Search Done Right

Reflecting on my experience as a corporate designer in technical industries, I am noticing the gravitation towards design thinking and innovation in business. Maybe this is because in today’s economy, it’s simply not good enough to be good—your company, products and services need to be great.  It’s not enough to offer a standard list of features and benefits. What your customers need to know is that you really understand them, their needs, their problems and frustrations. And you offer the right solution.

Design thinking is about redefining and solving problems by imagining previously unseen possibilities.  Instead of explaining why some things cannot be done and using traditional ways to gloss over or circumvent issues, this approach dives right into problems and seeks to accurately and creatively solve them.  In business, the company that incorporates design thinking into their business practices reaches a new level of leadership and success. Problems which may have been liabilities can be reframed into opportunities—for growth, competitive advantage, and to better define and meet the needs of its customers.

Vivisimo is a leader in a relatively new industry (information access technology), solving relatively new business problems: many organizations find that every day they’ve got more information coming in and being generated than they can store, make usable, and securely share between its employees.  Each company that comes to Vivisimo presents a unique variation of this problem. Without the benefit of decades of historical or easily delineated solutions, innovation and design thinking are crucial to Vivisimo’s success in solving the problems of its customers.

So what are a few ways in which design thinking in enterprise search helps solve the information problems of organizations?

1. Understanding the Users
Organizations have employees which could number in the thousands and be positioned in offices around the globe. How do these users access information now and what are their frustrations in doing so? More importantly, what do they wish they could do? Or, by broadening the scope of understanding, what might they wish to do if they knew that it could be possible? By using design thinking to see the problem through the eyes of the users, you could begin to see how far-reaching enterprise search could be, imagine what solutions may be possible, and open up new opportunities to create value.

2. Visualization
Visualization is a powerful tool used to explain and frame the problem. One of the problems of an organization is that they don’t know the extent of their informational resources. By seeing exactly how much information they have and where it is, organizations can begin to eliminate wasteful storage solutions, pinpoint weak areas of security, and imagine new ways that their information can be scaled, stored and accessed.

3. Connecting Concepts with Realities
The implementation of enterprise search creates a system of interrelated data repositories and federated connections to optimize an organization’s knowledge management. Design thinking not only helps to conceptualize this system, but it can be used to translate it into a future reality—step by step—envisioning all of the possibilities and identifying which strategies will drive success and be the most value to the users.  

Because of my profession, I’m an advocate of design in everything. I challenge everyone to use design (and their laterally-thinking designers) for more than just choosing layouts, colors and fonts; consider using the ideas and processes of design thinking in the business of creating smart, usable, and sustainable enterprise search solutions, strategized for the needs of each organization.

This entry was posted on Monday, January 18th, 2010 at 8:00 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.