With design thinking behind much of the innovation in tech today, it’s a key concept to understand for anyone working at a startup.
Don’t be fooled by the word design. Design thinking is not limited to making things look good, or even to product development. Instead, the process can apply to just about any task at just about any company. Think of it as a way to design an innovative solution to a problem.
What is design thinking?
Proponents of design thinking like to say that it’s human-centric. But what does this mean exactly? Isn’t all product design done with humans–especially the customer–in mind? Ideally, yes. Unfortunately, thinking about the customer’s needs is often hypothetical and with assumptions and biases, rather than actual listening. Sometimes, too, a company may develop a solution based on what works best for the business, not what actually works best for the human.
Broken down to its basics, design thinking can be thought of in these steps:
- Empathy. Design thinking is a process that begins with listening to customers and observing their habits. What do they want and need, even if not expressed?
- Define. Empathy leads to clearly articulating the real problem.
- Ideate. Thinking out of the box and asking the right questions are highly valued concepts in design thinking.
- Prototype. Solutions are first developed in low fidelity, for efficiency.
- Test. The prototyped solutions are tested to evaluate results and any need for iterating.
How did design thinking come about?
IDEO, a design studio headquartered in Palo Alto, CA, is largely credited with devising the process and evangelizing design thinking as a movement in the early ‘90s.
David Kelley, IDEO’s founder, also founded Stanford’s d.school, where students and community members learn the tools for innovation via design thinking. D.school has been especially instrumental in spreading the movement.
The values of design thinking are now widely held in the startup world. The prototype and testing stages dovetail especially nicely with Eric Reis’s Lean Startup philosophy, which is a cornerstone of the startup culture’s ethos and is based on the efficiencies of creating a Minimum Viable Product (MVP) as a low-risk experiment.
Design thinking is a perfect fit for startups, which are usually designing a product from scratch, and are highly motivated to do this efficiently due to lack of resources.
Why is this revolutionary?
This mode of thinking differs from what has been done historically and often still is: to create a product in a vacuum, without testing its real value to the customer. Large, well established corporations tend to hold fast to processes developed over years or decades. This just makes it harder to think outside the box and ask new questions, to look at the customer’s problem in a fresh way.
By now, though, design thinking has also gained acceptance in larger corporations and has been widely adopted, becoming more mainstream.
What does this look like in product development?
Here’s a great look into how Airbnb used design thinking to take a quantum leap forward. What got them there? Forgetting about the business assumptions (“only do what’s scalable”) and test something (in their case, better photos) in a low-cost way.
What does this look like outside the product team?
While this process has been thoroughly embraced by those in product development, other departments in tech companies are ripe for applying it.
As IDEO’s website articulates:
[Design thinking] allows those who aren’t trained as designers to use creative tools to address a vast range of challenges. The process starts with taking action and understanding the right questions. It’s about embracing simple mindset shifts and tackling problems from a new direction.”
In sales, for example, Falon Fatemi presents a vision in a Forbes article about how this can be applied.
In customer success, the team is already in close contact with the humans–customers–and hears first-hand about what they find difficult or even about what excites them. Ideally, this information is communicated to the product team for ideating on solutions and new product features or enhancements.
Even teams not in close touch with customers can implement design thinking, For example, human resources and operations can apply the process by considering the needs and problems of employees.
Applications of the process are endless!
Where can you learn more?
Start at the source! IDEOu.com offers basic information plus online courses.
This video from HBR is an explainer to give you the basics, and explains the process in terms of corporations in general, not just startups.
And of course, Wikipedia has a complete explanation, if you prefer text.
Want to really get serious? Coursera offers several free online courses in design thinking, including this one from the University of Virginia, which is excellent.
Maybe you should be employ design thinking!