2. What is Design Thinking?
What is Design Thinking?
– Applying the way that designers think to a broader set
of industries and problems
• Products and services, culture, business model,
organization
7. Design Thinking Process
Design Thinking Process
– Take a Holistic view
– Steps can be done in any order
– Stop at any time and go back
to a step when you think you
need it
9. Design Thinking
Empathy
– Who are you designing for?
• What is important to them?
• Why do they do what they do?
• What are they feeling?
– Interview people and find these answers
• Watch to see not just what they do but how they interact
with environment
– Create artifacts like Customer journey map, sketches and
diagrams
10. Design Thinking
Define
– Make assumptions
• I heard _____. I think this means _____ because
_____
– This statement should be your guide for the rest of the
steps
– This is an evolving statement as you learn more
– Fall in love with the problem
11. Design Thinking
How might we?
– The statement should be focused, not vague
• How might we resolve the user’s problems?
• How might we meet user’s needs?
• How might we leverage existing strengths?
– Create a ton of How might we statements
Just right:
How might we redesign ice
cream to be more portable?
Too narrow:
How might we create a cone to
eat ice cream without dripping?
Too broad:
How might we redesign
dessert?
12. Ideate
Ideate
– Brainstorm on how to solve your problem
• Don’t be afraid to think too large or unrealistically
• Create a large amount of very different ideas
• Don’t evaluate these ideas as you are generating
them
• Yes, And!
13. Design Thinking
Prototype
– Pick an idea from the previous step and create a
prototype
– The faster you prototype, the faster you learn about the
quality of your idea, and the faster you can improve
– Clear up unanswered questions
14. Design Thinking
Test
– Show your prototype to your users
– Tolerate failure, learn from it
– Sometimes testing reveals that not only was the
solution wrong, the problem was wrong too
18. Design Thinking
Resources
Design Thinking Comes of Age -
https://hbr.org/2015/09/design-thinking-comes-of-
age
Stanford’s d.school resources -
https://dschool.stanford.edu/resources-
collections/design-thinking-artifacts
https://www.fidelitylabs.com/
Hi, I’m Heather Wingfield and I’m a principal information architect in the User Experience Design group at Fidelity Investments. That means that I help design parts of Fidelity’s different websites with the user in mind, trying to take complex concepts from the financial industry and make them consumable for a more general audience. One of the main ways I do this is following the principles of design and applying them to my projects. These principles of design are the basis for Design Thinking, a process for solving problems from a designer’s point of view.
Simply put, Design Thinking is thinking like a designer. It’s taking the different steps that we use when we’re designing sites or software and applying them in new ways to new places. However, it does not need to be limited to just software or the web, it can be applied to business models or cultural initiatives. For instance, what if you were trying to redesign the Laundry process. This is a common sample problem used in Design Thinking boot camps. Laundry is something that we all do, but when you start to look at it and talk to people about it, there are surprising amount of passionate thoughts and frustrating roadblocks.
You’ll see the idea of redesigning laundry appear throughout the rest of this talk, but first I want to show you an example of Design Thinking in action.
Here is a case study about Doug Deitz, who worked as a product designer for GE Medical. I have a link to his TED talk at the end of this deck so you can hear the story in his own words, but here is my shortened version. Doug was trained as an industrial designer and he was in charge of the enclosures, controls and displays, coils and patient transfer for a new MR machine.
Once the scanner had been installed in a hospital, he was so proud of it that he wanted to go see it work in action.
While he was there, he saw this young family coming down the hallway and he could tell as they get closer that the little girl was weeping. He noticed the father lean down and say ‘remember we talked about this, you can be brave.’ As they walked into the MR suite, Dietz had the chance to see the room through the girl’s eyes for the first time: He realized everything was beige and there were stickers telling the patients where to go that looked like they were from a crime scene and the exclamation mark warning sign on the door. The machine made terrible noises while it was running. He realized that while he had designed a great product for the medical technicians and doctors, his design was quite scary for kids.
Doug realized that he needed to use Design Thinking to make the MR machines a more enjoyable experience for the youngest patients. He goes into more detail in his talk, but he did brainstorming session with experts on child development and also children themselves to learn more about the mindset of young children.
And here is the final result after going through the Design Thinking process with the MR machines. They created a variety of different immersive experiences for children using calming decorations, special lighting, aromatherapy, and storytelling. The results were incredibly positive, the children and their parents loved the new rooms and taking an MRI was no longer an intimidating experience, but a fun adventure.
It started with empathy for customers and creating with teams that cross boundaries.
Doug Dietz likes to add: “When you design for meaning, good things will happen.”
These are the five main steps of Design Thinking. Some folks may use less or more depending on their preference or use slightly different labels. I’ll go into each in a lot more detail, but they are Empathy, Define, Ideate, Prototype, and Test. Empathy is usually the first step. You’ll notice that they are laid out in a circle, that is to represent iteration. You maybe have seen other diagrams that have Iterate as a step. Once you finish going through all of the steps, you’re not done, you need to do it all over again and continue to evolve.
Going through these different steps allows you to take a Holistic view of the problem, the people being impacted, the organizational constraints, budgets, etc.
Also, you don’t need to follow the order of the circle, if you’re on one step and feel like you need to go back a couple of steps or skip the next step, that’s fine. This flow is just a guide.
As we go through the steps, you’ll see that you will be going back and forth between focus and flaring. Flairing is when you brainstorm and generate a ton of ideas. Focus is when you take a more narrow view of those ideas and try to refine them.
The first step in Design Thinking is Empathy. Try to gain empathy for your user, understand their point of view and their pain points. You’re trying to find the answers to questions like what are their needs? Why do they do what they do? And how do they feel? The best way to do this is to talk to people and ask them a ton of questions. It’s even better if you can interview them in their own environment to see how they interact with the tools, people, and things around them on a daily basis.
So take our Laundry example. You would start by talking to folks about how they do laundry. How often do they do laundry? Do they do it all at once or spread it out? Where do they do their laundry, in a laundromat or their house? If it’s their house, what floor is it on? Do other people in their household do laundry too? What do they hate the most about doing laundry? Get a tour of their laundry room and note how things are laid out in the room and in the house. Their laundry room may be in the basement, but they store their clothes on the third floor. If they have trouble walking up stairs, that could be an issue.
The answer to one question can lead to the next question, especially if a question hits a pain point. Be sure to delve into pain points to discover as much as you can about them. Don’t be surprised if your interviews take on the semblance of a therapy session.
Once you have gathered information from your interviews, you can create sketches or diagrams to represent what you have learned. These do not have to be fancy, they will be helpful going forward as something you can use to go back and check on to make sure you’re on the right track.
The next step is Define. You now need to take everything you learned during the Empathy phase and try to define the problem you are going to solve. This is a phase where you are focusing instead of flaring. You need to create a focused problem statement that will drive your work in the next phases. You are not looking for solutions here, you are trying to fall in love with the problem.
If you leave with only one thing, let it be this. Fall in love with the problem, not your solution. This is so important in the design thinking process. Much of the discipline is giving yourself more time and permission to get to know the user to really understand their problem. This means if we come up with a solution and our user doesn’t like it, we have no problem changing it to be something that they do like.
You are going to make assumptions based on what you learned during the Empathy phase, this might feel uncomfortable because you might not be sure the assumptions are correct. That’s ok, they might not be correct. The purpose of the remaining steps is find out if the assumptions are correct or not.
Generate a multiple How might we statements, one of these or a combination will be your problem statement. How might we resolves the user’s problems? How might we meet the user’s needs? How might we leverage existing strengths?
On the screen is an example around dessert.
Going back to our Laundry problem, possible statements might be “How might we get Heather’s husband to fold laundry sooner? How might we get Heather’s husband to not leave laundry in the dryer for so long?”
The next step is Ideate. The point of this step is to brainstorm a large number of possible solutions for one of your How Might We statements. This step is a combination of focusing and flaring because you’re going to focus on one problem and flare a of lot different solutions. The emphasis here should be on quantity over quality. No idea should be too wild or too expensive because these ideas can feed off of each other. An idea seem crazy, but there might be a part of that idea that has some real value that you may not have realized initially and can lead to something great. As you’re generating these ideas, don’t evaluate them, just keep churning them out.
A good way to build conversation is to use “Yes, and” instead of “Yes, but” If someone says an idea you like, build on it – say “yes” and acknowledge their idea, then say “and” to add something else to it. This encourages the positive brainstorming flow that is so crucial for this stage.
Let’s say we were Ideate on one of our laundry ideas, “How might we get Heather’s husband to not leave laundry in the dryer for so long” Some possible ideas might be we could build an app that would remind him to fold that laundry. We could program his fitbit to keep buzzing till he folds the laundry, we could build a robot that would fold the laundry for him automatically, we could train their dog to fold laundry, Heather could just do all of the laundry, etc”ß
In the Prototype stage, you pick an idea from the Ideate phase and create a prototype for it. Don’t spend a lot of time deciding on an idea, the point of prototyping is to start figuring out if it is a good idea. The faster you prototype, the faster you can learn about the quality of your idea and the faster you can improve. The prototype can take on a lot of different forms, it can be a sketch made on a computer, a piece of paper, or a whiteboard. Or it can be a physical prototype that you build, although probably not to size.
For our redesigning Laundry example, we usually use crafting supplies like pipe cleaners, construction paper, and scissors to make scale models of an idea.
As you’re creating the prototype, you’ll also be answering a lot of open questions and creating new ones because you’re being forced to think about your idea more in detail. Creating the prototype type might make it clear to you that the idea you chose is not going to work and that’s totally fine, that’s why we have these different steps. If so, go back and select another idea and prototype it. Continue this process till you have a prototype that you think has potential, then it is time for the next step.
The last phase of Design Thinking is Test. This is the phase where you take your prototype and show it to people to gather feedback, ideally the same people you initially interviewed back in the Empathy phase. You should ideally be showing the prototype to actual users to get realistic feedback. Chances are that your users are not going to love everything about your prototype, they’ll hopefully have constructive feedback and that’s ok, that’s the point of this phase. You want to learn if your prototype and your idea are viable solutions and how to improve upon them in your next round of the design thinking cycle.
Sometimes, your prototype may fall completely flat with your users and you realize that way back in the Define step, you defined the wrong problem. That’s ok, that’s why we iterate. You now have valuable information to use for your next round of Design Thinking.
For our laundry example, we want to show our craft supply prototype to users to garner their thoughts. Does X make sense to them? Does it seem realistic
So those are all of the steps of Design Thinking, but just because you went through all of the steps does not mean that you are done. You should start again at on of the initial phases to help refine and iterate on your idea, whether you realized that you need to start from scratch or think your prototype just needs a couple of tweaks. Theoretically, this cycle could go on forever, but I know that is not realistic. Try to go through as many cycles as possible or until you are satisfied with implementing your idea.
