Locally rooted, globally minded — exporting thoughts and vibes
When thinking of UX (user experience), the first thought which comes to mind is simply — beautiful and easy to use set of product features that make people’s lives easier. But after reading a few articles one after another, I realized it means something more and a feature itself is a small part of the entire designing process. According to this, the core of the digital product is research, UX and engineering work that makes dramatically positive impacts on our screens (software dashboard). But as a matter of fact, features are only a few of many possible proposals for a user’s problems which should have been solved by a company before a competitor takes over our clients. In order not to allow this, and whoever you are, a designer, an engineer, a new young influencer on social media or in any role that creates our future, you probably hear a lot about Big Data and being data-driven. Data equals direction and insight but getting more data doesn’t necessarily mean more clarity. It requires a lot of creativity, foresight and being able to understand what our data shows. We apply all of these skills on a daily basis to get better knowledge about our customers, potential clients and information about how we could improve our services or products. It could be unbelievable but it will not get easier in the future — definitely! Various companies, organizations, and institutions have taken on this challenge and have come up with models in order to provide a structure which could upgrade the business process focused on this problem. Similar models have already been invented for improving simple products. Tackling the topic by design teams resulted in an outstanding and distinguished strategic model called design thinking which collects and generates an opportunity to clash with each other on varying perspectives and opinions. Thus, questions arose regarding the concepts of mockups, designs, and prototypes which should be solved by a company in order to get better service. Furthermore, first come first served — so if one company doesn’t meet customer requirements and expectations, another company appears and will deliver a satisfying product. When you add the aspect of fidelity to this approach, you see that by delivering a lean, optimized and structured small upgrade to your product, a customer is able to stay with you longer just because of seeing your willingness to address their requests.
Understanding human-centered concept
In order to start talking about design thinking, it should be said what design thinking is. A design isn’t an event, experience or neither a product. It’s a systematic process aiming to improve artificial environments into preferred outcomes (Herbert Simon, 1996) but let’s start from the beginning.
It’s great to start a new project off (kick-off) with a sketch or a mockup because it’s easy to include anyone from a team and it’s easily understandable by anyone. Everyone knows how to use a pen and how to put it to paper, sketching a user flow is a process to map out a key user’s objectives.
Harvard Business Review magazine and Forbes describe design thinking as an “essential tool for simplifying and humanizing”. Generally, it’s an innovative process for tackling complex problems (Brown & Wyatt, 2010) which has been evolving slowly since the 1960s. Over the past fifty plus years, to be honest with you, it has appropriated a lot of the best solutions from social and computer science. The model was invented by scientists at Stanford University. John Arnold, Robert McKim, and James Adams created a multidisciplinary program combining engineering, art and creative problem-solving. It was the beginning of design thinking. The results of their work can be seen in figure 1 below.
Concurrent with the movement that was concerned with mapping thoughts regarding defining, prototyping and testing potential solutions, Victor Papanek (American educator, 1923–1998) published a book that introduced a moral perspective on the responsibilities of the designer and indicated a completely new idea focused on human-centered design. The Papanek standpoint drew attention to fundamental societal needs and took into account wider moral responsibilities. Instead, he usually referred to innovations as a solution he believed to be the best result of simplifying complexity.
Looking at human needs in detail is not easy. From the early 1990s, human-centered and user-centered were often interchangeable terms which were used for methods that involved end users in the design process. The human-centered design consists of three main categories: technology, business, and human values.
The mindset camp of design thinking advocates believes a creative, dynamic and human-centered perspective is the driver behind the main concept (design thinking). Design thinkers (if this is the correct occupation name) should hold intuitive and divergent practical thinking skills, using both realistic and original thinking to solve a complex challenge. According to Idris Mootee (CEO & co-founder of Idea Couture), the main difference which sets design thinking apart from methodological predecessors is actually a human-centered approach.
Talk, talk and once again — talk to people — a basic and main rule in the design thinking approach. This way we are able to collect new information from customers as well as find out more about customer concerns. According to this, in an ideal scenario, an awesome product or service appeals to people on a visceral, behavioral and reflective level (“3 Levels of Design”, Don Norman). While the visceral level handles the visual appeal and the behavioral one deals with usability; the reflective level indicates how to process, remember and share an experience. Being able to do that, we have to have an interdisciplinary team (saying commonly — radical collaboration team) consisting of people whose backgrounds are completely different such as engineering, designing, education, industry or even social science. Then, based on the end-user experience and connecting the three basic circles indicated before, we are able to build new innovative products and services.
Stanford and design thinking
Like it was said before, the starting point of design thinking was at Stanford University but so far it has not been mentioned how to actually apply this concept in everyday life. A simple design thinking approach consists of six elements as follows:
- Empathize
• Define
• Ideate
• Prototype
• Test
The process applies a few storytelling elements as well. Simon Sinek, a famous American entrepreneur, says the first question which you should ask yourself is “why?” Knowing your “why” gives a filter to make choices both at home and at work that help you find greater fulfillment in all that you do. To be clear and understand the higher purpose of why you are doing what you are doing, you have to answer this question and receive a reply to what you do, your product, your service or what your brand stands for. This approach is always a good point to start when you are considering design thinking. The question “why?” can be directed to people, teams or organizations (companies).
Starting with a user to map user data flow is the first day of your work to build a good solution. We have to learn more about a user, his or her behavior and habits. In simple terms, we have to figure out what our customer is doing on a daily basis and check if our product fits his or her life or work. In theory, this process is linear, but in practice, it’s very cyclical and messy.
To gain an understanding of the problem we are trying involve many people from different levels of an organization. Empathy is a crucial element of a human-centered design and allows to set assumptions about the issues involved and to gain insight into users and their needs. The amount of information gathered at this stage can have a critical influence on the next stages and can help to develop the best possible understanding of the users and their problems. In every design sprint (a term describing a period of time in an entire designing process), the core of the problem may contain words or jargon that need to be defined and unpacked. The main goal is to underline and split an issue into atomic parts that even a child can understand. Instead of looking at the average user, extreme users provide novel insights into your problem space.
After the first stage, we should already have a product that is an empathy map to categorize the gathered information.
The defining stage which we were talking about before was focused on defining the main problem. Now we put together the information we have created and have gathered. Then we analyze observations and synthesize them in order to define the core problem as a statement which should be solved at the end of the design thinking process. The problem should be measurable but we don’t verify if the problem is able to be solved. One of the most important practical rules in business is to fail fast & start again. It’s a key design thinking tenet where you have to fail early and fail often. The first time I encountered this rule was during my studies in Finland where I had to become comfortable with uncertainty, develop myself to navigate situations of failure and learn how to turn failures into opportunities. Taking part in these kinds of exercise-based workshops can examine the psychological impact of failure and teach traits or the power of resilience.
The defining stage helps designers to gather wonderful ideas which establish features, functions or other elements that allow them to solve the problem.
In order to communicate the great insights from the empathy phase, it’s usually useful to create some virtual diagrams, a relationship map or Venn diagrams which are used to express both commonalities and differences.
The next day in design thinking is — ideate. At this point, we start generating ideas using different techniques such as brainstorming, mind mapping or storyboarding. This is a fun part of work and you should refrain from limits which you have and approach ideation with an open mind. It is a good point to think expansively without constraints. Actually, the storyboarding technique, in this case, is really fruitful and can help creative people represent information by using pictures, user stories, and other pertinent data. In the following figure, a standard storyboard is shown where a team is planning the next steps in their designing process.
There are tons of creative ideation tools. After brainstorming or another technique which you prefer, it’s really important to write down all ideas and decide which ones to prototype. This may be tough if there are a lot of great ideas to choose from. As far as I remember there are two primary methods to handle this issue:
• Ease vs impact
• Choose your fancy
The first one is about drawing a simple graph using two axes — a technical complexity and a user value as a vertical one. Then we would have to map our ideas on the graph. Following this, it will not be difficult to identify valuable ideas. Another method is based on choosing your favorite idea where each team member votes for ideas. Next, you should evaluate your ideas and select favorite ones — a short list of valuable ideas which could be moved to the next stage — prototyping.
Creating a prototype doesn’t mean you have to start coding. Once you come up with potential solutions you should start building a prototype. At this moment, it could be a good idea to apply an agile approach considering three basic steps:
• Build
• Test
• Iterate/repeat
We cannot forget about the other rule which should be applied to our work. Each iteration should bring to the table a small piece of work which works well and this will be the basis for the next upgrade. In order to know if our prototypes solve user problems, we need to gather feedback. To make that easier for us, we can create a feedback form where our customers can give us a clear point of view on matters which are important for us.
Once we have done our final solution we can go back to the start and do it all over again because there are always things to be improved.
Design thinking and omnipresent corporations
Finally, when we have got a solution for our customers’ pain points, we can talk about the design thinking approach from a business perspective. It means mentioning how companies use this approach to generate an additional value and a positive cash flow.
One of the most common pitfalls found by entrepreneurs that try to apply design rules is getting stuck in the idea phase. I would say, it’s an unexpected result of research. The shortage of ideas makes a huge difference and a barrier which cannot be jumped over easily. Justin Ablett, IBM partner-associate, says that “for design thinking to be successful, there needs to be a cultural transformation”. Many companies still do not understand that or they do understand but are too big to implement this idea as it’s against accepted methodological and traditional management style. The most simple way to explain the difference between business thinking and design thinking is the following graph.
Many companies still have a portfolio of products which haven’t been changed for many years. All businesses have a lot of never-ending lists of goals, from releasing new products to providing better customer support which increases up-selling processes. When a business decides on a new product release, the wheels of an expensive machine are set in motion, especially at large corporations. Applying design thinking can somehow help save a part of this money right away because it directs attention to very specific solutions which customers need. It can be calculated easily as part of the ROI rate.
IEEE (The world’s largest technical professional organization of the advancement of technology) released an article “Why software fails”, indicated that the amount spent on IT projects worldwide is around $1 trillion a year — a truly incredible amount. According to their report, there are 12 reasons why IT projects fail The top three are the following:
• Poor communication between customers and developers
• Badly defined requirements
• Stakeholder politics
Susan Weinschenk — a behavioral psychologist — indicated that fixing an error after development is up to 100 times as expensive as it would have been before development. Similar statistics we can find regarding the cost of losing a customer. According to Harvard Business Review magazine, acquiring a new customer is anywhere from 5 to 25 times more expensive than retaining an existing one. It could make sense depending on what industry you are in and how you calculate end costs.
We can get completely different results when we are implementing a design thinking model for startups. The top 3 reasons startups fail are no market demand, running out of cash and the wrong team. The number one reason accounts for more than 42% of failures. Even if it looks amazing and impressive, people won’t pay for a product or service offered by an early stage company that doesn’t solve a core problem. This is where design thinking can kick in. Design thinking can be all about finding a challenge worth solving. Putting yourself in the customer’s shoes generates a unique chance to not only come up with better ideas but turn those ideas into viable money makers and success, otherwise you will fail like most millennial companies. Nobody wants to spend months delivering something that doesn’t create impact or deliver value. Implementing design thinking in startups could be the last chance for surviving on the global market.
Summary
There are countless terms and definitions of methods used in a design thinking process. Using a standard wireframe can be a good way to follow the main concept at the beginning of the work. Even if there are more than 50 years of using the design thinking model in companies, recently this trend has made significant progress. Large corporations and even startups started using the model to improve their products and services relying on customer feedback. Design thinking is a human-centered approach to innovate and integrate commercial products with the needs of people, possibilities of technology and requirements for business success. Defining people’s main problems is the key part of the process. Often, reframing the problem using different unique methods can be more innovative and generate additional space for unexpected ideas. Going through a cycle there is a huge interaction between designers and end users. Prototyping and testing potential solutions is a key to catch the best upsides and start selling a product on the market.
Even if you get started with design thinking, over time, you will adapt it to your working style, making it your own. Being aware of the design thinking approach you are prepared well to tackle any projects, from a new simple app on your Android cell phone to a new global implementation project.
Written by Lukasz Kudlak
Expert Mariola Szklarz
