‍

Championing Design Thinking & Transformation with MURAL

‍

The digital consumer landscape is evolving at a rapid pace and no matter the type of industry or organisation size, in order to stay competitive in the future businesses need to be equipped with the tools and the skills that allow them to readily adapt to this ever-changing digital landscape.

‍

Don’t worry, it’s not as daunting as it sounds! One of the most widely used methodologies that harness the core skills to encourage agility is 'Design Thinking', a creative and highly collaborative process used to visualise ideas, identify challenges, craft solutions and ultimately drive growth. And... it’s actually a very fun exercise once you get going!

‍

‍

Traditionally this type of collaborative process would be held in the form of brainstorming around a whiteboard or A1 paper in a conference room with your team. MURAL has taken that to another level, facilitating real-time collaboration within a digital workspace, worldwide! As avid users of MURAL ourselves, we champion the use of design-thinking in our everyday work, from digital workshops to consulting and problem-solving with destinations across the globe. We also use MURAL extensively in our newly launched Digital Transformation Series, and it is a pivotal tool in facilitating the creative ideation needed for transformation, and getting the whole team together to share and collect ideas, wherever they may be.

‍

We caught up with the MURAL team at their offices in San Francisco to find out more about this incredible platform and how they continue to pioneer Remote Design Thinking.

‍

‍

What are the principles of Design Thinking?

‍

Design thinking is a visually creative and customer-centric process which allows companies to identify processes within their own organisation, customers attitudes and business challenges to then effectively craft and apply solutions based on the findings. The process oversees end to end campaign planning, starting from the initial understanding and ideation, through all the different touch-points and stages to implementation.

‍

Visually mapping out this process is also known as 'Journey Mapping', looking at an individual as a customer of a service and essentially mapping out the full experience and then aligning your organisation to it. For businesses, this involves mapping out the complete customer journey from the dreaming to sharing, to critically evaluate and understand every stage, challenge and opportunity from start to finish.

‍

‍

How is MURAL pioneering Remote Design Thinking?

‍

Founded in 2014, MURAL is a customer-centric, digital workspace that facilitates the process of Design Thinking through virtual collaboration for distributed teams. Customisable canvas allow teams to ideate, plan and apply findings while enabling companies to effectively scale creativity across multiple locations whether that’s regional, national or global, in an 100% remote way.

‍

For businesses and organisations, MURAL is the ideal platform to bring different distributed teams together, as well as creatively collaborating with the all-important partners and stakeholders. On Mural, a varied set of perspectives and input means more ideas and the best possible outcome.

‍

Despite the name, design thinking is not just for designers and the platform is constantly evolving into a much more cross-collaborative tool. MURAL are huge advocates of embracing remote working and creativity, encouraging businesses to invest their teams to understand internal processes and innovate their products and services from within, understanding customer needs, problems, challenges and creating solutions. MURAL enables teams to develop these skills in a comfortable environment (wherever they choose to be) and the nature of the digital workspace empowers people to actively share their ideas (whereas a more conventional setting could potentially hold back open creativity.)

‍

Aaron Richman from MURAL explains the 3 key elements involved in design thinking:

1. ‍Empathising - This relates to identifying your customer persona in order to fully understand everything about what they want, need, care about, what their challenges are, what they are trying to accomplish etc.
2. ‍Defining problem sets - After putting yourself in your customer's shoes and empathising with their wants and needs, the next step is using that understanding to identify key problems throughout the customer journey.
3. ‍Ideating - Once the main problems have been identified, the team ideates around the problem, brainstorming solutions, identifying relevant trends and finally establishing ways to implement these findings.

‍

‍

Future Platform Developments

‍

MURAL is constantly evolving and developing its platform based on user research and feedback, streamlining the process further and making it as user-friendly and efficient as possible. One of the key developments based on customer feedback is the MURAL Scan App. The app allows you to scan physical post-it notes and instantly transcribes all the information directly onto a MURAL board, effectively bridging the gap between digital and analogue to save time and most importantly, not miss out on any of the great ideas and sketches generated in the session.

‍

‍

‍

How can Design Thinking work for your business?

‍

Along with MURAL, we believe that design thinking is going to become an essential process for organisations to stay competitive in today’s market. For businesses, incorporating the design thinking process into decision making can provide deeper and more valuable insights to understand the key deciding factors that influence customers to purchase your product or service. The shared creative process is instrumental in spotting emerging consumer trends, turning insights into successful innovations and matching these key findings to the customer journey.

‍

Check out the 'Take Action' section of the Business Launchpad, where we regularly feature downloadable templates where your team can actively collaborate on a vast range of topics. Each template is carefully designed based on a particular topic, to include key considerations, discussion points, challenges, and plenty of space to ideate.

‍

‍

Key Takeaways:

1. Design Thinking is a fun, creative and useful tool to foster team collaboration, turning insights and ideas into successful innovations. For example, it allows developing new experiences and products based on user-research, market trends and ideas.
2. Your core customer is central to your future marketing strategies. Journey mapping allows you to visually map the full customer journey which is essential to your strategy in order to identify challenges and ideate solutions that will constantly improve the customer experience.  
3. Invest in your teams and innovate from within. MURAL not only fosters these key principles throughout companies worldwide, but practices what it preaches. MURAL constantly develops the platform based on user-research and feedback to improve its service, a principle that any business should adopt to grow and thrive in an always more competitive marketplace.

‍

Download our worksheet on Design Thinking with Mural below.