Understanding the Importance of "Design Thinking" When Starting a Startup

Design is not about visuals, whether in shape, color, appearance, mood, or so on. Design is how things work.

Take for example a bench. The name of the bench is not because of its shape which has four legs as a support, so it is called a bench, but deliberately designed to have four legs as a support to prevent people sitting on it from falling.

This is related to how the founder plans to start a startup. Often founders misguided when creating products, prioritizing design over function.

Therefore, design thinking is a problem solving process that uses various elements of toolkit designers like empathy with user focus and experimentation for new solutions.

"Empathy is being able to feel what other people feel. When creating a business, empathy is important and is an important element in design thinking," explained Moselo CEO Richard Fang.

Moselo itself is a creative product marketplace and handmade.

Design thinking become the main topic in #TuesdayStartup the first week of May 2019 issue. He gave a lot of input regarding design thinking, including the importance of empathy. Here's a summary:

Know who the customer is and focus on the problem

Empathy has an emotional effect, in contrast to sympathy. Empathy can feel what other people feel. For that, when setting up a business, empathy is an important element and is the most important element in design thinking.

In order to feel empathy, continued Richard, the founder must know who the customer is. Quite a contrast to the work pattern of the makers who generally don't care about this. They usually think more about the look, the design, but forget who will wear it.

"Then focus on their problems, what part has made them 'sick' all this time. So that's what we design to solve the problem."

Create ideas and solutions, then dare to experiment

Next, the founder is required to translate consumer problems by creating ideas and solutions. Both must be based on a balanced analysis and intuition. Most founders ignore intuition, so their products become biased because too many databases are used as the basis.

Many of them have had to change businesses many times because of these mistakes. In fact, according to him, the data is actually just a proof, so it can't really be a solution. When the product is finished, the founder must dare to experiment and dare to accept failure many times.

"That's wrong no nothing, as long as it runs out it immediately rises again. The problem is that it's just one wrong assumption at the beginning, after that immediately down. If it's wrong, look for where the point of error is, and test it again and again."

Do not let founder busy experimenting until finally the startup closed because it couldn't make money. According to Richard, from the beginning the founder must look for revenue. It doesn't matter if while testing the market the founder can do side jobs to stay alive so he doesn't have to depend on investors' money alone.