Design Thinking: The Way to Breakthrough Innovation
When developing a product, service, or any kind of human experience, the end user is your final customer. The end user is the person you care the most about from a product development perspective because they are the ones actually using your product or service. Design thinking is the mindset that enables you to drop your own sense of self and focus almost exclusively on the end user, their needs, sensations, pain points, and aspirations. Once you empathize with and understand the end user, you can build a product or service that is tailored to their needs. This increases your chances of success because you listened rather than impose your own views and beliefs.
Dropping yourself and focusing attentively on the end user and their needs may feel uneasy and discomfiting at times. Building a product or service would be faster if you skipped that part right away. You would have the final product ready much earlier if you followed your instincts and secondary knowledge (i.e., through secondary research using existing available information). You may be faster in the development stage, but you may lose track of the end user, and you may risk having to go back to square one for prototyping your product right after you launch it to the market.
To create impactful innovation, you need to drop the ego and get in the mind and body of the end user. Mix that careful listening and research with your creative instincts and forward-looking attitude, and you get the design thinking mindset. There are multiple stages in the design thinking process to solve a pressing problem. We will explore them below. One key principle of the design thinking process is to let go of the mental barriers and limitations you have built up throughout your life and drop into your childhood self instead. Your child self is open, genuinely curious, capable of learning quickly, and willing to fail through novel experimentation. This is the design thinking process: unpredictable like the life of a two-year-old exploring a new park.
According to Tim Brown, executive chair of one of the world’s leading design thinking organizations (Ideo), “Design thinking is a human-centered approach to innovation that draws from the designer’s toolkit to integrate the needs of people, the possibilities of technology, and the requirements for business success” (source).
This is important: design thinking is an “approach” to seeing life and product development. It is not only tied to the practice of a designer. Design thinking is for everyone building innovation. It takes into account the business, the surrounding environment, and, most importantly, the end user. There are different stages in design thinking. Each stage calls for a different nuance of the human-centered approach. Sometimes, especially in the early phases, you want to drop your preconceived notions of the world and listen and ideate freely. Other times, you want to address practical and business challenges to ensure the applicability of your prototype and idea.
The steps of design thinking
Empathize
As Tim Brown states in the first part of the quote above, “design thinking is a human-centered approach.” A human-centered approach is one that starts from the people and inducts conclusions from first-principle observation and careful listening. The first step in design thinking applied to innovation is empathizing with the end user. Are you thinking about innovating the shopping experience via a new cart design? Go to multiple supermarkets and observe the behavior of cart users. Speak with some of them via unstructured interviews to understand how they currently feel and think about the shopping experience and shopping carts.
This is akin to the role of a scientist in the research phase of their paper. As a researcher, you want to get your hands dirty in the real world. This is the only way you can truly empathize. It allows you to get out of your “I know it all” mindset and actually drop your current beliefs to listen and observe carefully. Ultimately, your objective is innovation for the end user, not for your own ego. And the real world is much less apologetic than your ergonomic office chair, and that’s a great gift for empathizing effectively.
In software development, empathizing can take place via interviews and observations of how your target end users use current technology and how they think and feel about it. This is also the first step in disciplined entrepreneurship: defining who is your customer and conducting primary market research, before figuring out what you can do for your customer. If you are truly operating for creating impactful innovation, it is key to get out of the “by me” mindset and into the “for them” mindset.
The main tangible outputs of the “empathize” stage are the persona and the customer journey. The persona is a realistic, detailed avatar of the type of person your innovation is targeting. When defining the persona, you will take into account their demographics, psychographics, current pain points, and desired state. As part of this process, you can use the sentence “As a …, I want to …, so that …”. For example, “as a mom of two preschool children, I want to never forget what I need to buy, so that I don’t need to return to the supermarket in a few days.” Notice how you have identified a clear target persona (mom of two pre-school children), action (I want to never forget what I need to buy), and desired outcome (I don’t need to return to the supermarket frequently).
The second deliverable of the empathizing phase is the customer journey. That is the current experience your target persona is having. For the shopping cart example, it is the current end-to-end experience of the mom with two children, from when they leave the house or work to go shopping, to when they return home with the shopping bags. What is the whole process like for them? What are the sticking points to improve? What spectrum of emotions are they experiencing during the process?
Define
Once you have identified and described the persona and their current experience, it is time to define the problem. In problem-solving in general, defining the problem is one of the major sticking points you will ever encounter. It is often the case that a problem can’t be solved because the people addressing the problem do not have a shared understanding and avoid addressing the elephant in the brain.
In design thinking, defining the problem is essential. Is there a problem in the first place? You may find out there is no actual problem, and that’s ok. You can then go back to step 1 and refine your project. If there is a problem, it is worth exploring in depth with your team. Do not leave thoughts hanging. Address every possible angle of the problem. Be precise and narrow. Do not jump to conclusions yet. This step is for researching and understanding.
Just as in writing—where production and editing are two completely separate stages and mindsets—also in design thinking, research and ideation are two completely separate mindsets. When you are researching and understanding, there is no space for solutions. Those will come in later stages. Now is not the time to find solutions to the problem yet.
Sometimes you may feel compelled to throw some possible solutions during the group discussion. That’s because coming up with possible ideas feels more comfortable than defining the problem narrowly. A team lead is essential, in this circumstance. They must be able to recognize the most effective mindset for the stage of the process and filter out the noise to ensure deep focus on the task at hand.
For our example project, the problem may be something like this: “Jennifer often forgets what to buy at the supermarket and needs to return every few days to ensure her children don’t lack the essentials.”
Ideate
Once the problem is defined, you can ask yourself: how might we help Jennifer go to the supermarket only once a week without forgetting anything?
Let the question sink. It’s time for ideation now. Ideation is akin to the production process in writing. Produce something. Finished beats perfect. During ideation, you want to let your child self take over. Your child self is your innate ability to express your creativity and not have any psychological or social blockers.
During ideation, any idea is a good idea. There is a no-judgment policy. Filtering (judgment) will come later. For now, you want to go wild and generate ideas without refraining from them. In a group setting, you may use popular ideation techniques such as the crazy 8 or hot potato. These are methods to help you get out of your rational self and into the flow of ideas.
Once you have enough ideas (dozens), the discussion may begin. Each person in the group can explain their ideas, and the rest can share their thoughts. Using visuals and a big whiteboard is useful at this stage for clear visualization. Now the filtering process begins. Some ideas will build on top of each other and you could combine them. At the end of your filtering process, you can pick the top two to three ideas and focus on those. You don’t want to get overwhelmed with features. Only pick the essentials, because putting together a prototype for the essentials is already complicated enough, and you want to test quickly rather than make it “perfect” in the first shot.
In our example, one idea may be: what if Jennifer has a shopping cart with a digital screen where she can pick the grocery list from a pre-defined list based on her user profile?
Prototype
Now you’ve picked the two to three fundamental features of your idea. It is time to prototype and get to testing in front of a few target personas to get their real-life feedback. Prototyping can be quick and dirty in the first stage. You can put together a shopping cart made of make-shift items you recycled from your office. You may also draw or sketch your prototype on paper or software. The key thing is that there is a tangible, visual product ready for experiential testing.
Test
Experiential testing means walking the user through their journey using your prototype. And ask them how they feel about it at every stage of the process. And taking notes in order to iterate and get back to the final product. You will use your prototype to conduct the first testing round. You could use VR to ensure the tester can immerse themselves in the experience. Or you may merely talk the user through their journey and listen carefully.
Repeat until product completion
You will gather notes and feedback from testing. That’s what will inform your iterations. You will go back to the drawing board and refine your prototype as many times as needed, and then test again and repeat the process until you are not getting any additional insights from users.
At that point, you can continue with upgrading your prototype to a beta product with the essential features. And keep testing to get real-life feedback rather than using your own faulty beliefs. Repeat until completion, which may also mean letting go of the idea if it doesn’t fit the persona’s problem. That’s part of the design thinking process. Your child self wouldn’t care much about failure, ultimately.
