When it comes to promoting your business, everything matters. Just as we need to be problem solvers, we also need to be designers. Every aspect of our store must be developed with the customer in mind – from the products and services we provide, to how we greet customers when the call or enter our store, to the architecture of each location – including our web presence.
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For example: when a new customer walks into your store, do they know where to go or who to talk to? Now, think about it from your perspective – are you crystal clear on where the 
layout takes you (or doesn’t)? What about your web site? Is the way finding intuitive? Do the links actually help them find what they are looking for? What if they need help – is it easy to find and contact someone? Often times, we get so deep into working in the business that we need to step back and work on the business.
Here are the core principles of design thinking:
Begin with people, culture, and context: understand human needs deeply enough to know where to begin design—the biggest challenge is ensuring that you’re asking the right questions.
Rapid prototyping: learn rapidly by building, testing, failing, and honing.
Engage: enable participation from customers, employees, and even those outside the company to build upon ideas – a fresh set of eyes is always a benefit.
Execute: change is hard—especially the type of transformative change realized with such a reimagining of the customer/company interface.
It’s for these reasons that empathy in our designs is so important; Empathy forces us to be creative. Empathy insists that we enter another person’s world, experience first-hand what they are experiencing, and then interpret their experience for ourselves’.
How will you employ design thinking at your store?
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