What is "Design Thinking"?

Design is a pursuit that requires you to be very methodical, logical and smart. You must be able to spot patterns that are not obvious, see things from many different perspectives and bring together seemingly disparate ideas. There is a need for great attention to detail as well as having the ability to abstract something down to its raw components, and being able to sense how it fits into a wider ecosystem.

That beautiful object, interface, gadget, or tool is highly practical as well. You enjoy touching it, you enjoy using it, you enjoy looking at it and having it in your life. It enhances your day, and makes you react emotionally. You love it. It solves a problem, and delights you at the same time. In fact, thinking about it now, it just seems like an obvious solution and you really can't imagine life without it. Someone however did have to sweat the details and work on many many prototypes before you even knew it existed. Why didn't you think of it?

This is where "Design Thinking" fits in. It is a method that allows you to deconstruct a problem, view it from all possible angles, and then craft a solution for it. It is a highly potent recipe for innovation, bringing together people from varied areas of expertise an intellectual and cultural persuasions, to solve a wicked hard problem together. Design Thinking can be applied to any sort of problem from running a hospital to evolving a product and anything beyond and in between. It applies the way that designers  think about problems to just about anything.

Design is not a beauty parlour. It is not where you go to pretty things up. It's where you go when you have problems to solve.

The backstory 

Design Thinking is a user-centered process for innovation based essentially around observation, collaboration between individuals from different disciplines and user group, rapid learning, focus on visualising ideas through prototypes, business analysis and strategy. When I mention "innovation" I don't mean having a lot of ideas, I mean actually making good ideas a reality. Innovation requires action or else they're just ideas. Design Thinking in my mind should be applied to all software development pursuits and can easily integrated with Agile and Lean methodologies. To some extent there's quite a bit of overlap. Using Design Thinking in your software teams will help you get the results you're looking for from a product perspective.

User-centered design is not design by committee

You must develop a deep understanding of your user-base. You must develop empathy for your users, and determine what the best way is to gain insights into unarticulated needs. You need to gain the experience, knowledge and ability to frame the real problem.

Many people mention Henry Ford who reportedly said that "If I asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses". There's no evidence that he actually said that, but it is clear that he believed it. Ford made the T-model in black only, and dominated the market for nearly 20 years. Ford's mistake was to stop innovating, and to refuse to understand what the market wanted. Harley Earl was GM motors head of Colour and Trim from 1927 to 1959. He not only introduced the idea of the clay prototype (still used to this day), but carried out user centered design by understanding what Americans wanted from their cars. This led to the strategy "A car for every purse and purpose". GM made 5 distinct brands from the Chevy to the Cadillac, and dominated the market. Ford was forced to shut down and re-tool his factories. (You can read more about Henry Ford and the "faster horse" thing on HBR)

This story is sadly still repeated in many industries and companies today, from Kodak to sony and beyond. If you fail to balance your portfolio, failure is a high likelihood.

Companies like Patagonia for example, have continuously innovated and listened to their customers to ensure they were responding to their needs and growing in the right direction as a company. Listening to users does not mean that you should act on every demand, but rather that you get good at sorting the wheat from the chaff, and making well balanced design, business and technical decisions. This is not easy to do, and there are a lot of great tools and techniques to help you get it right. This is the discipline of user-centered design, and it sits at the heart of Design Thinking. It overlaps a great deal with sociology and anthropology. We use ethnographic methods where we seek to understand people by observing, listening, discussing and through open-minded collaboration. If you think you already know what your end-user wants...you're starting to sound a lot like Henry Ford.

Take the time to do it properly and you will be leagues ahead of where you hoped you;d be. Do it wrong and it will cost you dearly as Target found out. They asked consumers in a survey whether they would prefer the aisles to be less cluttered. That was a 1.85 billion dollar mistake. Surveys have their place and this was not one of them. Asking leading questions will also never get you good results. User-centered design is a science, and if you want to do this yourself, then you need to learn how it's done. Learn from the mistakes of others first. Here's a quick overview on surveying to get you started.

The Method in a nutshell: Think - Make - Check

This very same cycle is being seen all over the "Lean" software methodology at the moment. It has been around for at least 50 years, and is finally being popularised and applied to all sorts of different industries by companies like IDEO, who drive large scale innovation in almost every industry that touches our lives.

Think:

During the "Think" stage you should be ideating, encouraging a lot of blue sky thinking, introducing yourself to the box so that you can think outside of it, and imagining all of the possibilities. It is a time to think big and broad. Invite specialists from different areas of expertise and give them a voice. Invite end-users to your workshops and brainstorms. Get all of the ideas on the table and then converge towards a few key directions that work from a business, design, and technical perspective for you and your market.

Tip: Include users by interviewing them, observing them using your current product or a competitor's product, visiting them in their environment.

Make:

It's time to think with your hands. Make some rapid prototypes of the directions that have emerged from your "Think" phase and try them on for size. A prototype can be anything from a role-play (like the Google checkout one for example), to sketches, 3D models made out of cardboard and tape or a user journey draw on post-it notes. Made sure that you only do enough to learn what you ned to. Once you have learned that, it's time to move along and throw this prototype away. You'll be iterating on it many times before you get to your end product. When I say this I don't mean that it is going to take a long time, I mean that in a week or even a day you can make many iterations on a single prototype. Don't get attached to anything, stay open-minded.

Tip: Include users by getting them to participate in collaborative design sessions. Invite them to show you what they are thinking by drawing, role-playing, acting out and modelling.

Check:

Check that your ideas so far are actually in line with what end-users need and want from your product. You can test with humans (anyone who is human) to test if basic interactions and flows are going to work. You should test with end-users and gradually more and more specific user groups, the more you have evolved your prototype. This is a time for stopping a direction dad in its tracks, adapting it to be something else more useful, or giving it the OK. Remember that you may still decide to not go ahead in future, so keep it as rough as you need,and don't waste time on cosmetics and documentation. The documentation is the learning. It is the prototype.

Tip: Include users by getting them to evaluate your prototype, but also by inviting them to tell you what they would change if they were in your shoes, and why.

Rinse and repeat:

You will go back through Think-Make-Check many more times, however many times you need to be comfortable with the result. The early Think-Make-Check cycles are gross and the later ones subtle. The key here is learn quickly whether an idea has legs and what is needed to make it a reality if it does. Learn by making it. Don't waste your time on long meetings where you endlessly discuss the same small details or where groups disagree and theorise over things. Put every to the test. Get people making rather than talking. Call out facts and assumptions. Check the assumptions. Make informed decisions.

A few tips to put it in place:

You don't need a lot of time or effort up-front to get Design Thinking working for you. You just need to do it.

• Start by getting the people you need together, being mindful to include people who view things from different perspectives
• Timeboxing all of your workshops together and keeping the focus and momentum rolling will help you greatly
• Make sure everyone is heard by using different facilitation techniques
• Don't shut down ideas,  build on them. Encourage groups to say "Yes, and..." rather than "No, but..."
• Don't allow any "Devils advocates" to exist in your groups, encourage people to speak for themselves. As Tom Kelley says "Devil's advocates can go to hell". It's too easy to shut ideas down and hide behind the devil.
• Having direct responsibility for your thoughts and ideas in a safe environment where failure is ok, will speed things up
• Prototype all the time. Every time we fail, we learn something important. When we make a paper prototype that fails, we didn't put a lot of time and money into making it, so we are less attached to it. If you have ever spent months working on something and polishing it only to find it isn't what users want anyway...you will know how painful and costly a lesson that is. You can learn those things in a matter of days at little cost. Focus on learning quickly through rapid prototyping
• Don't try to avoid the mess, the failure and the chaos that can sometimes ensue - keep moving towards a solution do not lose momentum. Those spaces of high emotion are where creativity lives.

Different environments will have their own challenges that you will need to deal with of course, and I am confident that it can be done. This is a really short intro to Design Thinking, I encourage you to delve deeper starting with the resources below and to experiment. If you are in a software environment you can work to iterations and soundly incorporate Design Thinking practices within the Agile or Lean framework you are using. More on that soon.

Some useful resources:

"Change by Design" - Tim Brown (book)

"Design Thinking" - Thomas Lockwood (book)

"The art of Innovation" - Tom Peters (book)

"The 10 faces of innovation" - Tom Kelley (book)

D-School Standford - Stanford school of design (website / course)

Tim Brown on Design Thinking - HBR (pdf)

Design Thinking - The movie

10 principles of Design for software

Dieter Rams was chief of design at Braun (1951-1995), where he emerged as one of the most influential industrial designers that has ever lived.  His legacy is of immense importance to us all. In the 80's, as consumerism went wild, he felt unhappy with the way things were going and penned his "10 principles of design", sometimes also called "The ten commandments". This sound advice resonates with me, and applies even in the world of software, where the level of complexity is typically very high. It takes a lot of practice and patience to be able to mentally abstract out all the angry noise out and provide a quiet and balanced design. Dieter Rams also penned my first and foremost rule of thumb: "If you can do it with less, do it". As he says here, design is not all about "making it pretty": “To use design to impress, to polish things up, to make them chic, is no design at all. This is packaging. When we concentrate on the essential elements in design, when we omit all superfluous elements, we find forms become: quiet, comfortable, understandable and, most importantly, long lasting.”

Here are the Ten principles, re-framed for the software industry:

 1. Good design is innovative

This about not blindly using pattern libraries to address interaction problems, or with no forethought, going ahead and doing something you have done a thousand times before. Even if it is "just another web form" for example, and that you have made thousands like it before, what is it you have become blind to? What is it that you can change? Is there a better way? Does there even need to be a form? Every time you approach a piece of work, "empty your cup", and try and see it with beginners eyes.

2. Good design makes a product useful

Question whether the features you are designing are really needed, and ask users even if you think you're sure. If you make features that nobody uses, its wasteful and already bad design in itself. The Standish Group’s statistic is that 45% of features in software go unused. It's your job as an experience designer to ensure that the user gets what they need, not what they think they need and not what anyone else thinks they need. This is why it's good to do prototype testing, and also role-playing.  Role-playing will enable you to work out what the interaction users want to have with the system is, better than asking them what features they want. The same goes for unnecessary images, links, text, screens, clicks, cognitive load...keep it simple and balanced. Do away with anything that detracts from the original user intention.

On another note, before embarking on building a product or a service, system or process, ensure that it is going to be used, that there is a genuine need for it. Please don't make the software version of one of these.

3. Good design is aesthetic

This sounds like a no-brainer, but there is a lot of awful looking software out there, some that I am sure you use quite often as well. It's one thing for it to be functional, useful and that it "does what it says on the box" but you're not selling a can of beans here. This is where you really need to have someone who understands what makes a good design also visually pleasing. Different aesthetic directions will work for different cultures, sub-cultures, demographics and so on. The visual designer does not make something that s/he wants to see, but rather something that will work for the audience and the brand. S/he will use their expertise and experience to ensure that it looks good as well.

Don't underestimate this part, and over-simplify it. If you have ever had to make presentation slides, you will know how time consuming the visual design can be. It requires a really creative thinker and an accomplished expert to make an excellent job of this. Beauty is in the execution.

4. Good design makes a product understandable

The software you make should be self-explanatory for users. Help text and lists of FAQ's are a poor substitute for good design. It should be obvious to the user what it is they need to do, and what the software will do for them. That conversation between human and software must be smooth and simple. Continue to refine the design until users can easily and quickly achieve their goal...without frowning or looking worried.

5. Good design is unobtrusive

Your software is not a work of art. Its function is not to provoke a reaction in anyone. It should fulfill its purpose and do so elegantly, without arrogance and without trying hard to be noticed and loved. It should be a comfortable enabler for people. Dieter Rams defines "unobtrusive" as "both neutral and restrained, to leave room for the user’s self-expression". The same is true for design in software. Imagine that the software is telling a story, and allow the user to write the ending.

6. Good design is honest

Always deliver on your promises to the people using your software, even if they are implied. Software needs transparency to gain trust from the people using it, and to gain their loyalty. We need to be clear about what we're doing with their information, with their money, with their actions, with their social networks...and be sure that we've communicated that really well. We also need to be transparent about what our software can and cannot do.

7. Good design is long-lasting

Dieter Rams said that "It avoids being fashionable and therefore never appears antiquated". In the world of software, there is a lot of waste. An Agile philosophy, with well integrated experience design practices will ensure that the right thing is delivered, and that it fundamentally lasts. It will go through iterations and then more iterations and really never be finished, as software moves and morphs with needs and changing technologies. We should ensure that our decisions are not based on what's hot, but what's needed and what is best for the business and the people who will end up using  our software.

8. Good design is thorough, down to the last detail

I said in my "Experience design manifesto" that I would "Sweat the details so that you don"t have to". A great execution of an idea is fundamental to it succeeding. Every detail of the experience design needs to be thought through, so that we can ensure that it's not clumsy to use. The information architecture needs time and testing to get right, interactions that seem like a good idea in your head don't play out as planned, and not everyone uses the same language as you do. Testing with enough users will allow you to hunt for the details, as will running an "unfocus group" with users from polar extremes of the spectrum.

9. Good design is environmentally-friendly

Let us please put a stop to all those horrible websites that litter the web, software that gets left unused or abandoned by those it was intended for, and the software that causes pain, anger, and sadness in people. Software needs to be human-centered to be environmentally friendly, because its environment is people's lives.

10. Good design is as little design as possible

Good experience design is about taking things away not adding things in. Can you design fewer steps in the process, fewer clicks, fewer screen reloads, fewer minutes waiting, fewer distractions on the screen...Can you create an experience that is less hassle and less painful than any other? We often talk about making experience design more enjoyable, or delightful or something else. Really I think that we should not be "making" but "unmaking" the experience, at least to begin with. What is the most direct path for a person? If that path involves being delighted that I can browse shoes or that I can quickly pay for something, then that should be the focus. Anything that distracts from it should be taken away. Each part of the software must not overload me with choices but point me to where I need to be. In order to do great experience design, you have to be able to synthesize all of the information that you have about about it, and distill it down to the crux of the thing. Then simplicity emerges.

A couple more quotes from Dieter Rams for your pleasure:

"A designer who wants to achieve good design must not regard himself as an artist who, according to taste and aesthetics, is merely dressing-up products with a last minute garment. The designer must be the gestaltingenieur or creative engineer. They synthesise the completed product from the various elements that make up its design. Their work is largely rational, meaning that aesthetic decisions are justified by an understanding of the product’s purpose.”

"I hate everything that is driven by fashion. From the beginning it was hating the sixties American way of styling. Especially the cars. They changed their styling every two years to sell more. Which has nothing to do with good design".

“Good design is innovative. It does not copy existing product forms, nor does it produce any kind of novelty for the sake of it. The essence of innovation must be clearly seen in all functions of a product.”