We Are All Designers
When I started my previous job, it didn’t take long to notice a lack of awareness and use of user-centred design and UX best practices in the company. And so I made it my personal mission to integrate Design Thinking tools into the company’s Agile development process.
At the start, it took many people by surprise that a designer was so interested in the internal processes and systems of a business, and I’m finding that the word “design” especially, but not limited to those outside of the field, is greatly misunderstood. When I tell people I’m a designer, their thoughts immediately go to visual forms of design like logos, colours and typefaces, but design is so much more than that. Design is not just about making things look “nice”, it is strategic and functional. Bruno Munari defines a designer as: “a planner with an aesthetic sense”. I’d like to alter that and propose that a designer is a problem solver with a humanistic sense. By this definition, anyone could be a designer, if they choose to collaborate with the people they are designing, developing or planning for.
It is just as much our fault as designers that this definition isn’t more widely know and that businesses don’t know what to do with or make of us because we don’t often talk about what is smart for business. But the role of a designer is evolving rapidly and becoming even more important in the 21st century. Design has already moved beyond the creation of digital and physical objects and into the construction of complex systems. It is now our job to be the ever present-voice of the customer in product decisions, connect with people to improve services, and, in some cases, to facilitate the process of business decisions.
When we work in companies where design hasn’t scaled in importance alongside Product and Engineering, it can be difficult to have a voice in the leadership team where decisions are made. At UX London 2017, I heard Jeff Gothelf and Josh Seiden speak about how businesses don’t need output anymore to stay ahead in this fast-paced world. What they need is outcome because outcomes are the user and customer behaviours that drive business results. In order to get a voice at the leadership table, we as designers not only need to help our colleagues understand how design is used to uncover these behaviours and drive outcome, but also teach them the tools to assist in the process.
This is where Design Thinking comes into play. I believe it is an incredibly powerful tool that can be used by product and software teams alike to build valuable products, but I know there is a lot of ambiguity around this term so I’d like to clarify exactly what I mean. Design Thinking has been described as anything from a framework for innovation to a toolkit for facilitation. In the film Design & Thinking, Tim Brown talks about it as a process that brings people together from different disciplines and allows them to work together to solve problems. This is what makes Design Thinking so useful within an organisation: it is meant to be multidisciplinary and collaborative and couldn’t work or exist if only “designers” were doing it.
I’m sure many of you, like me, have worked in an organisation that understands the importance of design and is open to change but struggles to bridge the gap and apply theory to practice. If you’re up for the challenge, I encourage you to take it upon yourself to educate your colleague about the importance of Design Thinking and begin forging the path to user-centred product development. There are countless tools and techniques under the Design Thinking umbrella that you can begin using, but the one I found to have the fastest and most impact is the Design Sprint from Google Ventures.
Design Sprints are a great way to solve problems, answer crucial questions about developing products, and help align teams and stakeholders on business and user goals. In my experience, I’ve found that they don’t always result in a completely new or innovative idea, but I have yet to facilitate one that doesn’t result in a better sense of team ownership of a product. After a Design Sprint, people feel validated because they’ve been able to voice and explore their ideas in ways that may not have been encouraged or taken seriously before. If Design Sprints and Design Thinking sound like something you’d like to bring to the teams you work with, you can check out my blog post on how to adapt them to get quick wins and download some helpful material here.
It is my hope that someday soon, design is no longer considered separate from developing and engineering a product, but instead is seen as the core of it. When our non-designer colleagues begin speaking about their own work in terms of design, I’ll consider my quest complete. If you too stand behind my movement, I urge you to pass on this message from Nigel Cross reminding us that everyone is capable of being a designer:
“Everyone can — and does — design. We all design when we plan for something new to happen, whether that might be a new version of a recipe, a new arrangement of the living room furniture, or a new layout of a personal web page. […] So design thinking is something inherent within human cognition; it is a key part of what makes us human.”
This post was adapted from my talk “The Role of Designing Thinking in Software Development” given at the World Usability Congress in October 2017.
