Design thinking has been used by consumer-driven companies for the development of products and services, for over 50 years. But can design thinking in intelligent automation drive benefits in the same way as it does for consumer goods?

What Is Design Thinking?

Design thinking isn’t a new idea and has been well refined over decades. In short, it is an approach to products and services that helps to methodically identify unknowns, establish solutions, and then test outcomes. It can be broken down into 5 clear stages, and while they don’t have to be completed in order, teams will often run them simultaneously and repeatedly until the result is refined to a point the stage can be considered complete.

1. Understand
First, you must identify and understand the problem you want to tackle. Focusing on the user of your product or service and how the solution they currently use works.

2. Define
Next, you must define what the key challenges for that user are, and what issues those challenges create. Make your definitions clear and easily understood by everyone involved.

3. Solve
Then comes the first part of the solution. Looking at the problems you discovered and defined and think of a variety of potential solutions that solve most of or all of those challenges.

4. Prototype
Create a basic version of the solution you think is best. It doesn’t need to be perfect, it just needs to cover the basic functions of your solution – so that you can establish whether or not it works.

5. Test
Testing is the gatekeeper to rolling out, so you have to be certain you’ve tested your solution as thoroughly as possible if you want something to be successful on day one. If something doesn’t work, go back to the root cause and apply the relevant stage.

How Intelligent Automation Benefits From Design Thinking

Design thinking in intelligent automation is no different from the stages we’ve covered above; we just have to apply those in an automation setting. As with any business venture, ROI is right up there as a performance indicator. Design thinking offers a specific way to boost the ROI of automation – changing the perspective on the technology to not accomplish individual tasks but instead outcomes.

By focusing on outcomes rather than processes you can more clearly define what every process is set to help achieve. It’s just like your business goals, all the decisions you make should be geared towards achieving them. Design thinking brings alignment between process flows and process outcomes and that helps to drive returns on automation investment.

You may already use some form of design thinking in your business so making the shift to using it internally, focused on intelligent automation, could fit nicely into your current model. If you’re unsure of how to bring automation into your business or how you can implement design thinking then your best bet is to reach out to an expert.

Need help with design thinking and automation? PAteam is ready to help, talk to us today.