DESIGN THINKING

I started using design thinking approach in my product management work and have been able to observe more collaborative effort from the teams resulting in products which customers loved and we took pride in building.

I got introduced to Design Thinking when I bumped into Design thinking courses and certifications - Enterprise Design Thinking (ibm.com) and fell in love with it ever since.

What is design thinking?

It is essentially a human-centered process of innovation that emphasizes observation, collaboration, fast learning, visualization of ideas, rapid concept prototyping and concurrent business analysis which impacts both innovation and business strategy.

Design Thinking (hbr.org)

It is really a tool to imagine future status and to bring products, service and experiences to market which enables innovation. The heart of this way of thinking is a deep understanding of the consumer based on fieldwork research. The book “7 habits of highly effective people” mentions “seek first to understand then be understood” (Habit 5) and it is true when it comes to design thinking as well. The key is to start from a seeking to understand point of view and not in seeking persuasion which seems to be prevalent in other push-development methods.

“a human-centered process of innovation that emphasizes observation, collaboration, fast learning, visualization of ideas, rapid concept prototyping and concurrent business analysis which impacts both innovation and business strategy.”

DESIGN THINKING STEPS

Essentially its a 5 step iterative framework as illustrated beautifully by Interaction Design Foundation Org. (Link). The following is also a summary of these steps.

1. Empathise - seek first to understand.

2. Define - use empathy to articulate users’ needs, their problem, and your insights

3. Ideate - by challenging assumptions and creating ideas for innovative solutions

4. Prototype - to build solutions

5. Test - solutions and iterate

1. Empathise : Understanding the problem a user/customer has and actually staying in this problem space long enough to be “able” to empathise with the user is a major part of design thinking. Most people don’t make much of an effort to explore the problem space before exploring the solution space. This falsely leads to the belief that you completely understand the situation. But the actual problem is always broader, more nuanced, or different than people originally assume.

2. Define: State users, needs and problems

In this phase based on what we have learnt by empathizing with the users and their problems, we can analyse our observations and synthesize them to define the core problems which we and your team have identified. These definitions are called problem statements. We can create personas to help keep your efforts human-centered before proceeding to ideation

3. Ideate—Challenge Assumptions and Generate Ideas

This is the brainstorming phase and the key is to suspend judgment too soon. When we're exploring the solution space, we first broaden the search and generate lots of possibilities and generate ideas. (Good, bad, ugly everything is welcome)

4. Prototype—Build Solutions

You’ve defined the problem. You’ve spoken to customers. You’ve brainstormed, come up with all sorts of ideas, and worked with your team to boil those ideas down to the ones you think may actually solve the problem you’ve defined.

This is an experimental phase. The aim is to identify the best possible solution for each problem found. Your team should produce some inexpensive, scaled-down versions of the product (or specific features found within the product) to investigate the ideas you’ve generated.

We explore potential solutions through modelling and prototyping. We design, we build, we test, and repeat — this design iteration process is absolutely critical to effective design thinking.”

Repeating this loop of prototyping, testing, and gathering user feedback is crucial for making sure the design is right — that is, it works for customers, you can build it, and you can support it.

5. Test—Try Your Solutions Out

This is the phase where we rigorously test the prototypes. Although this is the final phase, design thinking is iterative: Teams often use the results to redefine one or more further problems and also to remind the solution itself.