Design Thinking Unravelled

Design thinking- An Introduction

 Design thinking for me was what someone designed a sketch on paper. It had to be something to do with artists or designers. What place does this have in IT so I thought? Surely not for developers, was the next thought. So I ventured into the mystic world of design thinking with muddled brain and several questions

As it might with many of you, I initially confused design thinking with visual design.  That’s when I stumbled on this quote by Steve Jobs, and viola, I now had a different perspective all together

It then dawned on me that design thinking is actually less about thinking and more about doing. So what exactly is design thinking?

Design thinking starts with people. Design thinking according to me is a user-centric approach to problem solving. Design Thinking is an iterative process during which you aim to understand the user, challenge assumptions, and redefine problems.

Design Thinking revolves around a deep interest in developing an understanding of the people for whom you are designing the products or services. It helps you observe and develop empathy with the target user

Now that you have some idea of what Design thinking is, I turn towards next piecee of Zig Zaw puzzle, Is Design thinking the answer to all your problems?

Problems can be of 2 types: Simple Problems, Wicked/complex problems (I like the word wickedJ)

Simple problems are those wherein problem is obvious and all it has lot of good data from the past that we can use. All it requires is a rational approach. For these kind of problems Design thinking is not required.

Wicked problems are those which are illdefined, wherein both the solution as well as the problem itself is unknown at the beginning. A large part of problem solving actually goes in identifying the problem. Wicked problem happens whenever we are faced with a  decision that first of all involves human beings, secondly , one in which data from past does not necessarily predict the future  It is in these cases that Design thinking can be most useful.

So now with this knowledge let us extend the definition of Design thinking

Design Thinking is an iterative process during which we aim to understand the user, challenge assumptions, and redefine problems in an attempt to identify alternative strategies and solutions that might not be instantly apparent with our initial level of understanding.

 

So we are now talking of people, technology and the business. All this put together is Design thinking

 

 

 

Now that you understand where design thinking can be effective, next obvious question is, what is the benefit of Design thinking

When I look at it, Design thinking creates a set of collaborative tools that help people work together across differences. It asks us to make an initial investment as a team in really understanding the problem from diverse perspectives, building a common mental map across team members based on the criteria required for good solution to be accomplished.

But still is it relevant for IT?

In technology perspective, Design thinking is about designing products, services, solutions from the customer perspective

As a buyer many times one can get frustrated because solution provider did not understand what you are trying to achieve. For example lets us consider you have an ecommerce business of retailing goods and your requirement is that customer should have seamless experience between web portal and mobile app. For instance product ordering on webportal and tracking through mobile app. However solution provider wants you to specify how the Andriod App should like as they use specific API’s and exchange data from cloud.

As a software developer, how many times did you receive an incomplete or flawed specification from the client? Or how many time they times were changes requested during the project?

Is this only communication problem or is there a deeper challenge? Only by empathizing, by putting yourself in another’s shoes, you can experience what they do. Role is to deeply understand your customer’s world, not just what they want but the entire context. Asking what they want, what they are trying to achieve, whom they want it for etc will give you a chance to exceed their expectations by designing a better customer journey. This does not require technical or architectural expertise but lot of critical thinking, analysis but also imagination and lots of patience to continuously iterate what works and what doesn’t

Let’s now break down design thinking. In simple terms process can be captured in terms of 4 questions

1. What is?
2. What if?
3. What wows?
4. What works?

1. What is?

It asks people to understand what’s going on today before trying to generate new ideas. This is because today’s customer dissatisfaction is the only data we have got to work with to help us create better tomorrow

1. What if?

This is a creative possibility generating question. Here we ask, what we would create to satisfy the needs of customer that we discovered during “What is” phase. We end with series of ideas with simple description

1. What wows?

Here we go through process of creating prototypes and putting assumptions as to why we think ideas meet these tests and begin to narrow down the number of ideas going forward

1. What works?

In this phase, we take the ideas that have made it successfully through previous 3 stages and we move them to market place for small scale experiments with real customers to get feedback which can then be used to iterate and improve our solution

 

Stanford design school shows design thinking process as an iterative cyclic process

 

Some others like IBM use the terms “Understand”, “Explore”, “Prototype” and “Evaluate” to describe the process. But they are all same, which can be seen from diagram below

 

 

1. Understand

Here we try understand the real problems for the users in the market. This can be done by

1. Stakeholder maps
2. Empathy maps
3. Customer journey
1. Explore

This is the ideation phase wherein we explore and generate as many solutions as possible. Explore wide variety and large quantity of ideas and go beyond obvious solutions to the problem this can be done by

1. To-Be scenarios
2. Storyboards
1. Prototype
   This is where we make ideas tangible. It’s a cheap and fast way to shape ideas so that we can experience and interact with them
2. Evaluate
   This is the testing phase. Ask for feedback on prototype. Learn about the user, reframe your views and refine your prototype

That’s it folks!! Hope this give you basic understanding of Design thinking. In my coming blogs I will talk about Personas in detail followed by more about IBM design thinking and extra steps called Keys that they have included. We will look into Hills, Playback, sponsor users amongst others.