“Design thinking is a human-centred approach to innovation that draws from the designer’s toolkit to integrate the needs of people, the possibilities of technology, and the requirements for business success” Tim Brown CEO IDEO
What is Design Thinking?
You have probably heard of ‘Design Thinking’ or ‘Human Centered Design’, maybe ‘Digital Transformation’ or ‘Experience Design’. Well, they are all pretty much the same thing, they are all processes that facilitate human centered creative problem solving.
So what is Design Thinking? Well it’s not about design, nor is it about thinking, it is about caring about the people who have entrusted me with a problem, and promising that I’ll do something to help solve it.
– Source: Design thinking process ALStarr75
The process allows you to get closer to your customers and deliver solutions to real human problems increasing the desirability of your products & services.
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By making your research more personal and building empathy with your customers through observation and conversation, you will be able to uncover powerful insights to push you past incremental improvements to real innovation.
The process will:
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Help you focus on what is really valuable to both your customers and your organisation.
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Build team alignment and remove the culture of debate.
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Facilitate failing fast and often in order to learn quicker.
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Help you to make more accurate decisions and design for scale.
By doing your homework properly you will save time and cost in the later stages of development.
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Create diverse, cross-functional teams and open up the opportunity for more diverse ideas and perspectives around a problem, resulting in more valuable solutions.
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Flatten team structures to empower you to give everyone a voice regardless of experience and expertise, and help you move away from bias, personal opinions and assumptions.
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And the outcome will enable you to deliver real value to your customers with solutions that solve a need, are desired, viable, feasible and will strengthen your brand reputation.
It’s all about mindset...
Changing culture and mindset is not easy; take bias for example – we all have it. We’re all human, we’ve all had different life experiences and have unique perceptions and bias.
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In the Design Thinking process, we replace bias with data which we get through research...
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...and when I say research, I’m not just talking about market trends, opinions from stakeholders or subject matter experts, but feedback from the real people we are solving for.
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Then we have experience – having decades of experience is great when it comes to grasping a complex domain; experience is a crucial element to help us maintain our relationships with our customers. But experience alone is not enough when it comes to addressing the needs of our user. User needs change constantly and the difference between having a year of experience and a decade plays a minimal role in our ability to address them.
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Design Thinking teaches us to level the playing field and accept that a new starter's perspective on solving a user problem has as much weight as that of a subject matter expert, senior manager or executive. Junior staff are often closer to our user than you might think.
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Empathy – this is one buzzword that we need to embrace. Empathy is nothing more than accepting you are solving a problem for somebody else, not for you or your stakeholders. It’s about embracing the responsibility to ensure that everybody on your team keeps user needs at the centre of every decision.
Team alignment – trusting in the process and forgetting about roles, titles and experience will enable teams to get consensus around the problem they need to solve and focus on user value.
After facilitating a common understanding of our user’s world, Design Thinking guides us towards a team-agreed approach to addressing the problem.
Understand the problem!
I’ve broken down design thinking into eight stages, observation, extremes, interviews, empathy, insights, ideation, prototyping and iteration. Although you follow the stages in order, you will often need to repeat as you uncover new things you want to learn and understand.