What is design thinking?

Design Thinking in action: A quick intro

YOU’RE SOLD ON THE IDEA OF INNOVATIVE DESIGN THINKING PROCESSES to lead the way forward in your company, yet the term still seems vague. You’re not sure exactly how this creative solutions methodology can be applied in the real world on a practical level.

Many of us are visual learners. We learn by seeing things done through our own eyes, not just by reading about them. Which means using design thinking can help you understand, communicate, and optimize processes more effectively.

As such, we want to illustrate some of the greatest design thinking examples in this article to guide you along the path to unleashing your creative potential.

What is the design thinking process?

Design thinking is basically a problem-solving model that uses a defined five-step process to enable the effective development of new products or services. But, when you look to define a term that encapsulates a modality of thinking, you can often get stuck in quicksand, struggling to grasp exactly what it means in concrete terms.

People love to talk in abstracts when it comes to creative processes, but this doesn’t help for honing in on what really matters. Instead, you need a blueprint for implementing the design thinking process to be able to apply the design thinking framework to your product development process.

Empathy is the ideal starting point with the design thinking process, since you need to keep the end user in mind throughout.

In this section, we will outline the design thinking process, focusing on what it means for design teams to engage in this method of thinking rather than providing a dictionary definition. After all, you’re looking for practical advice that helps you implement ideas quickly.

The 5 design thinking stages

The design thinking process is broken up into five core stages, each one representing a different phase of work and emphasizing human-centered design. The five design thinking stages are as follows:

1. Empathize

The design thinking process differs from other creative processes as it’s largely customer-driven. It places the customer on a pedestal and attempts at every step of the way to incorporate their voice into the development of the product or service.

As such, the empathize stage is necessary to find out what the customer is saying, why it’s important, and how this feedback can be effectively implemented. A design process that lacks empathy doesn’t have the customer’s best interests at heart.

Design shouldn’t be a vanity exercise in which employees flex their individual creative muscles and try to outdo each other to come up with the ‘best’ idea. It should be a collaborative effort to reach an idea, or better yet, various ideas that encapsulate the real user’s wants and needs and address them effectively.

2. Define

Taking the information you’ve acquired about your customers, you’ll then build a clear picture of the problem you’re looking to solve. Customer pain points should be the foundation upon which you develop your product and, as such, should significantly influence your team discussions and the design process.

It isn’t enough just to find out what the customer is struggling with and how your product can solve these issues. You need to define the problem in no uncertain terms and then use the statement you create as a north star for the design process. An example of that could be something like:

Young entrepreneurs need a platform through which they can manage and trade their cryptocurrency at their convenience.

3. Ideate

Only now, upon reaching the third stage of the design thinking process, should you activate the right-hand side of your brain and engage in blue-sky thinking.

The ideation phase is where you’ll carry out a series of creative exercises to come up with ideas for your product. It’s important to ensure a steady stream of ideas and put them under scrutiny to make sure there aren’t any obvious flaws that would prevent the ideas from leading to a successful product.

It’s during the ideation phase that you’ll be able to open up the floor to engaging discussions and forward-thinking brainstorming sessions. Without ideation, you have no threads to follow and nothing to base your product’s development cycle on.

As a result, you want to spend a lot of time here, making sure you exhaust as many ideas as possible so that when you make a final decision, you can say with confidence that it’s the right idea to pursue.

4. Prototype

The fourth stage of the process is where you’ll draw up a prototype — an inexpensive version of the final product. With the prototype, you can invite criticism and troubleshoot any issues you encounter.

It’s difficult to visualize what a product might look and feel like from an idea alone, so bringing it to life can be a valuable exercise in addressing its real-world practicality.

5. Test

Finally, there’s the testing phase, which is where you’ll use insights from the previous stage to come up with innovative solutions to problems. During the testing phase, you may find that an idea that you fleshed out into a prototype falls short of expectations or fails to deliver on your user-focused statement.

If this turns out to be the case, now’s the time to go back to the drawing board and start over in the ideation phase. This might sound like taking a step back after all that hard work, but the design thinking process is in place to guarantee you end up with the best possible product for your customers.

You’re not always going to come up with the best idea the first time around, so it’s important that you’re open to the iterative process, re-evaluating at any point and revisiting other ideas.

Design thinking examples

Let’s take a look at how three different companies have found business success through implementing design thinking in their product development process.

1. BCG Digital Ventures: helping Fortune 500 companies strike gold

For Digital Ventures (DV), the design thinking process is instrumental in analyzing how fortune 500 companies can grow upon their success and find new opportunities. DV leans heavily on customer research as a tool for identifying exciting market opportunities, and this is underpinned by the design thinking process, which places the customer’s needs first.

By prioritizing the thoughts and desires of the customer, DV can build out a strategy for meeting those demands in innovative ways. This initial customer research is backed up and built upon through a series of design thinking workshops, in which the team will go through the five stages to settle upon a handful of ideas that have legs.

Miro provides the canvas through which DV carries out most of the creative heavy lifting, and the access to a digital whiteboard allows team members to contribute and offer value even while working remotely. It’s also the virtual drawing board that the team returns to following interviews with customers, acting as a debriefing platform through which each member can express their thoughts and add their input.

By providing frameworks to interpret the data, they can then go in and map out connections between them and identify what could be big opportunities to explore.

DV has built a place for itself in the market by offering the kind of thinking and creativity that those at Fortune 500 companies and enterprises can’t make space for. Whereas a large portion of creative energy in these companies is spent on iterations and product improvements, DV’s work environment allows for the incubation of new ideas which can flourish into lucrative opportunities.

2. Project Bloks: making coding accessible to kids

An excellent example of cutting-edge design thinking, Project Bloks is an initiative spearheaded by tech giant Google with the aim of introducing people to coding at an early age.

On the surface, Project Bloks might just look like an attempt to gamify coding with colorful blocks to appeal to children. And in essence, that’s exactly what it is. Yet, the genius of the project comes from the customer-oriented approach borne from design thinking.

Instead of creating a coding game for kids to play or yet another online course, Google decided to find out what would really engage young minds. The company spent a lot of time in the first two stages of the design thinking process, empathizing with the real user and defining what the core problem was.

This extensive customer research would inform Google’s innovative approach to teaching coding to children. Using physical blocks, pucks, and boards, Project Bloks provides learners with a tactile element not possible with an online-based platform. The tactile nature of the initiative is reminiscent of Montessori toys — those which encourage experimentation with various textures and tactile elements.

Google didn’t just rely on market research, though. It partnered with design firm IDEO to really get to grips with what works and what doesn’t. Design thinking is at the core of everything IDEO does, so it turned out to be a match made in heaven and resulted in a product that was designed with the customer in mind.

3. Upwork: creativity knows no limits

It’s easy to assume that creativity flourishes in certain environments or that it’s reserved for contemporary lounges with bean bags and colorful murals (Google springs to mind) and cannot be replicated remotely.

Yet the example of Upwork’s success with design thinking at distance suggests that the opposite is true: that creativity isn’t limited to location.

Upwork, formerly Elance and oDesk, has been the intermediary platform connecting freelancers to clients on a global scale since 2003. The platform has helped lift the barrier created by national borders, allowing freelancers to find clients in other countries without restrictions.

Yet the team behind the platform’s success was predominantly execution-oriented engineers. As such, creativity at scale proved difficult, which is where the design thinking process came in handy.

Sean Kane, the engineering VP at Upwork, alongside key team members, came up with a game plan for implementing the design thinking process across the organization. It started with creating 5-6 member teams, assigned to different countries around the world, and Miro’s whiteboard, which facilitated remote design work focussed on the four Ds of the process:

• Discovery

• Definition

• Design

• Delivery

The teams would map out a mock user journey using Miro’s digital whiteboard and work with a bullseye diagram that helped them establish the priorities of the design process. From there, the teams would brainstorm ideas for potential solutions and develop them for visual presentation using storyboards and wireframe prototypes.

This mock exercise opened the team members’ eyes to a new method of problem-solving that focused on the end-user and presented as four clear stages. It also showed that with the right collaboration tools and framework, effective communication and creativity were achievable even while working remotely.

Upwork outlined one of the key takeaways from the experience as the need for engagement during design thinking sessions. It’s easy to shy away from offering your input or opinion in a brainstorming session at the office, but even easier to do so from behind your computer screen. As such, icebreaker activities and a clear focus can help keep everyone on the same page and encourage active participation.

Effective design thinking exercises

Behind every example of design thinking success is a series of practical exercises that push the envelope and allow team members to express their creativity under the right parameters.

Here are several design thinking exercises to get you started:

Yes, but…/Yes, and…

The first exercise shares a lot in common with improv classes, as it asks participants to take an initial idea and expand upon it, improving it in the process.

To do this exercise, assemble your team and pick a topic to workshop. For example, it could be that you’re updating a feature for your software service. In this instance, a software developer might start out by saying ‘we need to integrate drop-down menus into the website homepage’, to which someone else should respond ‘yes, but’ and make a counter-argument.

The goal here is to rebuke someone’s suggestion in a way that encourages critical thinking and holds ideas up to the necessary level of scrutiny.

Participants should go back and forth with ‘yes, but…’ statements for a while to see what emerges from the discussion. Then, do the same, but add to what others are saying and justify their opinions with ‘yes, and…’ statements.

With the ‘yes, and…’ exercise, you invite the group to add to suggestions made until you end up with a fully-fleshed-out concept that may or may not be worthy of pursuing.

Use the two variations of this exercise to draw up a list of pros and cons for each suggestion made so that you can be sure you’ve covered all bases and end up with the perfect solution.

Worst possible idea

‘Worst possible idea’ is a method of arriving at ideas that you may overlook or dismiss as being too far-fetched or ‘out there.’ It can also have the effect of easing the pressure in the design room, as bad ideas are actually encouraged.

This might give designers the courage to explore a range of ideas, despite how they might label them in their minds.

Building on the solid foundation you’ve established in the previous ‘empathize’ and ‘define’ stages, you should focus on solving the problem you defined and do so in a way that aligns with the customer’s desires.

User journey mapping

User journey mapping is an incredibly useful exercise for visualizing what stages the customer has to go through before they buy your product or engage with your business in any way.

Let’s consider the software service example again. To effectively map out the user journey, you might include information such as what steps the customer has to take to register or sign up for a free trial, what problems they may face while onboarding with the software, and issues they could encounter once they’re subscribed.

The exercise can also be helpful in assigning team members to each stage of the journey so that they can assume responsibility for making sure the user moves through to the next stage.

Nine whys

‘Find your why’ is common advice for anyone who’s feeling lost in life, as it forces you to think about why you want what you want, which can be powerful motivation. This is what makes this next exercise so effective.

‘Nine whys’ is a simple exercise that requires you to ask your partner, another software developer, for example, what their rationale is behind each decision they make. For example, ‘why do you think we need drop-down menus?’, ‘why would the customer care about it?’

The idea is that you ask your partner nine questions starting with ‘why,’ but of course, you can ask as many as you feel is necessary to get to the bottom of a team member’s reasoning for something.

Conclusion

It’s difficult to truly appreciate the design thinking process without understanding what it looks like with real-life examples and exercises. This guide has shown several practical tips and examples you can draw upon to create a roadmap for escaping design process stagnation and inspiring a change of direction.

If you’re ever in doubt as to how you can infuse design thinking in your product development process, revisit the examples outlined and try to apply the principles and frameworks in your own business.