Design thinking 101 — Starter guide
Let me start by saying that Design Thinking is not a concept that is proprietary to IT systems. Instead design thinking can be applied to multiple disciplines ranging from medicine, law, human resources, and others. In any discipline if you are trying to find solutions by leaving behind older methodologies and truly empathising with your users’, you may already be using design thinking principles. However, for this post let’s try to focus on the impact of design thinking in developing technology.
For decades software engineering was almost a standalone discipline. IT companies would release generic software that would bend users to its own whims, and force people to change how they work in order to use them. This method of software development has long been found obsolete and engineers now ask, what if instead of building systems that users need to adapt to, we look at the users real world problems, and build systems that are adapted to help the users.
In order to achieve this, engineers must first understand the customers problems in the same manner as felt by the customers themselves. If this crucial insight is missing, then the developed software and the time and resources spent on it, are a wasted effort.
The flow of design thinking can be captured in the following components;
During the Empathise stage, you must wear the shoes of the end user to try to understand his needs and pain points. This can be achieved by conducting interviews, field visits, etc. The end user directly influences and is involved in this phase of the process. We typically carry out the first Analysis part of design thinking during this phase by breaking down all the details we observe into smaller easier to understand components.
When the end user requirements have been captured, clarified, we enter the Define stage to frame the problem definition. During this stage we carry out the initial Synthesis part of design thinking and create our problem statement.
One thing to bear in mind during this phase is to always keep the end user in mind. Don’t get bogged down in technology or problems or solutions or even process, to the point that you forget what you are trying to do.
Remember the human you worked and empathised with in phase 1. Your goal remains to make their life easier.
Moving on to the Ideate phase, you can now share your problem statement with your team, and brainstorm on the ideas suggested by others and bring forward your own ideas. In this phase we typically use the mindset, there is no such thing as a bad idea, and nearly all ideas brought to the table will be documented in some manner.
The team focuses on vetting the ideas on the grounds of feasibility and viability in the Prototype phase. The feasible ideas are then converted to prototypes. Once prototyped further issues related to an idea are generally discovered. This process leads to finding the best solution from all presented ideas. During this phase the customer is directly involved with the team once again as their feedback is critical.
In the ‘final’ Test phase, the customer examines or uses the full prototype in real world, or close to real world scenarios. The customer decides if the provided solution in fact addresses the needs and pain points discovered in the empathise stage. It may well be that the solution has failed to achieve all it set out to do, and the team needs to go back to the drawing board and go back to a previous step, or even restart the entire process. In this way, iteration is one of the fundamental building blocks of design thinking.
To wrap up, design thinking is a unique way of forming solutions. An empathetic bond with customers is mandatory in order to fully understand the customers pain points and find solutions that address these issues. Has your company subscribed to design thinking? What was your experience so far?
