Vous vous préparez à un entretien. Comment pouvez-vous insuffler les principes du design thinking pour faire preuve d’innovation ?

I agree empathy is important, especially for human-centered projects. And one way to guarantee you're getting the right amounts of empathy is a diverse team. You need team members with different backgrounds and abilities to address the needs of a wide variety of people. If you do that, you'll build a more inclusive product or service. And that in turn will lead to more conversion, adoption, and retention.

Empathy is a fundamental aspect of design thinking and can significantly enhance the innovation you bring to an interview. Begin by thoroughly researching the company and its customers to understand their challenges, culture, and goals. This depth of knowledge allows you to tailor your responses, demonstrating that you not only align with the company’s values but also have the ability to think from the perspective of their users and clients. Exhibiting empathy in your approach shows a commitment to user-centric solutions, a crucial trait for innovation.

To infuse design thinking principles into your interview preparation and demonstrate innovation, focus on understanding the problem deeply and empathizing with the user’s needs. Start by defining the core challenges and brainstorming creative solutions that address those needs. Use prototyping to illustrate your ideas, showing how they can be tested and refined. Emphasize a collaborative approach by highlighting how you would involve stakeholders in the process. Finally, share examples of how you’ve applied these principles in previous work to achieve impactful results. This approach will showcase your ability to drive innovative solutions and a user-centered mindset.

One of the most important skills you need when interviewing people is the ability to read them well, which involves a lot of psychological thinking and observation. Interestingly, having strong design thinking skills also requires good psychological techniques. These techniques are crucial when applying design thinking principles to interview preparation, making them essential in both contexts.

Another way to show empathy is to understand your client or employer's pressures and aspirations as much as you understand their users'. The best way to move forward a projecr in a human-centred way is to be able to take the perspective of different stakeholders - users, designers, decision makers..

After understanding the company and its users, shift to ideation. Brainstorm how your skills can uniquely address the company's challenges. Think broadly and creatively, allowing for a range of possibilities without self-censorship. While you may not present every idea during the interview, this exercise primes you to offer innovative solutions spontaneously. It demonstrates your ability to think divergently—a trait that many employers highly value. This preparation not only showcases your problem-solving skills but also your capacity for innovative thinking.

One of my favorite techniques to push my creativity is to use 'what if' statements to prompt new ways of thinking. What if we didn't have budget or time constraints, what if the users could design their own service, what if everyone agreed... what would happen then? What could we do or how did we get there?

In the context of an interview, prototyping means crafting and refining your personal narrative. Focus on developing stories that highlight your problem-solving skills and innovative contributions in past roles. Practice these stories until you can deliver them confidently and succinctly, ensuring they resonate with the challenges and goals of the company you're interviewing with. This approach allows you to effectively communicate your value proposition, demonstrating your proactive and innovative mindset to potential employers.

I used to have a lot of trouble with being concise and staying on point. When I started talking about past work, I would jump back and forth in time, miss important context information, and go off on irrelevant tangents. Now I find most helpful prototyping these narratives using the STARR structure - situation, task, action, results, reflections. Or in simpler terms: context & challenges, approach and methods, impact and learnings.

It is definitely a good idea to have some mock interviews with critical friends. I would encourage you to test your project examples with someone who is a designer and know what you are talking about, as well as with someone who has no clue what your work is about. The people interviewing you will not always be experts in your field.