Brynn Marie Evans

This was originally posted on Unstructure on January 30 2010, as a guest author.

Is design thinking really that hard? There is obviously a growing acceptance of the notion behind design thinking as the previous essays and comments pointed out. But it remains that there is no formula for design thinking, and because of that, design thinking may alienate business leaders, managers, or even UX practitioners.

Consider the following quotes:

• “Design thinking is not about solving design problems, it’s about solving problems with design.” –Paula Thornton
• “It’s not just thinking. It’s a structured approach to organizing design.” –Gayle Curtis
• “Good design is at the intersection of business and human goals. It’s not just about users, and it’s not just about business—it’s about balancing both.” –Jess McMullin

A natural reaction to this is: Great! Sign me up! P.S. I have no idea where to begin.

Even as the essays on this panel have hit the nail on the head in how design thinking can be used for innovation in businesses, it still feels like an elusive process that faces many barriers in actual organizations. I’ve been noticing this with one of my clients. After introducing some new user-centered, user-driven design, marketing and sales invariably rework it to echo their time-tested sales pitch, causing it to bloat with extraneous options, text, and check boxes. In the end, we’ve made only an incremental improvement in our design.

Yet, I’ve also noticed a theme emerge across the many articles on design thinking recently. Bruce MacGregor talks about the importance of gaining insights early. Venessa Miemis mentions Tim Brown’s book which outlines an “inspiration phase” (disclosure: I have not read the book myself). And Peter Merholz continually reminds us that users are the central to the design process.

At the same time, I saw this surprising graphic last week: that “science” only makes up a sliver of the design thinking process. Really, I thought? What about the aforementioned importance of understanding users—isn’t that like a “science”? Maybe this is partly explains the uncertainty and confusion around design thinking.

[via http://www.kaplusa.com/blog/2009/12/the-role-of-intuition-in-design/ ]

I prefer the way that David Gillis describes the tradeoff between science and art as more of a continuum. Even still, where does design thinking fit in? A notch closer to the art, or to the science?

[via http://www.teehanlax.com/blog/2010/01/20/the-art-science-of-evidence-based-design/ ]

Taken together, I wanted to write a piece on the “science” in the design thinking process, to reiterate the importance of user-centered design and try to illustrate how this is not just a black box. Hopefully there’s some stuff in here that will help companies grasp exactly what we mean when we talk about “innovation” and “design thinking.”

One way to think of the innovation process is as a funneling of ideas across various stages—stages that span needs-finding, synthesis, ideation, prototyping, and iterating. Of course, this is a cyclical and dynamic process so it’s somewhat misleading to represent it as a sequential progression.

[via http://www.slideshare.net/mikeyk/intro-to-design-thinking ]

Gillis represents this process slightly differently, but still captures the same basic design phases:

[via http://www.teehanlax.com/blog/2010/01/20/the-art-science-of-evidence-based-design/ ]

Now, I prefer to think in terms of craft and creativity rather than science and art. By craft, I’m referring to the well-defined and established process of user-centered design. Creativity is the art, shiny design-y, intuitive part—the window dressing if you will. And to an extent, all these phases can be said to involve both craft and creativity.

It’s the craft part of design thinking that I want to elaborate on in the rest of this post, since the craft can be taught to a greater extent than the intuitive, experiential, creative part. Afterall, there are books and workshops out there teaching contextual and user-centered design. One great resource is IDEO’s Human Centered Design Toolkit.

Investigate / Observe:

Remember that the point of user-centered design is to gain clues about unmet user needs—needs that users themselves may be unable to articulate. The only way to gain this insight is to embed yourself in the community and practice of the people you’re designing for.

To do this, you must first scope your project and define various goals and hypotheses (what IDEO calls a brief).

Next, you talk to end users directly to learn about how they think, act, and engage, either with your product or in the space where you want to design a new product. This involves conducting contextual interviews, field studies, or otherwise observing users in their natural environments (not in the lab). If you’re designing an e-commerce checkout application, watch a user’s entire purchasing process from start to finish. If you’re redesigning your own site’s checkout flow, watch your users’ purchasing process. This is not a usability study. You’re not looking for feedback on specific features of your checkout process; you’re looking holistically at what your users’ goals are, what they’re doing to address those goals, where breakdowns occur, where confusion arises because expectations were violated, and importantly, how they feel (emotions! emotions! emotions!)

Synthesize:

There are number of established ways for documenting and synthesizing your insights. For example, interpretation sessions should be run as soon as possible after gathering user data, and they should always be done with other people—both people who were at your observation sessions as well as people who weren’t. Although it sounds counterintuitive, people who weren’t “in the field” with you often see the problem space from a different perspective, which causes important questions to be raised that might otherwise have been overlooked.

Some of the methods to use in interpretation sessions include building affinity diagrams, modeling workflow and cultural influences, and generating personas. Not all of these activities will be performed in the first interpretation session, but they are all part of the craft of synthesis in the design thinking process.

What you should be left with after this is a set of design principles in which you can begin to think about how to innovate on your product.

Ideate / Brainstorm:

Ideation and brainstorming is as critical to design thinking as is the collection of user data. After you’ve gathered your design principles, the goal is to generate ideas about how to create a product, service, or experience based on those principles. Gayle Curtis has an excellent talk on how to run such brainstorming sessions. Again, it’s a craft to structure the session— although what it generates is intended to be very creative, exploratory, and experiential. The more ideas the better.

Another excellent way to ideate is through what Dennis Schleicher calls a Issue Board. Issue Boards are, in fact, quite structured while still being visually evocative. They are generally built by one or two individuals, but subsequently used in larger brainstorming sessions to generate ideas.

Prototype / Evaluate / Validate:

I’m specifically lumping the prototyping and evaluative phases of design thinking together, to emphasize the point that prototypes are intended to solicit feedback. Yes, prototyping is an activity that can involve lots of creativity and visual aesthetics. But prototypes are not simply a beautifully-packaged, first generation version of your product—prototypes come in all shapes and sizes (from conceptual mockups to paper prototypes to high-fidelity interactive products).

In order to use prototypes to generate feedback, you must be open to testing your ideas early and often. Explore some conceptual mockups, and get feedback from a few users; then move onto paper prototypes and get quick feedback again; etc. This can also involve something like participatory design, whereby users are directly involved in the development of your prototype. There’s a good example of this in the Design Thinking for Social Innovation article: IDEO worked with children directly to develop a comprehensive vision care system for VisionSpring (the local provider).

…

As most will agree, design thinking is no panacea, even when combined with business thinking. Perhaps organizations become fearful of its outcome; or the numerous stakeholders and deep-seated traditions make it difficult to use design thinking in practice. One way to deal with this problem is to create an emotional connection with business leaders and UX professionals, in much the way we want to create an emotional connection with our users.

To do this, we must continue sharing examples of design thinking across a range of problem areas (which I have not succeeded in doing, but which unstructure has placed a call for). Sooner or later there will be a compelling example that resonates with every industry! We must also providing the necessary resources for others to embark on the design thinking process themselves. The goal for this essay was to do just that: illustrate how to put the craft in design thinking.