Blog 4 Techies Design Thinking to aid Food Delivery Service
Design thinking is useful to solve complex problems in the ever-changing world of food production development. Design thinking isn’t a new tool for innovation since its usage has continued for over 30 years. The first companies to use Design thinking were IDEO and Stanford University. This method is great for many industries, including automotive design, health care, and financial services.
Table of Contents
What does Design Thinking Mean?
Understanding the basic concepts of Design thinking won’t be a tough business! Design thinking is a cycle of human-centered innovation that uses three lenses to discover what people want and create meaningful solutions. These lenses are feasibility (technology), desirability, and viability (business).
Understanding what people need is the first step in design thinking, and this applies to all stakeholders and customers. Design thinking is more holistic and considers all three perspectives throughout the design process. There are four phases to the design thinking process, which most of the design thinking courses in India will cover.
- Inspiration and insight
- Design and iteration
- Strategy Synthesis
- Storytelling Communication
Each phase has its key activities and results. Each stage also uses divergent and convergent thinking. This allows the design team to think to the extreme to find breakthrough solutions. While mindfully limiting ideas to make them actionable, it pushes the team to the edge.
Design thinking is important in Food Delivery Services
In the past 5-10 years, purchasing behavior [1] has changed across many categories, including bread, bakery products, and breakfast cereals. So have consumer perceptions about larger food companies and the increasing number of organic and natural foods businesses.
These huge shifts in behavior and their impact on the categories and respective businesses that they serve have made it more important to use a human-centered innovation approach.
This has led to a greater need to understand and grab the opportunities provided by these consumer perceptions and behaviors. Design thinking is an innovative process that bridges the gap between qualitative consumer knowledge and tangible product design. However, you can do this by a single project team.
Design thinking is already changing the future of food production. This is noticed in the launch of new products. We will also see the development of new food systems as we tackle the global challenges. These are five unique ways that the design thinking process can create a new future in food production.
Design Thinking Encourages Teamwork
Design Thinking brings everyone together from the beginning. Although it sounds simple, the process of design thinking brings together members from different departments within an organization at each stage of a project. This creates a more collaborative environment and helps to build a stronger team.
An example of a project core team that works on product development challenges could include sales, marketing, research and design, packaging, consumer insights, and customer insight. Multidisciplinary teams can help gain knowledge about the problem in new and multifaceted ways. You can find high-quality solutions by looking at the problem from multiple perspectives and backgrounds.
Cross-disciplinary collaboration allows team members, even those not normally included in one phase, to fully participate in the entire project. In consumer research, food scientists and packaging engineers can be included, and next comes the Stanford design thinking process.
Design Thinking for Food Delivery Service: The 3 Phases
1) Design Thinking Team
They can get input from customers directly and better integrate that information into the design phase. During the design and iteration phases, team members from the marketing and consumer insight disciplines can build empathy and understand technical constraints. In addition, team members from different departments can participate at the beginning of a project, creating a closer team.
2) Design Thinking Builds Empathy
The heart of design thinking is building empathy for people ( customers and key stakeholders). Designers are not content to listen to people and observe what they do.
They want to get to the heart of people’s thoughts and feelings. You must empathize and understand customers, as changing customer attitudes towards food drives this desire. There have been major changes in grains and other carbohydrate-rich products [2], such as bread, breakfast cereals, etc.
These changing attitudes and the emergence and use of new ingredients and technologies make it even more crucial to understand consumers’ needs and determine the available opportunities.
Engineers and developers often find it tempting to inform consumers about their misperceptions. Consumers have many opinions on carbohydrate-rich foods, such as bread, pastries, and pizzas, thanks to the “low-carb/high-protein” diets that follow trends like the South Beach and Atkins diets. However, you must not correct customers but try to understand why they believe the way they do.
Because of their beliefs, opportunities exist. Today’s marketplace is filled with many whole grain products, gluten-free alternatives, and old grain-based products. This clearly shows that the food industry is creating new consumers.
3) Understanding Consumer Behavior and their Demands
Consumer behavior can sometimes be more emotional than rational, especially regarding food. For example, consumers were surveyed about breakfast. Breakfast consisted of prepared-at-home breakfast items such as cereals, milk, toast, and frozen waffles. In recent years, breakfast has become more frequent.
Many consumers stated that they don’t have the time to cook traditional meals when they have breakfast. In many conversations, people stated that they would rather eat at a fast-food drive-thru or coffee shop for their breakfast.
It takes much less time to make ready-to-eat toast or cereal at home than it does to go to a fast-food restaurant to get a meal. Empathetic design thinkers observe and plan accordingly, and this is because they can see the hidden opportunities.
Conclusion
Design thinking transforms ideas from good to amazing. Although product innovation is difficult due to its speed, design thinking allows ideas to grow and incubate during the design, repeating, and testing phases. Teams can develop their ideas by allowing for space in the innovation timeline, allowing them to get feedback from external consumers or internal team members. Design thinking is useful to solve complex problems in the ever-changing world of food product development.