How we did it: digitizing design thinking
Design thinking offers several benefits to the organization, but it also comes in a format that works for some teams and not for others. How can we take the best from design thinking and invent more formats making it more accessible and versatile?
The proposal is simply to take design thinking out of its ceremony / workshop based format and into a digital, continuous, scaled environment making thinking about and including the customer a part of our way-of-working (I’m not sure if it remains “design thinking”, but it will have all the good stuff in it).
[I started this work with a range of different people and projects back in 2016 as both a response to a need: to include the customer in a better way and at a lower cost. And a challenge: the customer was being replaced with channel performance proxies like open- and completion rates taking us further away from our customers not closer to them. We needed to demonstrate that access to thick customer insights (1) is as easy to come by as click-through-rates .. if you design for it! In 2020 we implemented, scaled and adapted a tailored version (under a different name) across more than 40 teams.]
The gap
The customer is made artificially expensive, inaccessible and external to the work happening inside organizations. We’ve invented frameworks, processes and rituals to keep customers out.
This shouldn’t be the case. The customer should be as natural to the company as its own products. [I know this is a contentious claim as most people feel that their knowledge of their own customers is very good / good enough. But most teams I’ve asked to articulate the customer’s need start out by either articulating their own needs or describe functionality they want to offer. Try it :)]
Let’s look at how digitizing design thinking can help us make the customer a better part of who we are:
A. Data
A traditional design thinking method collects information and data at the start to inform the process (2). Then the team gets to work seldom touching data again (or only in a few spaced out iterations). In a digitized design thinking way-of-working we are using data all the time, it’s a circular process with data at the center continuously feeding every process.
B. Real-time
Interviewing users and testing new prototypes takes weeks or months to plan, execute and analyze. An organization in a digital environment does not necessarily have this luxury (or need). With digitized design thinking we are continuously testing and measuring using real-time online data. There is an instant feedback loop giving the organization needed insights with no delay.
C. Scale
A traditional design thinking process is limited to the in-depth analysis of the behaviors and thinking of a small group of people. On digital platforms we can test and collect data at scale including thousands or tens of thousands of users and customers.
D. Low cost
Traditional design thinking is a fairly expensive ceremony involving several roles, teams and processes. Digitized design thinking ideally needs to have its platform in place, but after that should be an integrated part of our way-of-working helping us test and learn from our customers at close to no additional cost (5).
E. Hawthorne-effect
In design thinking prototypes are discussed or experimented with people who know they are being interviewed and tested. This exposes the experiments to the Hawthorne effect (3) suggesting that people who know they are being observed change their behavior. With digitized design thinking there is no indication to the customer that they are in a test. They are experiencing and engaging with a service that they perceive as valuable in itself and they act according to their intuition and motivations. As an example think of an online tool where you can design your own car or shoes before ordering them.
F. Continuous
A traditional Design Thinking project will solve a problem that exists within a limited time frame — when the project is running (4). With digitized design thinking the process is continuous. We are always running experiments, always collecting data making improvements towards the goal.
Not perfect
Digitized design thinking is not perfect. It demands a team that is able to produce experiments at speed, collect data, analyze and respond while having a clear direction of progress. It also demands that we keep focusing on bringing value to our customers through every test instead of only creating learning for ourselves (becoming a perpetual learning factory).
But it’s still awesome.. It helps teams deliver on their purpose: keep learning from our customers to get better at delivering value to them that delivers value back to us.
This list is not an extensive list, and I am sure many people will argue that the presentation of design thinking is rather narrow, or that I am over valuing the abilities of digital platforms. But neither of those arguments should limit us from exploring the opportunities we can discover when combining the best of design thinking with digital (the original version of this article is eight years old ..).
Sources:
(1). Tricia Wang, Why Big Data Needs Thick Data, https://medium.com/ethnography-matters/why-big-data-needs-thick-data-b4b3e75e3d7
(2). Rikke Friis Dam, The 5 Stages in the Design Thinking Process, https://www.interaction-design.org/literature/article/5-stages-in-the-design-thinking-process
(3). Wikipedia, The Hawthorne effect, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawthorne_effect
(4). Natasha Iskander, Design Thinking Is Fundamentally Conservative and Preserves the Status Quo, https://hbr.org/2018/09/design-thinking-is-fundamentally-conservative-and-preserves-the-status-quo
(5). Stefan Thomke, Building a culture of experimentation, https://hbr.org/2020/03/building-a-culture-of-experimentation?ab=seriesnav-spotlight
