How to Solve Problems the “Design Thinking” Way?
Before I brainstorm you with what design thinking is all about and how it’s going to help you designing products before they turn into pixels, lets head to Bangalore where I had the most productive weekend this month getting to meet people from different backgrounds in the tech community. I was early by an hour at the place where we had our Meetup, And guess what? I happened to break the ice by opening up a conversation with the host “Sandeep Kulkarni” who is a Project Manager at IBM. With approximately thirty minutes into the conversation which I got to know him a lot, I found it intriguing by the way he had put my thoughts into design thinking.
He began diving straight into design thinking with an anecdote of how the Bullet Trains we see today were different from the Steam Trains Engineered decades back. The problem then was: how to travel longer distances with the limitations of horse-drawn carts? The solution: Railways employed horses to draw carts along rail tracks. But this did not solve the problem to travel longer distances in less time, Thus leading to a new problem: how to travel longer distances with the less time? The Solution: Replace horses with steam engines which were by far the most revolutionary idea solving the problem. With years rolling by, the Steam Locomotive was one of the most important and key aspects of the Industrial Revolution.
Heading back to history and understanding one such important innovation, we get some important learning.
- First, the Trains (Steam trains, specifically) back then were designed for mainly improving the functional use to solve the main goal. Thus, making them Useful.
- Secondly, the focus from functionality shifted to a focus on making them faster, comfortable for commuters (user), and energy efficient. Which eventually led to the development of Bullet Trains. Thus, improving Usability.
- Finally, the people’s acceptance of the latest innovation manifested how it widely unraveled the problem to commute in no time. Thus, widely accepted/Used.
With the learnings, we can understand that a product/technology may be both useful and usable and still fail to be used. The ultimate aim of a design is not to be useful or usable but for users to use that design. Without users, a product is a failure and it doesn’t matter how great the design was — it’s still a failure. Which is why for the fundamentals of design to go right, you would need to check, usefulness, usability, and acceptance/widely used, off the list.
Here is where “Design Thinking” comes in; thinking of your products and services from a customer’s perspective. Usually when one thinks of design what comes to mind is “aesthetic” and “craft”. In short, design stops at technical execution as its highest goal. It prioritizes the designer. Its focus is not on what people want and need. “Design-centric culture” on the other hand transcends design as a role, conveying a set of principles (that are collectively known as “design thinking”) to all people who help bring ideas to life.
5 Stages of Design Thinking
1. Empathize
This stage focuses on users’ experiences, especially emotional ones. Empathy allows design thinkers to set aside his or her own assumptions about the world in order to gain an understanding of users and their needs. Designers should approach users with the goal of understanding their wants and needs, what might make their life easier and more enjoyable and how technology can be useful for them.
2. Define
Put together the information you have created and gathered during the empathize stage. Analyze observations and synthesize them in order to define the core problem. Come up with a problem statement expressed in terms of human need by making use of emotional language (words that concern desire, aspirations, engagement, and experience).
3. Ideate
Ideation is the generation of ideas using your understanding of:
- your users and their needs from the empathize stage
- analysis and synthesis of your observations to come up with a human-centered problem statement during define stage
During this stage, you think outside the box. No idea is too distressing. In fact, the solution may come from the most unlikely of ideas. It is important to come up with ideation techniques that will help you generate as many ideas as you possibly can.
4. Prototype
The best ideas generated during ideation are turned into something concrete. Here designers create scaled-down versions of the product or features of the product. At the core of the implementation process is prototyping: turning ideas into actual products and services that are then tested, iterated, and refined. A prototype helps to gather feedback and improve the idea.
5. Test
In short: get out, put the prototype in the users’ hands and get their feedback. What worked? What did not work? What was their emotional response to the prototype? How did they feel? How did they react? Observe their facial expressions? Listen to what they think works. Listen to what they say will make it better. Use the results generated in this phase to redefine one or more problems and gain a deeper understanding of the users. Alter and refine the prototype, rule out problems then go out and test it again.
Take Away:
Design thinking is a non-linear non-sequential process. Each stage can be conducted in any order, parallel or even concurrently with each other.
Design thinking does not settle on the obvious and conventional solutions. They may seem efficient in the short run, but in the long run lead to inflexibility, stagnation, and frustration to the user.
In design thinking, how the real users think, feel and behave is the key to finding a human-centered (user-centric) solution.
Design Thinking, bringing designs to life is a circuitous journey of many discoveries. Moving forward on the right track involves taking several steps backward, several times.
