Eight reasons design thinking exercises are more useful than you think

Why user research, idea sessions, and sketching on whiteboards aren’t just useful, but vital.

Everyone has been to a workshop, meeting, or training course where, within the first half an hour, that dreaded phrase is uttered: “We’re going to start with a little exercise”. It could be anything from rapid sketching, thinking up pretend users, to sticking post-its on the walls to map out a task. Some people (like me) enjoy these exercises, many are ambivalent. However, there are still a great number of people who are frustrated by being forced to step back and complete these exercises. And anyway, aren’t they a waste of time?

The short answer is no. Design thinking activities are tried, tested, and proven to improve the end product. However, so often the mention of them is met by a weary eye roll. Below are eight reasons why these design exercises should not be brushed off as fun-but-silly breaks from the ‘real work’, and why they’re actually vital to your product or project cycle.

1.You need to break out of the usual mental space. Creative thinking is difficult. You have to be brave enough to offer your ideas up to your team, which is nerve-racking if you’re not familiar with it. Creativity and problem solving are skills that need honing. These exercises are designed to ease you into the process.

2. If you haven’t defined the problem, your solution probably won’t solve it. There is no bigger waste of time, money or energy than pouring sweat, blood and tears into a pain-staking creative cycle, only to find out you’ve created something that nobody needs, or worse — nobody will use.

3. You need to remove constraints to think about what you need, instead of what functionality is available. When you’re used to working in a specific environment with specific tools, it’s easy to become confused between what functionality is actually needed, and what’s available. We often become constrained by technology, resource or cost. There’s no problem with identifying these practical constraints, however, they should come later in the process. The cycle should begin with broad ideas that are refined as they are developed. Creative exercises help to focus your mind simply on what the user needs, not on what will be feasible later on down the line.

4. It’s fun. Although design exercises are essential to the outcome and can introduce fairly complex thinking challenges, they are also often enjoyable. They allow people to work on something different from their usual tasks and encourage them to get involved in the creative process. Revisiting number 1, it’s also a great way to improve communication and encourage participants to become more comfortable in sharing ideas and voicing opinion.

5. You might save yourself some future embarrassment. Whatever the problem you’re trying to solve, it’s a fairly safe bet that at some point you will have to introduce your idea to stakeholders, users, customers, or anyone else with an investment in your outcomes. This means you’ll be asked tricky questions about the suitability of your proposed ideas. If you’ve taken the time and effort to properly research and develop ideas, you’ll be able to answer every question, and design exercises are a great way to uncover these answers.

6. You have something to sanity-check your ideas against. Later on in the process when you start to develop your ideas, you’ll be able to keep putting yourself in the shoes of the user and ask yourself honest questions about what you’re doing. It makes the decision-making process a lot easier.

7. Your specification will practically write itself. Many people often forget to begin the ‘making’ stage of a product or process cycle with a specification of needs. If you’ve properly carried out your design exercises, however, that won’t matter. Your user needs will be so ingrained you’ll automatically know what the nice-to-haves or must-haves should be, therefore jotting them down will be a breeze.

8. Because hundreds of the world’s most successful companies probably aren’t wrong. We didn’t invent design thinking, and we definitely are not the only organisation to be using it. Again, these exercises - although maybe a little frustrating for those who would prefer to move straight into the development phase - are proven to improve the outcomes of the project. If you don’t believe us, just ask the hundreds of other organisations that take the time to perform these exercises in every project.