My freshman year course titled How Do Innovators Think focused heavily on Design Thinking. I'd never heard of the concept before, and realized it's something that isn't just for designers to use it's for everyone. Design Thinking is human centered and solution based, and should have a result that is useful to as many people as possible. 

 

I've used Design Thinking in my job at The Diamondback. As the Advertising Operations Manager, I am in charge of the layouts that our sales reps use when they sell advertisements. This layout lets other sales reps know which products have been sold, and helps managers see how we're doing in terms of revenue. This year we created new products that have required me to generate new layouts for everyone in the office to use. Instead of simply copying an old layout and relabeling it, I decided to create one from scratch. 

 

The first step of Design Thinking is empathizing with the end user, in this case our sales reps. I knew they sometimes had a hard time understanding our old, cluttered layouts (so did I when I was a sales rep). I also knew that for managers it's best to have a grand total of the amount being spent. The next step is to define the problem. In this case my definition was essentially "Sales reps and managers should have an easy, streamlined experience when using layouts". This helped me realize that a lot of the clutter resulted from unnecessary parts of the layout that nobody used. For example, there's a section just labeled "other notes" that nobody uses, and nobody needs to use. 

 

The third step of the Design Thinking process is ideating. I started by sketching what a layout should look like, and how I could make one that was more minimalist than our other ones. I also made sure every header/title had a name that conveyed what was meant to be inputted underneath. For example, instead of "pickup date" as the date that an advertisment first ran I called it "Original Print/Running Date". After I came up with my rough drafts of what I wanted the layout to look like I asked the other managers to look itover andsee if they had another edits to make. The fourth stage is prototyping, which was simple because all I had to do was create my rough draft in Google Sheets and share it with all our employees. Finally, to test the new layout I had the reps use it for a week and I asked for their feedback when I was in the office. This led me to go back and change some of the features. You have to do this final step in Design Thinking because it is so human centered that without feedback the rest of the steps are essentially useless.