods can be counter intuitive. So, you can introduce low-cost trials to help your customers learn about your products.

Customer Onboarding

Customer onboarding is essential for user adoption. You should ensure that your customer journey is seamless, leading to value delivery. It is the process that will want them to return to your products.

Conclusion

Implementing Design Thinking into developing an idea and designing a system, services, or products around it enables you to gain better user adoption. It is because Design Thinking focuses on addressing people’s issues and designing solutions around them. Design Thinking can also help designers become critical thinkers who can learn about customers at a deeper level and help know the issues to be addressed by the products. Employing Design Thinking to solve problems is more creative as well as effective than the traditional methods.

No matter the medium of transmission of the news, we know a recession could be imminent. We know that recessions are fearful and can be catastrophic to businesses and people.

Many people agree that there might be a significant economic downturn in trade and activity despite having high corporate profits. Various questions might ponder in the mind of business owners.

What can be done to prepare for a recession? What precautions should be taken to get prepared for it?

No matter that the questions, you can prepare yourselves ahead of time without disrupting the business.

Investing in anti-cyclical methods before times of crisis is key. However, the real question that arises is how can you keep yourself in a scenario where your business is not affected by the recession? Furthermore, how can you turn this major challenge into an opportunity to improve and grow.

In the present economic situation, when your business is surrounded by instability, pandemics, and disruption, planning to innovate business strategies or prepare for recessions is prudent and wise.

With some strategic Design Thinking methodologies, you can protect your business from falling apart and improve it so you can grow. Many companies have leap frogged ahead during down cycles because they planned not only how to survive, but more importantly on how to thrive.

What Is a Recession?

A recession is when less trade, lower business activity and unemployment create a prolonged and widespread economic downturn in the country. A recession occurs when a country has two consecutive quarters of an economic downturn that declines the GDP of a nation. Recessions generally reduce the economic output and demand of customers and increase unemployment. During this upheaval, customers limit their purchases and get limited nonessential services or products. It results in an economic downturn in various businesses.

However, recession-proof businesses are those businesses that are still performing well despite the economic contraction. Some are businesses providing everyday products, such as healthcare product suppliers, food companies and electric and gas utilities. People need these essential services and products during the good and bad times as well. These industries might not grow much faster but can outperform during recession times.

Recession-Proofing Business

As a business leader, big or small, you know when a recession is imminent, and once that happens, there isn’t much you can do but deal with it. You can just wait to mitigate the impact when the other one occurs in the future. You should always take precautions to recession-proof your business since it is crucial for success. You can plan better using Design Thinking methodologies that can assist in uncovering plans that better and more closely align with people’s needs, thus making your recession-proof.

What Is Design Thinking?

Design Thinking assists organizations in creating value for people. It aims to solve concrete problems that impact people and deliver solutions that align with people’s needs.

As designers unveil or identify issues, they can bring about innovative solutions. In addition, it enables designers to tackle problems that people find difficult to define or verbalize. Furthermore, Design Thinking assists organizations to lead with innovation.

For example, a human can’t imagine things that cannot be believed. Therefore, it creates difficulty for the designers to land on a solution that does not exist. Using an iterative approach more often leads to innovative solutions.

It makes any organization run more efficiently and faster because it focuses on creating prototypes and testing to check their effectiveness, after a lot of listening to people and defining the problems.

Design Thinking as a philosophy encourages experimentation before launching products in the market that ensures creating value for people. Multiple methodologies move forward the Design Thinking process.

Design Thinking aims to gain a clear understanding of the issues before generating an idea. It involves an action-oriented process to collect data that enables the designers to understand issues deeply.

The idea generation phase involves various possible solutions, then the designers start prototyping, gaining feedback, and ongoing iterations. All these step-by-step processes after idea generation eliminate bad design. The product or service design involves user input, thereby increasing the chance of user adoption when products are launched.

A deep and clear understanding helps idea generation and expands the chances of creating multiple solutions, which are then analyzed and selected for prototyping and customer feedback.

The outcome is the result of prototype iteration and customer feedback. However, companies need to practice patience during the process to get to a proper solution.

Process Of Design Thinking

Design Thinking solves people issues in a customer-centric way. It is deeply rooted in questioning, generating ideas, and developing the creation of innovation. Design Thinking questions the issues, assumptions, and implications before creating any product or service, reducing money and failure risks. Here are the stages of Design Thinking briefly described:

Empathize

Empathy is the first phase to successfully designing solutions. It depends on understanding people’s needs at a deeper level than just the transactional level, but at an emotional level. You focus on what problem you are trying to solve with the active input of customers which will assure your success.

To unveil new solutions, you must understand customer needs, limitations, and aspirations. To do this effectively you must elevate your view of customers, to people. No matter what business you are in, you are in the people-to-people business. By engaging with targeted customers, designers should gather real insights relevant to the problem that needs to be solved and align products and services to best solve them.

Define

This stage focuses on clarifying and defining the solution. You should consider the themes that have come to the surface, the barriers identified, if your team is going in the right direction or if you need to reassess your learnings. This brief created with focus and inspiration is crucial to unearth the best solution. When this step is practice with precision, you can move on to the next phase.

The most important way to recession-proof your business is to not assume you have solved the problem based on your own knowledge of your customer base, it must be informed by the people who will be involved. The customers, and the employees. That alignment is the secret sauce to recession proofing your business.

Ideate and Collaborate

In this stage, with the combined idea from the previous steps, it is time to start creating solutions. To fuel this phase, you can use tools such as landscaping, mind-mapping, brainstorming and post-it notes. Before developing solutions, you should also assess where the solution can land you and the longevity of the changes you see in the landscape. Be sure to spend plenty of time identifying your strengths, weakness, opportunities, and threats assessment to be confident about the viability of the solutions you are landing on.

Prototype

In this phase, you need to experiment with the created solutions. Consider iteration and prototyping to infuse life into your creation since it is crucial. In this step, try to highlight the remaining gaps from the lens of the stakeholders (customers, employees, partners) understanding. This step can be improvised, redesigned, or even rejected through a series of critiques and reviews. The key is to not push a fixed narrative, rather you want to take a mutable approach here, and remain flexible to learn, iterate, and adapt. There is no room for egos in this phase.

Test

After the development and prototyping, test it with your customers. Some businesses might have a tight budget, or their clients might be uncomfortable breaking free of traditional methods. Engage with your friendly contacts first. It is also essential to know if your customers are vested in the problems you are trying to solve.

You should ask questions that are solution-oriented like, “What are the problems you care about that can be solved with this solution?”, “How will the solution make a difference in your experience, and why does that matter to you?” or “What more can be included in the package to make it a better solution that best serves your needs?” When answered effectively, these questions can help you come up with more productive and on demand solutions.

Recession-Proof Using Design Thinking

Identification

You can get your team, employees, and customers together to understand the current processes, particularly to identify the jobs that need to be done and the needs and difficulties of customers. This step can assist in finding out different initiatives that can impact your business. It can improve your present operations that can enhance customer experience or bring new value into your line of products or services. The identified issues can be analyzed further to know if they can offer a positive impact, their feasibility, and the complexity of implementation.

Opportunity Mapping

You can use opportunity mapping in various ways while planning for a recession. Here are some examples:

New Models

You can view the recession period as an opportunity since many industries are retreating. So, you can take this time to expand your strategic business plans. Know that if the traditional mode of function ceases to serve people, then new systems or commodities have the chance to become relevant. You and your team can create an opportunity map to identify the needs of the suppliers, clients and customers and assess their area of importance that has emerged. Then, as other industries are retreating, you can find an opportunity to reframe and extend the traditional things into a new one relevant to the circumstance.

Mixed Scenarios

It is likely that when one business faces a recession, another might get an opportunity to soar to new heights. So, these mixed scenarios view it and create recession-prone business units that can be more impactful. Therefore, you can take the opportunity to map your experience and identify strong and weak points that you can act on when the situation emerges.

Cost Management & Efficiency Gains

Whether or not a recession occurs, cost management and efficiency gains are always on top of the business must do list. However, when a recession occurs, businesses would investigate short-term opportunities while keeping costs at a minimum. Therefore, create an opportunity map focused on the books and related cost improvement chances.

Fail to Plan Equates to Plan to Fail

Even though no planning is perfect, still being prepared for the various circumstances can let you have options available at that moment. For example, if you decide to plan when the recession occurs, it will be too late, and your industry might lose the opportunity for growth and expansion. With Design Thinking tools and systems, you can get hold of various directions and create an impact to survive, thrive, and strengthen your business.

Conclusion

Even during a recession, you can meet the needs of your customers and grow your business. Companies should seek to adopt Design Thinking that can increase exposure time with customers listening, talking, and taking feedback from them. Then incorporate customer feedback through the lens of Design Thinking and ingrain them in producing the right products or services. This process will save time and money and decrease recession induced risks since it will ensure that your products resonate with your customer’s needs no matter what’s going on with the economy.