What is Design Thinking?
Design thinking is a process used to identify the right problems to solve for customers and how to solve them. It’s extremely effective for tackling the unknown and approaching problems in a more human-centric way. Traditionally it has been used by designers to come up with impactful products - however over time it has evolved time to be much more translatable across fields.
Since the pandemic, dealing with complex problems and the unknown has become the norm. Teams across organizational functions have started to use design thinking as a way of become more adaptable and innovative. To start investigating or leveraging this process for your teams, it’s important to understand:
“Design thinking is a human-centered 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 of IDEO Design Company
What is Design Thinking?
Design thinking is a creative and problem solving process that puts people first and foremost. And although design thinking has phases - do not be fooled. It is not a linear process. In fact, iteration and redesign are two of its key components. The process is fluid and agile, and can go back and forth between different steps.
To understand how design thinking works and is implemented, you need to first know the principles it was built with.
4 PRINCIPLES OF DESIGN THINKING
The Human Rule: All design is social in nature - solve problems in ways that prioritize and satisfy human needs.
The Ambiguity Rule: Ambiguity is inevitable - it cannot be removed or over simplified. Experiment at the limits of your knowledge and ability to control events to see things in a different light.
The Re-design Rule: All design is re-design - technology and social behaviour are constantly changing.
The tangibility rule: Making ideas into tangible prototypes enables designers to communicate them more effectively and gain feedback.
5 Phases of Design Thinking
1. Empathise
Empathy is critical to design thinking. It’s all about getting to know the end-user and immersing yourself in the customer experience to uncover hidden needs and issues. In this phase, it’s important to throw away your assumptions and pre-existing theories about the customer. Focus on gathering real insights. Collect this information in all ways possible - through analytics data, live studies, reviews, focus groups, surveys, and more.
2. Define
Here is where you take all of the information and data gathered in the Empathise phase and start to make sense of them. What patterns can be observed? What barriers are your customers coming up against? What is the big problem that you need to solve? By the end of this phase, you should have a clearly defined problem framed in human-centric terms. Be mindful to articulate the problem from a human need, and not in any way that insinuates a solution itself.
3. Ideate
This is where you get creative. Once you’ve put the problem into words, you have your north star for coming up with solutions. You’ll hold ideation sessions to come up with as many angles as possible. How you host these ideation phases can be different - some teams use open brainstorms, role playing or mind mapping amongst many others methods to help fuel creativity and generate a variety of ideas.
4. Prototype
It’s time to turn your ideas into solutions. You can look at a prototype as a scaled down version of your solution. Prototypes are critical to the process. They put ideas to the test and highlight any constraints or flaws. Depending on how your ideas take shape in prototype form, they may be accepted, redesigned, or rejected.
5. Test
Testing is the last phase, but it is rarely the end of the design because this is an iterative process. This is where you get user feedback on The results in this testing phase can often lead you up the funnel - either to redefine the problem statement, come up with new ideas, or design new prototypes.
How Design Thinking Drives Innovation
Design thinking is the human-centric way to innovate. And when you solve real human problems, that’s when a product really takes off. After all, some of the biggest brands today were founded by designers who served these needs better - including Apple, YouTube, Instagram, KicksStarter, AirBnB, Canva, Etsy, Pinterest, and Square - to name a few. It starts and is rooted in understanding human intentions, desires, and needs. All ideas and solutions focus on addressing those needs, while using ongoing customer feedback before, during and after product design.
“It’s not about the world of design, but the design of the world.”
— Bruce Mau, Canadian Designer and Founder of Massive Change Network
ZOOMING IN ON THE RIGHT PROBLEMS
Too often, businesses rely on a back-of-the-theatre view of the customer. Teams work in a bubble of second-hand, fragmented perspectives and assumptions about what the customer’s true needs and pain points are. This leads to concentrating on the wrong problem, or in some cases, a made up problem.
Design thinking always puts customer the first. It prioritizes their experience over opinions and data over instinct. This ensures that your team lines all their ideas back to the customer experience and data, and not their own isolated views.
FASTER LEARNING
You’re learning while building, and building while learning. This means getting products into the market faster, gathering feedback faster, and redesigning when needed faster. It’s a humbling, iterative process.
You’re encouraged - or rather, forced - not to cling onto ideas that aren’t working. Releasing prototypes gets teams into the habit of working on live and unfinished products, receiving real-time feedback, reworking ideas, and rejecting products before reaching a finished state. All of this cuts down the time typically wasted on bringing unsuccessful products to their full state and instead creates more opportunities for gathering predictive data and pivoting based off of it.
RISK MITIGATION THROUGH ITERATION
Learning faster also means that you identify flaws and opportunities earlier. The inherit nature of iteration in design thinking minimizes risks with innovation by collecting feedback through early prototypes to learn, test and refine solutions. This contrasts with linear problem solving and planning, that can cause companies to over-invest in one idea only to find out it has serious issues once in-market. The less money, time and resources invested in duds translated to more resources invested in viable solutions.
FLEXIBILITY CREATES AGILITY
Disruption is inevitable. The world does not sit still while you create. And the pandemic has shown us just how drastically and quickly people’s needs and behaviours can change.
With design thinking, you can redefine problems and redesign prototypes without resetting all of your work. It allows you to pivot on-the-go. Whether you’re facing new world issues, competitors, regulations, or consumer behaviour, nothing is set in stone - purposefully so. This type of process and mentality is what can make your company and teams competitively agile.
Today, disruption is a common occurrence and the problems businesses face are much more complex. Design thinking helps you solve these problems faster. It also allows you to be agile and bold in ways that actually reduce risk. And that is why its popularity is surging.
Are you interested in injecting more innovative, design thinking talent into your teams? Contact us today to see how we can help you grow with our network of agile experts, innovation-focused executives and flexible talent.
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