5 Steps to Designing Creative Solutions for Your Business from Creative Confidence
The arts don’t have a monopoly on creativity; it’s also essential for entrepreneurs. You need to find creative solutions for your customers, creative messaging for your marketing, and creative strategies for your team to be effective. Entrepreneurship is all about creativity, and luckily for those of us who don’t feel naturally creative, there are systems to help enhance your creative thinking.
In the book Creative Confidence, design thinking pioneers Tom and David Kelley, help everyone better understand why creativity is so essential for business success and how to design creative solutions for your business.
5 Steps to Designing Creative Solutions for Your Business
1. Start with Empathy
To create effective solutions for your customers, the first step is to let go of your ego and preconceived notions. You don't know what's best for your users — they do. You need to develop a deep capacity for empathy and strong sense of curiosity. While it will take extra time to learn directly from your customers (emailed survey's probably won't suffice), the revelations you discover will give you a competitive advantage that you could never gain from making your own best guess about what people want.
2. Ask Yourself the Right Questions
Once you've embraced the need for empathy, it's time to start asking the right questions to solve your problems. It may be easy to see the problems your business is facing, but asking the right questions to get a good solution takes more consideration.
For example, you might not be getting as many sales from your Instagram posts as you hope, and you might jump to the question - "How do I get more people to see my IG posts?" But that is a very limiting question.
The right question is probably much broader. A better question would be, "What marketing strategies will convince my target market to buy?" By assuming that Instagram is the best platform to generate sales, or that more sales are directly linked to posts views, you’re limiting your potential to find quality solutions. The answer to your sales problem may be that Pinterest is a better platform for you. Or maybe a referral group is the best way to create sales for your business.
A limiting question creates limited solutions and may prevent you from finding the answer you need.
3. Engage With Your Audience
The next step to your creative solution is to engage directly with users. And you need to engage with your audience in person.
One of the best ways to learn what works and doesn’t work is to observe real people engaging with your asset. You might introduce them to things like your product, service, website, or advertisement. Observe what they do throughout the user process. What works well for them, and what causes frustrations? What unexpected things do they do with your asset?
To take it a step further, ask the user to speak out loud about what they’re experiencing. And as they share their thoughts, ask them why the feel the way they do, to get a deeper understanding of the benefits and pain points your asset is creating.
If it's not possible to observe people engaging with your asset, the next best option is to interview them about their experience. To encourage more specificity, ask them to draw or map out their experience from start to finish and explain what they feel in each step of the process.
4. Synthesize Your Findings
After engaging with your audience in real life, it’s time to synthesize what you learned. You are looking for patterns and insights revealed by aggregating your multiple user observations.
One way to do this is to create an Empathy Map. An Empathy Map has four quadrants labeled ‘Say, Do, Think, and Feel’. Based on the notes you took engaging with your customers, you can map out the four quadrants, color coding them as green for positive, yellow for neutral, and red for negative. This activity will help identify commonalities between user experiences. The positives you find can be enhanced, or you might celebrate them in your marketing. And the negatives give you clear opportunities to improve and better serve your customers.
5. Act!
After going through all this work to discover ways to improve your business, the last step is to take action. This might seem obvious, but sometimes making changes in your business can seem daunting. You might have discovered that your product needs a complete redesign, or that your marketing needs a lot of work. But isn’t it better to do the work and make the changes, than maintaining the mediocre status quo?
To get started, break up your large projects into small achievable tasks. For example, rather than dwelling on all the work that it will take to redesign your website user experience, start by creating a map of the changes that need to be made. Then break that map into a task list and assign yourself small doable tasks that in aggerate will create the change you’re after.
Small Business Book Review: Creative Confidence
I loved Creative Confidence by Tom Kelley and David Kelley. While I was reading it, I kept reaching for my notebook to map out ideas and try mini versions of their design strategies. In all honesty, this blog post didn’t come close to highlighting all the great insights in Creative Confidence. This is the type of book that will make you rethink everything you do in your business.
I give Creative Confidence a 4.5 out of 5 stars. If you are looking for new strategies to make impactful changes in your business, pick up a copy today.
