Design Thinking and Understanding Client Needs

Many of the industry partners or clients who will request services are not experienced in the area that they are requesting work in.  When they describe what they are looking for from you and your team, it may have a different focus compared to what is actually being requested.  When designing the plan as a team, you need to ensure you are on the same page as your client.  Your goal is to understand their needs and desires out of the project, along with what is possible given the constraints of the course.  Design Thinking is a tool that will not just help you with connecting to your client, but also with many areas of your career and life.

Design thinking is a human-centric approach to solving problems by creating new ideas.

Design thinking is an iterative process in which we seek to understand the user, challenge assumptions, and redefine problems in an attempt to identify alternative strategies and solutions that might not be instantly apparent with our initial level of understanding. At the same time, Design Thinking provides a solution-based approach to solving problems. It is a way of thinking and working as well as a collection of hands-on methods. (Dam, R. F., & Siang, T. Y.)

It works for any business challenges like defining new solutions, strategies and roadmaps, organizational structures, and processes.

This video from Harvard Business Review (2015) provides a quick overview.

INNOVATION = DESIRABILITY + FEASIBILITY + VIABILITY
(Brown, 2009)

3 Pillars of Design Thinking

1. Empathy

The problems you are trying to solve are rarely your own; they are those of particular users. Build empathy for your users by learning their values. Discover the emotions that drive user behaviour. Uncover user needs (which they may or may not be aware of). Identify the right users for the appropriate purpose. Use your insights to design innovative solutions.

1. Ideation

Ideate is the mode in which you generate radical design alternatives. Ideation is a process of “going wide” in terms of concepts and outcomes—a mode of “flaring” instead of “focus”. The goal of ideation is to explore a wide solution space—both a large quantity and broad diversity of ideas. From this vast repository of ideas, you can build prototypes to test with users. When ideating, your team needs to fluctuate between times of focus and flare. Idea generation is a moment to “go wide”, while evaluation/selection of ideas is a time for narrowing-in.

1. Experimentation

Testing is your chance to gather feedback, refine solutions, and continue to learn about your users. The test mode is an iterative mode in which you place low-resolution prototypes in the appropriate context of your user’s life. Prototype as if you know you are right, but test as if you know you are wrong.

(Design Think Bootleg, Standford University, 2018)

Why Design Thinking Is Useful

• It captures the mindsets and needs of the people for who you are creating
• It paints a picture of the opportunities based on the needs of these people
• It leads you to innovative new solutions – starting with quick, low-fidelity prototypes that provide learning and gradually increase in fidelity

Areas of Application

• Product design
• Service and experience design
• Business design
• Leadership
• Organizational change

The Design Thinking Process

(Design Think Bootleg, Stanford University, 2018)

Step 1: Empathize

• Observe how users interact with their environment. Capture quotes, behaviours and other notes that reflect their experience. Watching users gives you clues as to what they think and feel— what they need.
• Engage users directly—interact with and interview them. Engaging users reveals deeper insights into their beliefs and values.
• Immerse yourself in your users’ experience. Find (or create if necessary) ways to immerse yourself in specific environments to understand firsthand, for who you are designing.

Step 2: Define

The define mode is when you unpack your empathy findings into needs and insights and scope a meaningful challenge. Based on your understanding of users and their environments, come up with an actionable problem statement: your Point Of View. Your Point of View is a unique design vision that is framed by your specific users. Understanding the meaningful challenge at hand, and the user insights you can leverage is fundamental to creating a successful solution.

Change a problem into an opportunity by asking: How might we…?

The define mode explicitly expresses the problem you strive to address. In order to be truly generative, you must reframe your challenge based on new insights gained through your empathy work. This reframed Point of View, or problem statement, can then be used as a solution-generating springboard.

Step 3: Ideate

Harness the collective perspectives and strengths of your team. You ideate in order to transition from identifying problems to exploring solutions for your users. Ideation is leveraged to:

• Generate ideas: a moment to “go wide”; while evaluation/selection of ideas is a time for narrowing-in. Step beyond obvious solutions and drive innovation.
• Uncover unexpected areas of exploration.
• Create fluency (volume) and flexibility (variety) in your innovation options.

Step 4: Prototype

A prototype can be anything that takes a physical form. In the early stages, keep prototypes inexpensive and low resolution to learn quickly and explore possibilities. Prototypes are most successful when people (the design team, users, and others) can experience and interact with them. What you learn from interactions with prototypes drives deeper empathy and shapes successful solutions. Prototyping is often thought of as a way to test functionality, but it serves many other purposes:

• Empathy gaining – Prototyping deepens your understanding of users and the design space.
• Exploration – Develop multiple concepts to test in parallel.
• Testing – Create prototypes to test and refine solutions.
• Inspiration – Inspire others by showcasing your vision.

Step 5: Test

Create authentic experiences for users to test your prototypes.

• Learn more about your user. Testing is another opportunity to build empathy through observation and engagement—often yielding unexpected insights.
• Refine your prototypes and solutions. Testing informs the next iterations of prototypes. Sometimes this means going back to the drawing board.
• Test and refine your Point of View. Testing may reveal – not only did you get the solution wrong, but you also framed the problem incorrectly.