Getting started with Design Thinking

As designers and creators we have a strong temptation to take pencil to paper and sketch out a vision for a product or a tool that solves a problem. The most freeing feeling is to create without limitations, acting on spirit and impulse. I bring to you the notion that professionally created products harness both this spirit and that of measured and research insights that provide a balance to the creative process.

The temptation to exercise your pencil and bring your raw creativity to bring a prototype to life is strong and hard to resist.

My early experience designing websites often took shape as wireframes that I would share with a client, talking them through the abstraction of content and functionality with gray boxes, sliders and interactions, my personal thesis for how this design solves the business goal and will serve as the impetus for developers and engineers to make the thing come to life. Let’s get building. This website is going to cost 15k, we have a deadline for a product launch. We think customers are going to love this. But how do we know, we haven’t build it yet? Design Thinking has entered the chat. Let’s pause for a moment. It’s going to cost how much to build this and we haven’t given the user of the tool a chance to weigh into the process? This is egregious, irresponsible, a true violation of the ethical spending of a client’s investment. Ah, I’ve heard of design thinking, said the client’s associate from the back of the room. It’s a framework to help businesses innovate. We just need to get our new website tool up and running.

Design Thinking isn’t just a framework for innovating, it’s a mindset for problem solving and building that can guide you through a project’s creative process, during everyone in the room, stakeholders and associates alike into participants in the creative ideation process.

But it’s going to take us weeks of time we don’t have! Design thinking is not a series of hurdles, it’s a series of catapults that can send you to the next step of your project no matter which stage you are at.

It’s steps can help you through all stages of product process:

• Understand: Clarify goals, constraints and requirements
• Observe: Collect insights from people interacting in the problem space
• Empathize: Listen to users motivations and emotions to develop a genuine understanding
• Define: Synthesize your findings to create a problem statement pinpointing the core issue to solve
• Ideate: Explore free-thinking solutions in a judgement free space
• Prototype: Translate ideas into tangible mock ups
• Test: Collect feedback from user interactions with prototypes
• Reflect: Learn from successes and failures

My first experience with design thinking was a true ah-ha moment for me. Early in my career, my agency hired an individual who had just sold his education tech company, his name is David. David brought to our company a relentless pursuit to have our design team first deeply consider the type of user we were targeting when we were designing websites. We were tasked with bringing to like customer personas that detailed, the company they worked at, what their pain points were that aligned with the type of design consulting work our company had the capacity to solve for. We came up with names, “Kate”, defined her education levels, psychographic details like values, beliefs, and goals. At the time customer personas, felt like an unnecessary exercise that was delaying the creative process since we were just inventing details about a fictitious person. In reality, once we all agreed on a persona that we were targeting for our website design. We quickly realized the exercise’s value. We found ourselves making design decisions that would align with Kate, we were writing content for Kate. Everything we were doing was using Kate’s persona as our north star. We were able to align on decisions because we weren’t making them based on our personal biases. We were making them for Kate. In our case Kate was more of a real person than we realized, she was based off of a former client.

I’m certain you are working on a product, a website, or a marketing campaign where design thinking can help you reach clarity and alignment with your team.

Use the navigation on the left to explore a variety of design thinking exercises that can provide you with a framework that is structured yet flexible for navigation the complexities of problem solving, reaching alignment with stakeholders or simply provide you with an enhanced sense of confidence that you are going in the right direction.