Extending Design Thinking into Product Design
Gone are the days when design thinking is seen as a framework employed solely by those designing solutions and building products. In recent years, design thinking has seen a new heyday. It has become a pervasive concept in business and social contexts, and is widely seen as a competitive advantage for many growing companies, as previously championed in Harvard Business Review and Forbes.
Design is now a widely used buzzword phrase across lots of industries as its perceived value has increased, particularly in the technology space. The methodology has become positioned as an integral ingredient in the secret sauce for reaching innovation. But this powerful framework is more than just a shallow fad, and designers everywhere are being called upon everywhere to challenge and expand upon this framework as we are asked to think about our work more as product design, and not just user experience or interaction design.
A powerful lesson I’ve recently learned in my design career is that design thinking doesn’t become truly valuable until we infuse it with product thinking. We need to expand the age old user-centered design methodology into a more holistic approach to designing products and ecosystems by keeping business goals and product strategy in mind. If we are designing solutions without any real grasp on whether or not these ideas will actually provide value to a business and its customers, we are not practicing design in a complete sense.
When I first started out in design, I was a User Experience Designer focusing on research, rapid ideation, usability testing, and wireframing rough concepts. All of which I conducted through the UX design thinking framework provided by the General Assembly UX course. Then, as my skills started to progress and industry roles began to shift to include more product thinking in the design discipline, I became a Product Designer. I have since wondered: is this more than a semantic distinction? Here a few things I’ve learned while trying to answer this question for myself.
1. Design will grow and expand to the space it’s given
Though it is often seen as a holy grail for new startups and products, design thinking alone will not take products and businesses where they want to go. They’ve got product managers coming up with a business strategy, and engineers to build it, so they just need someone to tell them how to push the pixels. It seems like companies are hiring UX’ers and designers simply to check a box on the list to get things shipped. This mentality is a problem because it limits design and the possible impact it can have on the product at large.
The problem is that narrowing the focus of these roles as purely “design thinkers” limits our potential to use design to solve bigger product problems. There isn’t a lot of room to leverage design to its fullest potential when you’re only focused on UX design to incorporate business strategy. Reshaping the role of “design thinker” to “product thinker” is more holistic and impactful, and in the end, will lead teams and companies to develop products that are not only viable, but are actually valuable and solve real problems for users.
If you’re a UX designer, or someone who works with UX designers, you’re familiar with the human-centric philosophy around the discipline. In human-centered design thinking, we ask questions like, “what affordance can I provide my user to complete a task?” or, “what calls to action are necessary on this page for my user to be successful?” The crux of UX is putting both user and usability at the forefront.
So much of our energy as designers is spent on the human stuff, that we forget to dedicate a chunk of our thought and exploration to asking and answering a very simple, and very important, product-oriented question: “what value is my design providing?”
I’ve found that incorporating this question into my design process has become the easiest way for me to hold myself accountable to be thinking about the product as a whole, not just the design task at hand. The answer to this question guides my design decisions through and through, and I have learned that the earlier this question is asked, the sooner I’ll arrive at the best solution.
As product designers, we need to consider things like growth and value when we are creating features or enhancements to a product. It’s easy to get caught up thinking about all the possible ways to display the information architecture of a page, or what colors we can use to make our calls to action obvious to the user so we can afford them to achieve their tasks and goals. After all, behind almost every design problem — especially when it comes to designing new features for a product — is an opportunity to foster business growth.
But we have to remember that even though products and features can be tested and proven usable, it doesn’t always mean that they should be built. Product designers also need to test whether new concepts add any additional value for the user if they want to drive product usage.
2. The product IS the project
Design is often seen as an initial phase that’s just a portion of a project since the bulk of UX and design work happens before shipping something off to be built. This siloed nature of UX design causes blind spots in the product development process, limiting opportunities to address business needs, in addition to user needs, with design solutions.
For many startups and even larger companies, design thinking is a nice-to-have. Product thinking, however, is a must-have for businesses that want their customers to be happy, their cash flow to be fluid, and their business and user base to grow. It’s rooted in growth, strategy, and returning revenue, while also providing value to customers in a way that keeps them coming back for more.
As product designers, it’s our responsibility to not only think about the project we’re designing for, but to think more holistically about the product we’re designing for. This isn’t just up to product managers — product thinking puts designers at the forefront of the business, informing its trajectory rather than simply applying UX or design-thinking practices to make sure something is usable or to “make it pretty” (the proverbial description of a designer’s role that we all not-so-secretly hate).
When we’re building products, we should be thinking about how what we’re working on affects the product at large, beyond the individual features and enhancements in scope for a particular task. We should be designing to build, launch, learn, and iterate in the long run, considering the potential growth of the whole product, not just a single feature — this is where come of the real value can be found.
3. The perfectly balanced PB&J sandwich that is product design
What do you get when you combine the right amount of design thinking and product thinking? Product Design!
As designers, we need the right amount of both design thinking and product thinking to be successful in our roles.
Products can be successful without design thinking — but they won’t be successful without product thinking. Product thinking emphasizes growth, while design thinking emphasizes usability. Just like any good PB&J (or whatever nut butter of your choice if you’re riddled with peanut allergies), every product and business needs a little of both in order to thrive and reach their highest potential.
As designers who help build products, it’s our responsibility to not only talk the talk but also to walk the walk. We can tout design-thinking methodologies all we want, but one framework simply can’t solve all our problems, make our products better, and make our businesses profitable.
So, the next time you’re approaching a new design problem, consider how you can infuse your design thinking with product thinking. Continue to ask the human-centered questions, but make it a point to ask the important product questions too. And if you’re not sure what these are, just make sure you’re included in the conversations with the right people who do know what they are. Be judicious about considering how to provide value, where the opportunity for growth lies, and how the design task at hand ties into the much bigger picture of the product itself. Now that’s what I call “product design.”
