DESIGN THINKING

BY : JOMARD P. DULLANO, LPT

• The Design Thinking (DT) Process has been credited with
driving innovations such as the computer mouse, the original
Palm Pilot PDA’s, and Pixar’s hit movies. DT’s proponents
insist that it can even transform organizations. Regardless of
the hype, DT offers provocative ideas to use in making
decisions and managing teams.

• Design Thinking is iterative, which means a person tests an

assumption then returns to the prototype stage and modifies it
based on the results and feedback. Iterate to learn lessons,
sooner rather than later, then try again.
• Design Thinking is a state of mind. It’s a human-centric, holistic
approach to problem solving and business thinking that
employs empathy, ideation, prototyping, and experimentation
to solve real-world issues. For organizations seeped in this
approach, Design Thinking works horizontally across an
organization to tear down silos, improve communications, and
deliver new insights. It’s been called “the search for a magical
balance between business and art; structure and chaos;
intuition and logic; concept and execution; playfulness and
formality; and, control and empowerment.” It’s been called “the
glue between disciplines.”
• Advantages of Design Thinking:
• It insists businesspeople to keep their focus on humans and
human needs.
• It relies on both creativity and logic.
• It promotes a learn-by-doing approach and even suggests that
failure is a good way to learn.
• It’s crazy collaborative.
• And it posits that the way a thing looks is not a secondary
consideration; rather, things cannot function well if they don’t
appeal to our hardwired visual senses.
• Phase I: Understanding and Empathy
• Empathy is the centerpiece of a human-centered design
process. The empathize mode is the work you do to
understand people within the context of your design
challenge. It is your effort to understand the way they do
things and why, their physical and emotional needs, how
they think about world, and what is meaningful to them.
• Benefits of Empathy
• As a design thinker, the problems you are trying to solve are rarely your own—they are
those of a particular group of people; in order to design for them, you must gain
empathy for who they are and what is important to them.
• Observing what people do and how they interact with their environment gives you clues
about what they think and feel. It also helps you learn about what they need. By
watching people, you can capture physical manifestations of their experiences – what
they do and say. This will allow you to infer the intangible meaning of those experiences
in order to uncover insights. These insights give you direction to create innovative
solutions. The best solutions come out of the best insights into human behavior. But
learning to recognize those insights is harder than you might think. Why? Because our
minds automatically filter out a lot of information without us even realizing it. We need to
learn to see things “with a fresh set of eyes,” and empathizing is what gives us those
new eyes.
• Engaging with people directly reveals a tremendous amount
about the way they think and the values they hold.
Sometimes these thoughts and values are not obvious to the
people who hold them, and a good conversation can
surprise both the designer and the subject by the
unanticipated insights being revealed. The stories that
people tell and the things that people say they do—even if
they are different from what they actually do—are strong
indicators of their deeply held beliefs about the way the
world is. Good designs are built on a solid understanding of
these beliefs and values.
• How to Empathize
• To empathize, you:
• Observe. View users and their behavior in the context of their
lives. As much as possible, do observations in relevant
contexts alongside interviews. Some of the most powerful
realizations come from noticing a disconnect between what
someone says and what s/he does. Others come from a work-
around someone has created which may be very surprising to
you as the designer, but they may not even think of bringing it
up in a conversation.
• Engage. Sometimes we call this technique “interviewing” but it should
really feel more of like a conversation. Prepare some questions you’d like to
ask but expect to let the conversation deviate from them. Keep the
conversation only loosely bounded. Elicit stories from the people you talk
to, and always ask “Why?” to uncover deeper meaning. Engagement can
come through both short ‘intercept’ encounters and longer scheduled
conversations.
• Watch and Listen. Certainly, you can – and should – combine observation
and engagement. Ask someone to show you how they complete a task.
Have them physically go through the steps and talk you through why they
are doing what they do. Ask them to vocalize what’s going through their
mind as they perform a task or interact with an object. Have a conversation
in the context of someone’s home or workplace—so many stories are
embodied in artifacts. Use the environment to prompt deeper questions.
• Phase II: Defining the Problem
• The define mode of the design process is all about bringing
clarity and focus to the design space. It is your chance, and
responsibility, as a design thinker to define the challenge you
are taking on based on what you have learned about your user
and about the context. After becoming an instant-expert on the
subject and gaining invaluable empathy for the person you are
designing for, this stage is about making sense of the
widespread information you have gathered.
• Benefits of Defining
• The define mode is critical to the design process because it results
from your point-of-view (POV), which is the explicit expression of the
problem you are striving to address. More importantly, your POV
defines the RIGHT challenge(s) to address based on your new
understanding of people and the problem space. It may seem
counterintuitive, but crafting a narrowed down problem statement
tends to yield both greater quantity and higher quality solutions when
you are generating ideas.
• The define mode is also an endeavor to synthesize your scattered
findings into powerful insights. It is this synthesis of your empathy work
that gives you the advantage that no one else has: discoveries that
you can leverage to tackle the design challenge, that is, INSIGHT.
• How to Define
• Consider what stood out to you when talking and observing people. What
patterns have emerged when you look at the set? If you noticed something
interesting, ask yourself (and your team) why that might be. In asking why
someone had a certain behavior or feeling, you are making connections from
that person to a larger context.
• Develop an understanding of the type of person you are designing for, i.e.,
your USER. Synthesize and select a limited set of NEEDS that you think are
important to fulfill; you may, in fact, express just one (1) salient need to
address. Work to express INSIGHTS you have developed through the
synthesis of information with the help of empathy and research work. Then,
establish a point-of-view by combining the three (3) elements – user, need,
and insight – as an actionable problem statement that will drive the rest of
your design work.
• Phase III: Brainstorming Solutions
• Ideate is the mode of the design process in which you concentrate on idea
generation. Mentally, it represents a process of “going wide” in terms of
concepts and outcomes. Ideation provides both the fuel and the source
material for building prototypes and getting innovative solutions into the
hands of your users.
• Benefits of Brainstorming
• Ideation is your chance to combine the understanding you have of the
problem space, and the people you are designing for, with your imagination
to generate solution concepts. Particularly early in a design project, ideation
is about pushing for the widest possible range of ideas from which you can
select, not simply finding a single, best solution. The determination of the
best solution will be discovered later through user testing and feedback.
• The various forms of ideation are leveraged to:
• Stepping beyond obvious solutions, thus increasing the innovation
potential of your solution set;
• Harnessing the collective perspectives and strengths of your teams;
• Uncovering unexpected areas of exploration;
• Creating fluency (volume) and flexibility (variety) in your innovation
options; and,
• Getting obvious solutions out of your heads and driving your team
beyond them.
• How to Brainstorm
• You ideate by combining your conscious and unconscious mind and rational
thoughts with imagination. For example, in brainstorming, you leverage the
synergy of the group to reach new ideas by building on others’ ideas. Adding
constraints, surrounding yourself with related materials that can inspire you or
the team, and embracing misunderstandings allow you to reach further than
you could by simply thinking about a problem.
• Another ideation technique is prototyping. In physically making something, a
person comes at point where decisions need to be made. This encourages new
ideas to come forward.
• There are other ideation techniques such as bodystorming, mind mapping, and
sketching, where the common theme is deferring judgment – that is, separating
the generation of ideas from the evaluation of ideas. By doing so, imagination
and creativity is given a voice.
• Phase IV: Prototyping Solutions
• The prototype mode is the iterative generation of artifacts intended to
answer questions that get you closer to your final solution. In the early
stages of a project, that question may be broad like, “Will my users
enjoy cooking in a competitive manner?” In these early stages, you
should create low-resolution prototypes that are quick and cheap to
make, but can elicit useful feedback from users and colleagues. (Think
minutes and cents.)
• In later stages, both your prototype and questions may get a little more
refined. For example, you may create a later stage prototype for the
cooking project that could trickle down to, “Will my users enjoy cooking
with voice commands or visual commands?”
Benefits of Prototype
• To ideate and problem-solve. Build to think.
• To communicate. If a picture is worth a thousand words, a prototype is worth a
thousand pictures.
• To start a conversation. Your interactions with users are often richer when centered
around a conversation piece. A prototype is an opportunity to have another directed
conversation with a user.
• To fail quickly and cheaply. Committing as few resources as possible to each idea
means less time and money invested up front.
To test possibilities. Staying on low resolution allows you to pursue many different
ideas without committing to a direction too early on.
• To manage the solution-building process. Identifying a variable also encourages you
to break a large problem down into smaller, testable chunks.
• How to Prototype
• Start building. Even if you aren’t sure of what you’re doing, the act of picking up
some materials—post- its, tape, and other small objects are a good way to start!—
will be enough to get you going.
• Don’t spend too long on one (1) prototype. Let go before you find yourself
getting too emotionally attached to one (1) prototype.
• Identify a variable. Identify what’s being tested with each prototype. A prototype
should answer a particular question when tested. That said, don’t be blind to the
other tangential understanding you can gain when someone responds to a
prototype.
• Build with the user in mind. What do you hope to test with the user? What sorts
of behavior do you expect? Answering these questions will help focus your
prototyping and help you receive meaningful feedback in the testing phase.
• Phase V: Testing the Solution
• The test mode includes soliciting feedback from the prototypes given to the
users. It is another opportunity to gain empathy from the target market of the
product.
• Testing is another opportunity to understand your user. But unlike your initial
empathy mode, you now have likely done more framing of the problem and
created prototypes to test. Both these things tend to focus the interaction
with users, but don’t reduce your “testing” to asking whether or not people
like your solution. Instead, continue to ask “Why?” and focus on what you
can learn about the person, the problem, and your potential solutions.
• Ideally, you can test within a real context of the user’s life. For a
physical object, ask people to take it with them and use it within their
normal routines. For an experience, try to create a scenario in a
location that would capture the real situation. If testing a prototype is
not possible, frame a more realistic situation by having the users take
on a role or task when approaching your prototype. A rule of thumb:
always prototype as if you know you’re right, but test as if you know
you’re wrong; testing is the chance to refine your solutions and make
them better.
• Benefits of Testing the Solution
• To refine prototypes and solutions. Testing informs the next
iterations of prototypes. Sometimes this means going back to the
drawing board.
• To learn more about your user. Testing is another opportunity to
build empathy through observation and engagement; it often yields
unexpected insights.
• To refine your POV. Sometimes testing reveals that not only did you
get the solution wrong, but you also failed to frame the problem
correctly.
• How to Test
• Show; Don’t Tell. Put your prototype in the user’s hands – or your
user – within an experience. And don’t explain everything (yet). Let
your tester interpret the prototype. Watch how they use (and misuse!)
what you have given them, and how they handle and interact with it;
then, listen to what they say about it and the questions they have.
• Create Experiences. Create your prototypes and test them in a way
that feels like an experience that your user is reacting to, rather than
an explanation that your user is evaluating.
•
Ask Users to Compare. Bringing multiple prototypes to the field to
test gives users a basis for comparison, and comparisons often reveal
latent needs.
THANK YOU!!!