3 tips for User Centered Innovation

Jos van Opstal
theuxblog.com
Published in
4 min readJan 20, 2017

The world is changing very rapidly, and Innovation is a huge part of this world. I continue to be amazed by the sheer amount of new things that you come across every month. Most of what you find is good, and within a short amount of time you sometimes wonder how you could ever do without. But you know there is a very large amount of what you don’t find, where the failed innovations are.

Being part of a young, curious environment means a lot of innovation. Hackatons come and go, and people quickly generate new ideas. Some are brilliant, some aren’t. And honestly, some ideas I simply do not understand. I feel like sometimes innovation is happening just for the sake of innovation. Sometimes you hear ideas where people almost randomly throw two or more pieces of technology together and I genuinely wonder: What problem does this solve?

A quick Wikipedia search tells us that innovation is defined as “a new device, idea or method.” They also recognize that most people associate innovation with more then that, it not only needs to be new, it needs to be better. One of the things IBM stands for is that we not only want to make products, we want to make products that matter to people. From that concept I want to share three tips I have found in my day to day job that are stupidly simple, but you will see that it will help you find even better solutions, allowing you to innovate in a way that matters.

1. Put the user first

The title of the post already gave this one away a bit, but still, make sure you know the person(s) you are designing for in and out. Find out who they are, what makes them tick. That last bit is extremely important, facts and figures tell you a lot about a person, but it does not tell you who he / she is. You need to really gain empathy for the person to truly understand them. In Design Thinking we do this by creating a Empathy Map, putting a user in the middle and trying to describe what he / she Thinks, Says, Does and Feels.

2. Find out everything there is to know about the problem

After you know your user, start learning the context. Walk a mile in their shoes, feel what they feel, joys and frustrations alike. Try to map out this context, preferably with the end-users there, and you will quickly find out where the pain points are. As with the empathy map, try to not only describe the steps, but also what users do, think and feel for each of the steps.

Note though: While these pain points are very worthwhile to investigate and try to solve, areas that already work well can also be interesting. A lot of very meaningful innovations have come from making something that was already good even better. We all know the images of pirate-themed MRI scanners, a device that was already saving lives. Make it look like a pirate ship and you go from 80% of children needing sedation to children wanting to come back the next day.

3. Carefully weigh your options

All humans have a tendency to try stuff and to see what happens. We tend to go for the first solution that comes to mind that seems plausible, we stop thinking, and we go for it. Only rarely do we stop to consider other options. Good quality innovation requires a bit more elbow grease.

In his book “The Design of Everyday Things”, Donald Normal states:

Designers don’t try to search for a solution until they have determined the real problem, and even then, instead of solving that problem, they stop to consider a wide range of potential solutions. Only then will they finally converge upon their proposal.

The above applies to everybody. When you are innovating, you are designing. And when you have done the entire diverge / converge process of finding and discarding ideas, and you have found that final idea, don’t stop there! It is highly recommended to make multiple iterations of the final idea as well. Fail quickly, fail early, learn from it while it is still cheap to make those mistakes, and use them to make your product even stronger.

These three tips are simple, pure common sense. But take them into account the next time you try and solve a problem, and you will find the time it takes is well worth the investment in the long run.

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