Like any modern-day editor, I’ve worked for a my fair share of websites. Some of them have been beautiful, well-designed sites. Some of them have not. And you want to know what I’ve learned? Great design does not guarantee profits. In fact, a poorly-designed site can be highly profitable if it’s content is valuable to its readers and its business model makes sense.However, design thinking is vital to staying financially prosperous in today’s disruptive media market. And luckily, you don’t have to be a graphic designer to develop innovative products using design thinking.Design thinking is a process of understanding business problems and developing innovative solutions in rapid time. By focusing on developing prototypes or minimal viable products, companies can test out a new idea or product and then improve upon it or scrap it without astronomical sunk costs.

Design thinking is a five step process that requires you:

1. Empathize – This is best done by observing your customer at the times and locations where they access your product. It is not to be done through market surveys. As Henry Ford once said, “If I had asked people what they want, they would have told me a faster horse.”
2. Define – You need to get to the core problem before you can begin brainstorming. Most failure in innovation is because people don’t take the time to really understand and define the problem, thereby resulting in band-aid or impractical solutions. For example, The New York Times audience was willing to subscribe, but not for the Times’ original Times Select plan.
3. Ideate – once you define the problem, you want to brainstorm like hell. Designers usually come up with 50 ideas before they even begin to evaluate them. You should do the same.
4. Prototype – Unlike engineers, you don’t need to come out with a life-size model as the prototype. For content sites, a simple wireframe design in PowerPoint is a good place to start. Then a simple website with maybe two or three places for audiences to click and interact is fine to start. As we all know, you can really sink time and money into building a full-fledged website with all the bells and whistles only to be outdated by the time it’s live. That’s why prototyping (or creating minimal viable products, as they’re known in agile product development) is the most critical part of the design thinking process. This is the key element that lets you stay nimble in our disruptive industry.
5. Test – As we’ve written about time and again, testing provides the data to know whether your new product will sink or float. While we advocated to A/B testing whenever possible, it’s also possible to test through consumer feedback and other qualitative methods. Just keep in mind Henry Ford’s quote in step #1.

Got questions about how you can use design thinking to make your website or publication more innovative? Contact me and I’ll he happy to tell you more.