“Who is a design thinking optometrist?” you may be wondering.
As an Optometrist, focused on your professional calling as a primary eye care practitioner, you may or may not have heard of Design Thinking. As a concept, Design Thinking might sound unique or even complex.
It would also be in the right place for clinicians to wonder how this concerns us as patient-oriented people. Does it mean we have to think like designers? The answer is yes if you understand design as a functional solution beyond how beautiful something or an experience is.
My enrolment in a Design Thinking Fundamental Course- Hello Design Thinking by IDEO opened my eyes to what human-centered design can do to the optometry practice. As a “tried-and-tested approach to creative problem-solving”, it can bring out the best of our creative potential as primary eyecare specialists.
In any case, we have to acknowledge that patients, like clients in other sectors of the economy, expect outstanding customer service. Our patients, whom I prefer to refer to as eye health consumers, no longer just come to us to see a good doctor.
They expect great experiences at every touch point in their eyecare journey. From the point they visit your website, book appointments, call the clinic, interact with front-line staff, spend time in the waiting room, see the optometrist, and collect their prescription, a not-too-good experience can ruin the journey.
So as optometrists who want to build not just eye clinics that struggle to survive but thriving eyecare businesses, we must embrace every concept that will help us be more innovative. One of which is design thinking, which I hope to help you understand, and see how it can help in building a long-term, thriving eyecare business and how to adopt it.
What is Design Thinking?
Design thinking is a way of handling problems that focuses on understanding others, working together, and being creative. Taking a user-centered and overall approach to problems is more important than just decorating or making things look nice.
You become a design thinking optometrist when you put yourself in your patient’s shoes, understand their wants, needs, and frustrations, and then come up with answers that help them.
This is basically how the d.school describes the five steps that make up the design thought process:
- Empathize: Research your users’ needs to understand them better.
- Define: List the problems and needs of your users.
- Ideate: Come up with new ideas and question what you think you know.
- Prototype: Start making solutions with a prototype.
- Test: Try your solutions out.
While the Design Thinking Process is made up of steps that happen in a straight line, it is more like a series of steps that can be changed to fit your needs. As an iterative process, the stages are put together.
- To get your team thinking about what your customers (the people you are creating a solution for) need, ask them a question.
- Spend some time away from everything going on in the world and look at things to get ideas.
- Inspiration should push you to think of new ways to solve your problems, not just the obvious ones.
- Shape Your Ideas: Make rough versions of your ideas and see what works and what doesn’t.
- Try it out, get comments, and make changes until you are happy with it.
- Tell Someone the Story: When you find the right answer, write down and tell everyone the story to let them know about it.
For an Optometrist, What is Design Thinking?
As a design thinking optometrist, you develop a new and different way of looking at eye care. You make experiences that last, not just provide basic eye care.
The clinic you run should be seen as more than just a place to get medical care. It should be a place where patients can get the best eye care from an optometrist and be taken on an amazing trip from start to finish.
As a visionary optometrist, Design thinking is a way of thinking at its core. You are trying to be more than just an expert in treating eye conditions. Spend some time with patient stories that go beyond case history to start as a design-thinking optometrist. Seriously pay attention to their comments, issues, and ideas.
The best way to find pain points and ways to make things better for your patient is to put yourself in their place. When you do Design Thinking, you start with empathy.
Why Design Thinking Optometrists Drive Eyecare Business Growth?
Your eyecare business will change how it works when you start using design thinking. This helps everyone on your team—receptionists to optometrists—collaborate on projects and share their ideas.
Meeting regularly to develop new ways to improve the patient experience could be part of it. You can improve your services by asking for comments and encouraging open communication.
Design Thinking is ongoing, so keep that in mind as well. Do not expect to get everything right when you first work on an answer. Continue receiving patient feedback, and use iterations to make your ideas better. This helps you to keep improving and attracting more patients.
The business world has become seamlessly competitive. Optometry practice business cannot operate in isolation. We need every business strategy that can help us position ourselves for the best outcomes. Design Thinking is a sure way to empower your practice for more impactful growth.
How to Use Design Thinking to Grow Your Eyecare Business
As we proceed with our plan to use Design Thinking in our eye clinics, let us look at its three main stages: empathize, define, and ideate. These steps are the basis on which we will build great experiences for our patients.
Empathise With Your Patients
First, empathize, which is the key to understanding. By seeing things from our patients’ points of view, we learn things that go beyond case history. Take the feeling of waiting in line as an example. We do not have to see it as just a duty; we can understand how our patients feel. Are they worried, interested, or curious? Because we care about other people, we try to make environments that meet their social needs.
Define Your Steps To New Patient Solutions
From insights to clarity, we move on to the Define step. Here, we put together what we learned during the Empathize step to find the biggest problems and best ways to fix them. By observing with empathy, we might figure out that patients feel disconnected because they do not talk to us between meetings. By describing the problem, we can start looking for ways to close this gap.
Ideate on the Solutions
We go into the ideation phase with a clear idea of the problem. This is where our creativity can run wild. This is where the magic takes place. Working together as a team, we come up with ideas that will help solve the problems that have been set.
Going back to our example, we could think of ways to keep patients interested between visits. It could be a weekly newsletter, educational videos, or online Q&As.
The goal is to come up with a lot of ideas, even if they are strange, and then to shape them into plans that can be put into action. But Design Thinking is more than just coming up with ideas.
The next steps—Prototype, Test, and Implement—let us put our original ideas to use in the real world. It means making prototypes of our ideas, testing them with a small group of patients, getting input, and making changes over and over again until we have an experience that people really feel.
For example, if we decide to start virtual Q&A meetings, we would do a small test run first. This helps us figure out what problems patients are having, see if there are any technical issues, and get comments on how to make things better.
This iterative process shows how flexible Design Thinking is—it is a never-ending loop of making things better.
In the Prototype process, ideas start to take shape. It involves making real things out of our ideas so that we can see and feel them for ourselves. Imagine coming up with a new way to help people choose the right glasses.
Perhaps a simple mock-up of an interactive touchscreen system is all it takes to make a prototype. It could also be a detailed storyboard of the patient’s trip. We can use this sample to talk to each other more effectively, making sure that everyone is on the same page with our ideas.
During the Test phase, the prototype’s real worth becomes clear. Here, we show our prototypes to a small group of eager users who are also patients. The comments, emotions, and ideas they share are very helpful. Does the touchscreen device really make it easier to choose glasses? Do the patients find the plan interesting and useful? Their answers help us make our solutions even better, so they meet the wants of our patients.
Now that we are in the implementation phase, we are ready to use our better answers on a bigger scale. It is about using what we have learned from tests in the things we do every day.
To use our example again, we work on putting the interactive touchscreen system in our clinic if it gets good feedback. It is not enough to just roll out the solution during implementation; it is also important to make sure it fits in perfectly with the rest of our patient experience environment.
Working together is very important in this process. By including everyone on our team, from front-line workers to fellow optometrists, we get a lot of different ideas that help us come up with better answers.
Our team members each bring different ideas based on their experiences with patients, which makes our Design Thinking method even more useful.
Design Thinking Optometrist Wrap-up
Design Thinking is not a break from our main job as optometrists; instead, it is a way to improve how we care for our patients. We improve the eyecare experience to a whole new level by knowing their needs, identifying problems, coming up with creative solutions, and putting them into action over and over again.
Adopting Design Thinking shows that we are still committed to new ideas and giving patients the best experiences possible. As we continue on this path, let us keep in mind that every contact we have with our patients is a chance to do something good.
We can make sure that every interaction has empathy, imagination, and new ideas by using Design Thinking as a guide. This will improve the lives of our patients and the field of optometry as a whole. You can not ignore the design thinking approach if you want to catapult your practice to new heights with masterful optometry branding
Please come along with us on this trip that combines the art of care with the science of making things. Let us work together to make sure that every patient’s experience with our office is nothing less than amazing in the future.
References and Design Thinking Resources
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