How Design Thinking Makes Software Projects Successful

The design thinking process seeks to overcome challenges through the process of developing a deep understanding of an application’s intended users, their behaviors, and their intrinsic motivations. Here’s how design thinking software works.

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Innovation is the foundation on which progress takes place in technology. Satya Nadella, CEO of Microsoft summed it up precisely, “The technology industry does not respect tradition – it only respects innovation.” Great companies are built on innovation. With the widespread adoption of digital technologies, software products are now driving the world. The software product innovations are creating a global impact by revolutionising products, processes and business models across industries. The software product innovations and technologies will play a bigger role in solving our day to day problems.

Building software products is a complex art. The dynamics of the field are constantly advancing at a rapid pace. Innovations and problem solving capabilities at scale will give companies unprecedented opportunities to build a better future. Here’s a look at some of the excellent sources for software product innovations.

1. Interdisciplinary Ideas

One of the most fascinating ways to come up with new innovations is being able to correlate and execute ideas across disciplines. For e.g. psychiatrists are able to understand human emotions based on social graphs generated by social media data. The psychologists and psychiatrists are making use of technology to evaluate and diagnose humans.

Today ecommerce platforms are helping farmers leverage cloud computing to reach their end customers by cutting out the middle men & get better return of investment. When innovations are applied across industries to solve real world problems, it creates a win win situation for everyone.

2. Competition

The software industry is very fast moving. Your competitors and other leading companies can be a good source of learning. Watch out the best in the world in your business and their capabilities. You can learn about the latest technologies, innovations and research areas they are working on.

An understanding of the top companies gives your company the perspective of what customers really want. When you understand your competitors and best companies in your space, you can shape your product innovations accordingly. It could help you discover ways to address gaps in existing products and innovate around them.

3. Industry Research & Developments

The computer industry is buzzing with new ideas and research developments all the time. The research and developments in the industry can be a great avenue for innovation. For e.g. cryptographers secure computers and data by using advanced algorithms for encrypting data. The algorithms are improvised to stay one step ahead of the malicious users and adversaries who can hack your data. Companies can make use of the latest research and development to build robust software products. The latest innovations from the field of research can be built into the software products for your customers to use.

The community ideas, research and innovation offers good insights into the latest developments in your areas. The most innovative companies learn to leverage the developments for solving the most effective problems for the customers.

4. Collaborators & Partners

The increasing amounts of collaboration and partnerships in the computing industry is driven by customer choice. Many customers prefer the best of the breed solutions today. In this scenario, your company needs to find ways to be effective for the customers.

Your collaborators, vendors, distribution partners can only contribute great ideas for software product innovation. For e.g. the hardware based sensors devices are integrated with software to provide surveillance solutions to the end customer. In this case, the hardware and sensor companies work with software product companies to tailor innovations for meeting the needs of the customers.

5. Customer Needs

Customer complaints are a breeding ground for innovations. When your customer is complaining, they are talking about an unarticulated product innovation. The top companies learn to harness these gaps, and innovate to create a pleasing experience for customers.

The customer needs are often the source of the best product innovations. Talk to your customers, learn what they have to say and identify the gaps where your next breakthroughs will come from. If your company can constantly reinvent itself based on customer feedback, it will always do well in business. The most successful companies are able to provide the right innovations, at the right time and to the right customers.

6. User Groups

The value of an innovation lies in its use. The most valuable innovations are driven by its users. Companies that innovate find time to listen to their users, they take inputs and feedback from them & build things that help them do their stuff with ease.

Everytime user needs efforts to use your products & services, it creates friction. The product innovations are meant to eliminate friction and make users happy. Sometimes, it could be breakthrough innovations to reimagine how the whole thing needs to be done. For e.g. smart phone based attendance systems in smart city offices with geo tagging & QR code. Or it could be redesigning UX to combine voice commands and easy interface for ordinary citizens to avail digital services from their mobile devices.

7. Data Statistics & Analysis

As per Forbes survey, 88% of marketers use data obtained by third parties to enhance their understanding of each customer. The data is at the core of how decisions are made today. Companies that operate without understanding and analysing their data are blind to the changing realities of their customers.
Many Times when innovations are fueled without proper understanding of the customers, they tend to serve little purpose. The most successful companies learn to harness the power of data for igniting innovations. They build features and capabilities to serve the customers backed by data. For e.g. customer usage analysis of products can help companies identify areas for innovations.

8. Customer Interactions

Every interaction with a customer is a chance to reflect about your product or service. The customer interactions can be classified in three stages viz,
Pre Purchase
Purchase
Post Purchase

At every stage, there is potential for improving your offerings. The overall understanding of customers needs and wants can be analysed in the pre purchase stage.

The data can be used to guide product development and innovation efforts. Google, Amazon and Apple are all obsessed with making purchasing their products and services as smooth as possible. For e.g. buying something on Amazon takes less than 1 second despite the billions of products it sells.

The post purchase interactions with customers are typically regarding the product usage, complaints or enhancements. When your company creates processes to effectively record and analyse all customer communication, it will provide you enough pointers to see what your customers value the most.

9. Organisational DNA

Every company has an organisational DNA that either promotes innovations or stifles them. Innovations are done, when teams are passionate to build great products and services. The most innovative companies let people experiment, ideate and build things that excite them.

When a company is innovating, they make mistakes. It is part of the process. Not even Google and Apple are successful with everything they do. Infact, a large number of their experiments and products fail. But great companies learn to experiment, fail fast and move forward to be successful.

The best organisations find ways to get their employees to contribute ideas, promote innovation and creativity among them. They organise brainstorming sessions, hackathons and incentivize innovation to create global impact. These companies prosper because they innovate, move forward and build things of great value for their customers.

Kreyon Systems has great expertise in innovative software product development across a wide range of industries. If you need any assistance or have queries, please get in touch with us.

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No matter what industry you’re in, UX design could be the difference between a lackluster online presence and one that generates meaningful leads. Studies have shown that website users are quick to click away if something doesn’t immediately catch their interest. That makes the UX design and visual appeal of your site vital.

UX design can convince users to stick around, but the ultimate goal should be to convert website users into paying customers. Doing this really centers upon marrying your website’s design with a pleasant customer experience; from their first click onto your website, a customer should have an easy time navigating and finding what they need. If you’re looking to improve your website conversions, here are a few ways you can improve the UX designs & customer journey on your site.

1. Offer Help

You should have a help center where customers can get all their questions answered with no trouble. When you have a help center, there should be easy and accessible ways for the customer to reach your company. The UX design of the site or product should facilitate users to take actions & get moving. It should augment the customer journey to find the answers to get things done.

2. Use Multiple Tabs

Use as many tabs as you need to help with navigation around your site. When the customers are frustrated about navigating your site, they are more likely to leave the site in favor of another company. Make the tabs easy to read, and line them up in a place where the customers can find them easily.

3. Use Multiple Contact Channels

Utilize as many contact channels as you can. You should have social media accounts, a phone number, email, and an address where people can reach you. When you give the customer multiple ways to reach you, they are more likely to shop with your company in the future. Plus, you’ll find that it is easier for you to contact customers to follow up on their issues.

4. The Instagram Story

Instagram stories are a great thing to use when you want to communicate with your customers or market your products. You should use the story as a way to quickly convey your message or new marketing plan. You also need to put as many influencer messages in the story as you can. Every time your customers come back to your IG feed, they need to see something new in the story. You could even use IGTV to advertise yourself.

5. Facebook Business Pages

Facebook business pages are helpful because you can utilize the business page as a home base for all your information. When people check out your business page, they are expecting to find contact information that they might use to send you a message. You can link your phone number or address so that customers can call you or get directions to your location.

6. Determine Your Brand and Aesthetic

You should use the same aesthetic on all the pages that you manage. Your customers need to know that they are on your official page just by how it looks. When customers get confused or feel like they are on the wrong page, they will move on to another company or site. If your company is listed through a site that already has a predetermined style like Amazon or Facebook, then being consistent in your work is vital.

7. What Is Trending?

You should use trending news to ensure that you capture the attention of your customers. When customers are searching for products or services, you will rise to the top of the search results because you are talking about current trends, keywords, or news stories in your posts, articles, or advertising.

8. Do You Support Any Causes?

In today’s world, it is vital that your company aligns with social causes. You should add any causes that you support to all your pages. You want your customers to know that you take corporate responsibility  seriously and in order to do so, it’s important to have a call to action area that permanently exist on your site.

If you follow each of the tips above, you now have built a beautiful customer journey & experience. Each step in the process ensures that your customers know what you are about, how to reach you, and can easily shop with you.

Author Bio: AnnaBeth Rouse is a contributing writer and media specialist for The Mountain. She regularly produces content for workplace blogs on corporate responsibility and green manufacturing.

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The customers today expect a high level of care and attention in the products they use. The user experience and customer expectations keep rising in the digital world. Many leading companies are adopting design thinking to create products and services with a customer first to thrive in the technology driven world.

Design thinking is helping companies create end to end customer experience, crafted with empathy for end users, encourages feedback for constantly improving products and services.

The design thinking approach is leading to improved outcomes for shaping winning customer experience. It is also increasing adoption of products and services due to superior user experience and intuitiveness.

Many Companies like ABN Amro Bank, Bank of America, Pepsico, Google etc. are leveraging design thinking to build holistic solutions for users. Some of these organisations are incorporating design thinking in their core processes to build user friendly solutions.

Design thinking is reshaping the culture, aligning teams with right priorities and democratising the way great solutions are engineered.

Here we look at the design thinking led skills that can enhance and shape end to end customer experience:

1. Customer Journey Mapping :

Design thinking forces teams to reimagine things from the users’ context. The end to end customer journey is visualised using design thinking. How customers use the product or service and effortless interactivity drives the processes.

Brands are using design thinking to create the end to end customer journey. For e.g. banks are using self service apps for customer feedback and financial services. These apps are changing the way consumers interact with a bank.

2. Addresses Core Pain Points for Customers :

The most important benefit of using design thinking is that it addresses the core issues and pain points that need to be resolved. The solution is centered around the key customer requirements and pain points.

The various data points are analysed before and after sales, surveys are conducted to zone in on the customer needs, inputs and challenges.

The customer journey is mapped and every touchpoint is analysed to provide solution that makes user experience frictionless. The emphasis is on understanding user environment to provide a solution that addresses the core challenges and solves them.

3. Means to an End :

Design thinking works backwards, it figures out what the customers wants and then creates the specific steps to achieve it. It uses technology as a means to an end. It uses digital technology for achieving great customer experience.

The ultimate idea is that customers accomplish what they want with ease. The core business processes are augmented digitally to make customer journey effortless.

4. Experiment Until You Get it Right :

One of the core tenets of design thinking is constant improvement. You need to experiment with many approaches, take customer inputs and ideas before converging to the best customer experience.

Companies use design thinking for creating ever improving experiences for them. Whether it is the banking self service apps, self service passport centers or booking a ride on an app, designs create fluid customer journeys.

When you try something new and innovate, it is easier to retain customers.  

A company that is constantly experimenting and innovating for its customers always remains ahead of its competitors.

5. Empower Employees :

Great customer experience cannot be all driven by technology. Even in the age of AI and Machine Learning, human interactions matter. Design thinking is a collaborative framework where teams can execute ideas and contribute with absolute freedom.

Big brands use design thinking for setting clear expectations and empower employees to take decisions for creating the best customer experience. Designs make client’s requirement and needs clear to the team. It makes everyone in the team connected to the mission and they know what is expected of them.

6. Leverage Power of Designs for your Business :

With the rise of digital technologies, businesses are changing dynamically at a frenetic pace. Design thinking enables organisations to evolve and adapt faster to consumer needs. The consumer expectations are driven by ongoing innovations and changes in the world.

Design driven approach enable organisations to build fresh solutions, think visually, create feasible ideas and remain flexible enough for constant improvement.

7. Dynamic, Vibrant and Efficient Workplace :

Organisations that drive the future need to be flexible enough to accommodate changes themselves. They must be on the lookout for new ways to deliver greater value for clients and customer.

Design thinking creates a cultural revolution where everyone can be part of innovation. Everyone in the team is connected to the core mission of building better customer experience and do whatever it takes.

The end goals and user needs shape the products and services. The team is also prepared for iterations and understands that the goal is to build truly stunning solutions for your customers.

Conclusion: 

Kreyon Systems is a software company with great expertise in building design thinking software products and solutions. Please feel free to reach out to us on how your business can benefit from design thinking and build delightful customer experiences.

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UI & UX are emerging as influential marketing and customer service tools for digital products. User interface introduces your product or application to the world.

A great user experience leaves them with a great impression, it makes your product or application usable and helps you win more customers.  

Every visitor that uses your product or service is a potential customer. The UI and UX designs create the first impression for your brand, they help you turn the visitors into loyal customers.

According to Google research, 26% of all installed apps are used only once. The main reason for this is poor UI. On the other hand, well designed products and apps are largely responsible for retaining as well as attracting customers.

Technology is rapidly changing things around us. UI and UX are not far behind. Here, we evaluate the top 7 trends that are dominating the UI and UX trends for web design and digital products.

1. Banner Image or videos for Landing Page:

Banners for websites with big images or eye catching videos capture the user’s attention in the first few seconds of the interaction. Whether you’re introducing a product, service or your business.

An impressive banner can contribute emphatically to the visual appeal & content of your portal.

Banners are great elements in setting up expectations, conveying the core message and winning the visitors.

A good banner design is informative, emotionally engaging and introduces your product or services with aplomb. Prominent banners:

• Create a strong branding
• Convey the core message with great visual presentation
• Create a stunning impression and captivate users
• Set the theme, mood & make your offerings appealing
• Demonstrate the value proposition for the users

2. Voice Enabled Interfaces:

With the rising voice enabled applications, the UX of voice is a crucial component in any UX design. Voice interactions enable the use of voice to help the user understand the functionality of the applications to get things done.

Google voice search, Alexa, Cortana, Siri are great examples of voice enabled applications. These applications are meant to provide great customer experience and evolving fast to provide an alternative to the
screen based design interfaces.

Many enterprise softwares, web applications and other products are also driven by voice interactions. The idea is to design the interface in an intuitive fashion that provides peace of mind solutions to the users.

For e.g. These voice activated apps can take voice orders, buy you grocery & lunch from the nearest outlets.

3. Bold and Attractive Typography :

Well-designed and attractive typography is always in vogue. It’s hard to beat great typography, because it uses text content in creative ways to a brand’s message.

The quality and choice of fonts for the designs are important elements for a strong visual presentation. The three essential elements of typography include legibility for distinguishing characters, readability for clarity, & aesthetics for creating impact & delight.  

4. Animated Graphics :

Animations never fail to catch users attention. The animations can be used for story telling or conveying the central message of the portal.

There is something attractive about cartoons animations that creates bonding with users.

Interactive animations using photos, fonts, buttons and GIFs are helpful for enticing users and creating a pleasant experience for them.

Airbnb used animations to convey how the site works. It was an instant hit with the users, it helped create a unique branding and at the same time made the users aware of what Airbnb was all about.

5. Native Mobile Experience :

Responsive designs are simply not good enough, until they’re tailored for native experience. Whether it is the text or the images, the web designs should appear app like on the mobile device.

Users should be able to seamlessly switch devices with consistent experience. The texts, font families, images, animations and videos should be done with mobile experience in mind.

As users get exposed to more web designs & apps, the usability aspects drive the adoption. The quality of user experience is very important. For the UX, Good enough is not good enough, it has to be standout.

6. Creating Impact with UI Components and Icons :

The UI components and icons are fundamental requirements in building a great digital experience. It is easier today to find lots of UI components and icons, thanks to Google.

Google provides a rich library of icons, fonts, typography, imagery and colors etc with its Material design resources. Whether you’re building a retail app, a software product or a dynamic website, Google Material design resources can be quite helpful.

Brands are also investing resources and building their own UI components, icons and distinctive layouts for creating a unique experience. The navigation, efficiency and rich interactions with the apps can be used for building exceptional software products.

7. Linear User Flow :

A linear user flow helps the users focus on one action at a time. It has a clear action step defined at every stage. For e.g. when you book a taxi using Uber or Ola, you select your destination in the first step, your pick up point in the second and book the taxi in the third step.

It makes things very easy for the users to have only one action item per step. The concept of linear user flow makes the applications intuitive and seamless for the users.

Any great product or design ultimately helps users to accomplish what they want. The ease and effectiveness with which users can get things done goes a long way in making the app or the product successful.

Conclusion:

Kreyon Systems uses UI and UX designs for software product development and charting digital transformation journeys. Design thinking is playing a bigger role in building products and simplifying user journey. The power of design cannot be overstated as they shape the digital products and web experiences to greater heights.

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Kreyon Systems is among the leading software companies in the world for design thinking software development. Our software solutions are developed with design innovation and top quality UI and UX designs.

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Business Transformation with Design Innovation combines ideas, creativity, imagination and inspiration. It  provides an optimal balance of design, technology & inspiration to deliver complete business solutions. Design innovation can make your business stand out. If you are looking for design innovation solutions, please get in touch with us.

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This video has quick design tips for improving your mobile apps and software design. Explore the latest tips and tricks for designing better application software. Whether it is the mobile apps or enterprise solutions, build stuff that delights your clients. If you need any assistance on software design and development, please reach out to us.

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This infographic explores the latest web design trends. Kreyon Systems is regarded among the leading progressive web app development companies & UX design companies in the world. 

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