Why We Should Teach Design Thinking to Coders
I come across a lot of coders in my line of work. I started out my career as one myself. The program that I’m currently helping to manage in Microsoft — the Brunei Solutions Development Centre — is itself half a solutions development facility and half capability development program. The capability development part of it which we call the Capability and Mentorship Program (or CAMP for short) has been churning out ten Microsoft-certified developers every year since 2014. When I got involved with the program, the fourth batch run was halfway through.
Last month when they were about two weeks shy of graduating their year-long internship, I casually asked them if they’d ever heard of something called Design Thinking. Most of them said no.
I grinned.
A barrage of calendar invites followed shortly after.
First of all-what’s “Design Thinking”?
Design Thinking is a human-centered approach to problem solving and innovation, appropriated for business use by global design and consulting firm, IDEO (also the company that designed Apple’s first mouse). While you’re likely to find a few variations to the number or naming of phases of it as a process or methodology depending on who you ask, the underlying principles are fairly consistent:
- Keep a human-centered focus
- Practice empathy, curiosity, creativity
- Seek to understand
- Embrace ambiguity and abstraction
- Collaborate with diverse perspectives
- Generate many options
- Iteratively evolve through experimentation, prototyping, and user feedback
At the other end, what it promises is the ability for people to intimately approach any challenge and come up with a solution tailor-made to the unique needs of the users surrounding the problem.
So that’s Design Thinking in a nutshell. But why should we get coders to care? I offer three reasons:
- It’ll make them better problem solvers.
- They’ll create better products.
- It’ll prepare them for the future.
Reason #1: Better problem solvers
When faced with a problem, the typical response of coders (or any of us, really!) is to jump straight to solution mode. But often times, that first solution is not going to be the best one.
I really like telling this problem-solving story I read in a Harvard Business Review article:
An office building was receiving multiple complaints from tenants that “the elevator was too slow”. When asked, most people quickly identified ideas such as installing a new motor or replacing the lift altogether. However, when the situation was presented to building managers, they proposed a completely different solution: to install mirrors beside the elevator doors. They decided to try it.
And it worked! The complaints dropped! What happened here?
Turns out having mirrors next to the elevator doors made people lose track of time as they now had something more fascinating to look at while waiting: themselves.
It’s important to note that the situation hadn’t actually changed. They just considered different perspectives-those of other building managers-and looked at the problem differently: by going beyond the functional problem of a slow elevator, to the emotional problem of bored tenants (the industry lingo for this process is “problem reframing”).
Design Thinking gets people to spend time immersing themselves in the problem, to familiarize with the context, to empathize with the people involved — to understand. It provides a structured approach for people to get through these kinds of difficult problems (See Facing Complexity: Wicked Design Problems) in a way which allows them to just “trust the process,” as they say. This process and the understanding it generates can lead to more creative solutions.
Reason #2: Create better products
“Technology alone is not enough… It’s technology married with the humanities that yields us the result that makes our heart sing.”
Steve Jobs famously said this while a screen behind him flashed an image of a street sign at the intersections of Technology Street and Liberal Arts Street during his final keynote presentation a few months before his death in 2011.
It wasn’t the first time he said it. He’s said it before, but it was more than just a marketing line for him. His biographer Walter Isaacson wrote that this was like a philosophy of his that was “bred into his own soul” — an expression of his credo.
What did he mean by it?
When he was in college, he grew increasingly disinterested in the classes he was required to take, so he dropped out. Instead, he started sitting in classes he actually was interested in-one of them being a calligraphy class. “I learned about serif and sans serif typefaces, about varying the amount of space between different letter combinations, about what makes great typography great. It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can’t capture,” said Jobs.
Throughout his life he had built this acute intuition of what would be delightful to customers. This was him positioning himself in that intersection. This was what he meant by going beyond technology alone.
Coders, engineers, programmers are often technology-focused. And this is only natural. It comes from having a strong understanding of the technologies they work with day in and day out. The consequence though is when they set out to develop products and solutions, they often only consider the functional aspects of what the technology can achieve. But in creating products that users will accept and be delighted with, they’ll need to go deeper — beyond functionality and technology and into the realm of human emotions and motivations. This is where Design Thinking — with its focus on empathy and human-centricity — can help and better position coders to infer the deeper needs of their users.
I can think of no better example of this than with Intuit — the software company that produces popular tax and finance applications such as TurboTax, Mint, and Quicken, and a company that has deeply embedded Design Thinking into the way they do things. This year they’ve just landed themselves in the #8 spot of Fortune’s Future 50 list-the companies best prepared to thrive and grow their revenue rapidly in coming years. In a recent profile of the company, they claimed that one of their secrets for being able to continually reinvent themselves all these years was to obsessively get close to their customers to obtain critical insights. They do this with an ethnographic approach, by practicing something they call the “follow-me-home” where a few employees will follow a customer to their home or office and watch them use their products. Their CEO, Brad Smith, who does 60 to 100 hours of customer visits in a year himself, says: “What you get from a follow-me-home you can’t get from a data stream. You’ve got to look somebody in the eye and feel the emotion.”
A few years ago, design researcher Jared Spool ran a study to see what effect exposure to customers had on the success of a product. Out of his research he concluded that repeated exposure to customers struggling with real-life problems, in the field, drove more empathic conversations and produced superior products. So this finding is consistent with Intuit’s own experience once when a small, customer-centric, Design Thinking-like experiment led to an increase of $10 million in sales within the first year.
That’s some pretty superior product right there.
Reason #3: Skills for the future
It’s an exciting time to be alive. We are approaching what some are calling a second machine age where digital technologies — such as mixed reality, artificial intelligence, and quantum computing — are expected to do for mental/cognitive power what the steam engine and its descendants did for muscle/physical power.
But what’s going to happen in a future world where machines and computers can surpass our human physical and mental abilities?
Short answer: there’s no single consensus. Some think we’re unknowingly in the process of building our future machine overlords. Some think we’ll all lose our jobs. But there are also some less dramatic opinions.
Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella in his recently-released book Hit Refresh states that in this new world “where the torrent of technology will disrupt the status quo like never before”, us humans and our uniquely human qualities — empathy, creativity, emotions, ethics — will become ever more valuable. He argues that “if we’ve incorporated the right values and design principles, and if we’ve prepared ourselves for the skills we as humans will need, humans and society can flourish even as we transform our world.” Some of the skills he spoke of: empathy, creativity, innovation.
There’s some overlap with what the World Economic Forum concluded in their Future of Jobs Report as the skills a child would need to thrive in the upcoming industrial revolution.
Why am I talking about these skills? Because I believe practicing Design Thinking will help people cultivate some of these same skills.
Empathy: Check. Complex Problem Solving: Check. Creativity: Check. Emotional Intelligence: Check. Innovation: Check.
It was encouraging to see John Maeda report earlier this year in the latest installment of his Design In Tech Report series how Design Thinking has proliferated into the curriculums of even top business schools.
They’ve got the right idea.
So what next?
If you lead or manage a group of coders in any way, get them exposed to the Design Thinking approach.
My go-to crash course when introducing Design Thinking to those who are unfamiliar with it is Stanford d.school’s Design Project Zero (or DP0). Why? Because it’s quick (90 minutes), it comes with readily prepared worksheets for both participants and facilitators, and it tries to capture a lot of the same feelings and concepts that a proper Design Thinking experience provides. You should try it yourself! You will likely learn a lot in the process of facilitating. As a bonus I also get a lot of inspiration from the fact that it’s the exact same one that helped launch Intuit down the path of transforming themselves into a Design Thinking powerhouse.
Though whenever I do it I do have to be wary of simply taking the participants on a trip to “brainstorm island” — this colorful place where Post-its are expended liberally and fun little prototypes are built out of straws for a few hours or days, then back to the real world they go where nothing has changed and it’s business as usual.
That’s why at the end I always advise that the methods used in Design Thinking are not always as important. They’ll likely evolve over time as people appropriate them to their own needs. Google developed their Design Sprint with inspiration from Design Thinking. Even IBM has their own version of a Design Thinking methodology now.
It’s more the principles of Design Thinking that’s essential-human-centeredness, empathy, creativity, experimentation. It’s these principles that I hope more coders — like the ten CAMPers from BSDC who have just graduated a few weeks ago, or the new batch of ten that have just done DP0 as their first onboarding activity, to those that may be working with you now — will stay mindful of and practice as they go on into the future to solve problems and develop solutions with all this new exciting technologies.
Let me know about your own experiences with Design Thinking!
Originally published at https://www.linkedin.com on November 15, 2017.
