The majority of people I speak to every day are problem solvers and innovators in one way or another. In a largely service-driven, start-up friendly economy, many of us are regularly trying to create better experiences or products, or to innovate traditional services with the advantages of modern infrastructure and tech.
The process of actually doing that, however, is varied. The fact that there is no ‘one way’ is our biggest strength and the diversity of thinking is what allows us to come up with different, unique organisations.
One way to evolve and innovate is to use design thinking. The name can be a bit misleading – design thinking isn’t something exclusive to designers or design projects. Instead, it’s a process that can be applied to largely anything you’re looking to change.
Centred around understanding the people that change is aiming to benefit, design thinking has been adopted by the world’s largest companies to evolve and innovate and is taught at world-leading universities.
There are a few different variations of the model, but my team and I choose to follow the Stamford Institute of Design’s 5 Phase Design Thinking Model. What exactly is it and how can you use it? Read on…
Step 1: Empathise
The vast majority of change is driven by the desire to make things better for people. Better can mean faster, easier, cheaper or tastier, but ultimately, we’re trying to change something to improve the experience of someone, rather than a machine.
To truly understand how we can do that, we need to look through the lens in which the person views the world and understand what colours their experience, to create and understand their personal context.
We do this through talking to them, listening and empathising.
Let’s imagine we’re looking to create a coffee shop:
In this instance, through understanding people’s views, thoughts and feelings, we’d hear how coffee can brighten a stressful morning, or that coffee is something they always buy at the start of the day, rather than the end.
Through empathising with these situations, we can start to tightly define the problems they face.
Step 2: Define
Developing empathy enables us to better understand the problems people face and the opportunities we have to solve them.
In an office scenario, empathy could highlight an issue in team dynamics. Within tech systems, we might understand that the process simply takes too long for the end-user to really feel the benefit of the process.
Using this insight, we need to clearly define the problem we’re trying to solve and the element we’re trying to change. This ultimately enables us to decide if the solution we implement has been a success or not, by measuring if it had an effect on the defined problem.
For our coffee shop, problems could include that currently, coffee doesn’t taste good enough to brighten someone’s morning, or that people need a pick-me-up at the start of the day.
Now that we’ve got a problem, we can start to create ideas to solve it.
Step 3: Ideate
For those who are itching to get into solution mode, this is where you run wild and free.
The key to design thinking is to appreciate that there are likely multiple solutions for each problem, and the greatest value comes from ideas that can be prototyped and tested, leading to an evidence-based decision on which idea best solves the problem.
This phase is therefore all about generating a lot of different ideas, rather than trying to find the optimum solution.
In our coffee shop, we might brainstorm potential flavours, caffeine strengths and indulgent add-ons such as cream and syrup to solve the problems we found.
This gives us a basis to start prototyping solutions.
Step 4: Prototype
Prototyping first allows us to understand if something is feasible and viable, two pillars of any successful solutions.
Some ideas don’t come anywhere near the prototype stage because they’re too expensive or simply not feasible within defined parameters. For the ideas that do make it to prototype, they normally start off as low-fidelity, low-cost, high-speed options that can be cheaply and quickly implemented.
This allows us to follow the golden rule of problem solving and innovation: If you’re going to fail, fail fast.
Failure in this instance is a bit strong. The whole point of prototyping is to work out what does and doesn’t work – we expect and welcome failure, as it helps to identify which ideas will help to solve our problems, and which won’t.
To create some prototypes to solve our coffee problems, we might add a shot of different syrups to a current recipe, or we might try adding flavourings before developing a full, new recipe.
To understand which prototypes are worth taking further, we need to test.
Step 5: Test
To determine whether we should move from low- through to high-fidelity prototypes, or even to full development and implementation of a solution, we need to test them against the original problem, to see if they have the desired effect.
Testing usually begins internally for low-end prototypes, through to a selected set of end-users for high-end prototypes, opening up to all users when we create a minimal viable product.
Testing sounds grand and expensive but it doesn’t have to be complicated.
In a coffee shop, the owner and a few friends could probably decide if any of our prototypes were worth pursuing past the low-fidelity, low-cost, high-speed options that we tried.
As we develop successful options into full recipes and quantities, however, we’ll need to get the opinions of a lot more people to understand if they fit the market and are a potential for solving our problems. Again, that doesn’t have to be complicated – 50 free mugs to customers with the promise of some feedback in return would be relatively simple to do, and give us a wealth of validated learning in return.
When we’re happy that something fits the bill, its time to implement and ‘ship’ a Minimum Viable Product.
Minimum Viable Products (MVPs)
Although not necessarily a defined step of the design thinking model, I thought it worth including a section on MVPs.
Traditional methods for implementing change centred around us working extensively to create a flawless product or solution, before releasing it and then basking in its glory.
Nowadays, we understand that to create something truly valuable requires extensive testing by everyone who will use it, so they can feedback and the product can be iterated in turn.
We do this by releasing an MVP and continuing market engagement to understand its strengths and weakness and to release new, tweaked versions on a regular basis.
In software this is now part of the accepted culture – our apps and operating systems update to the next iteration without us even knowing it.
For our coffee, this would mean putting our new flavour on the menu and seeking customer feedback as we gradually tweaked and improved its recipe.
Wrapping-up
Using this 5-step process can seem like a big undertaking, but actually, the whole point of the design-thinking model is to help us identify the right solutions, quicker.
By considering the person and end-user throughout, avoiding assumptions and generating validated learning, we save time and money by not implementing solutions that miss the mark. Equally, it helps us find the optimum solution, rather than just an optional solution.
This is a process that can be used on your own or by a team of 1000s. However you use it, I hope it brings evolution and innovation to your every-day problem-solving.
