| |December 20189instance Cleartrip's revolutionary split-screen return-trip booking on web and mobile or the TouchN-Go input interface in apps has becoming an example for almost every other player in the domain. Likewise, the convenience of printer-friendly tickets or saved cards during check-out/ payment- small, delightful differentiators that Cleartrip introduced years back and have become the norm in this space.While design thinking has, deservedly, received a lot of press and publicity in recent years there's a case to be made for de-sign doing as well. Don't just think like a designer- do like a designer. Design doing is charac-terized by three key traits- build-ing prototypes to learn & test as-sumptions, building prototypes to test failure points and building prototypes early in the develop-ment process (when it's cheapest to fail). All products can benefit from operating within this iter-ative framework- build early, fail early, and learn early.An integral part of the above matrix is early socialization of your product with your user base- it's no coincidence that brands that build a culture of public be-tas tend to build stronger, more robust products. It is also no coin-cidence that these products tend to be more useful, differentiated and personal to the user.This iterative mindset isn't, and shouldn't be, unique to de-signers. Indeed, most Agile soft-ware teams tend to adopt this it-erative mindset, at least in some portion- always perfecting, never perfect. The key difference in the design way is putting the user front and centre- a focus to un-derstand problems & needs deep-ly, and a prism through which to evaluate success or failure of the solution.These two tools make for pow-erful combination- design think-ing insists you keep the user at the centre of all your development effort and design doing asks you to include your users in the act of testing your solutions. Net- you've included your user in almost the entirety of your product devel-opment cycle, and that should be huge value to any start-up.The value lies not just in find-ing out what to build, but also how to keep it meaningful over several iterations- sustained engagement over a period of time. This should be worth its weight in gold and de-sign can help you get it. DESIGN THINKING STARTS WITH BUILDING EMPATHY TOWARDS THE USER AND VISUALIZING A HIERARCHY OF NEEDS AS THEY EXIST IN THE USER'S LIFE
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