Design thinking helps enhance user experiences

- Design thinking is a user-centred approach to solve a particular problem

- It is a step-by-step design process that goes through iteration loops

- If customers like it then you keep it

- It’s all about people and the end user who interact with the products and services

At the second Fuji Xerox Innovation Re:Mix Forum Future x Smart 2019 Chooake Wongwattanasilpa, MD and Head of User Experience & Design at DBS, underscored the importance of design thinking in pursuing innovative solutions as he shared how DBS applies structured thought frameworks for problem-solving.

According to Wongwattanasilpa, design thinking helps people "design the right thing". Desire paths, for example, show the shortest or most accessible route between two points, but it may not look very elegant, he said, showing how a university in Ohio has paved desire paths instead of neater alternatives.

"(People) don’t care about urban design, and create their own path – you need to look at high frequency and high gain," Wongwattanasilpa said.

He listed four phases in the process:

Make ideas visible

"Sometimes you need to define a problem before you start solving," he said.

User-centred design

The details might be small, but useful nevertheless. A toothpick might only be pointed on one end so that the other end can be rested on the table, for instance. "End users should guide you on how to use the product," he said.

Doing more than thinking 

"It’s not about thinking that much. It’s more about doing," he explained. and

Being iterative and testing everything, in a loop.

As an example of design thinking at DBS Wongwattanasilpa showcased the peek balance feature on the bank's mobile app. This allows users to check their bank balance quickly without needing to log in to Internet banking. A slider reveals the balance quickly, and no account details are provided to maintain privacy. The popularity of the feature can be seen by the fact that it has been used over 47 million times as of October 2018, Wongwattanasilpa said.

DBS' InstaRewards also resulted from design thinking. The initiative came from the team seeing that credit card points are often wasted. With InstaRewards, users can redeem credit card points to offset their purchases anytime, anywhere. "We just try to make the bank (not just about) saving money," he explained. "We value your relationship with us."

The same message is conveyed through the use of images on the mobile app. Night scenes are shown when users log in at night, and daytime scenes in the day. In a co-creation effort, users have also been invited to submit their own pictures. "It's another way to engage customers," he said.

There are incremental improvements, and then there are disruptive improvements. Wongwattanasilpa invited the audience to consider new ways to solve old problems or engage with customers. The Hovding cycle helmet is one that has an airbag built in. while there is a lot of excitement around unboxing videos, he said. DBS' video teller machines are an example of disruption change as they allow users to talk to someone remotely and obtain new cards or banking tokens on the spot. Neither would have been possible before.

Testing is important, however, as what worked in the lab may work differently in real life. Wongwattanasilpa described how Certis Cisco trialled robots for traffic enforcement at Jewel Changi Airport, but had many confused visitors get in the way so that it could not do its job. "Humans can do something that isn’t what we expect," he noted.

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