Why Design Thinking Works?

Good design is actually a lot harder to notice than poor design, in part because good designs fits user needs so well that the design is invisible, serving user without drawing attention to itself or away.

Bad design, on the other hand, screams out its inadequacies, loopholes, too many Elements, lack of simple navigation making itself very noticeable.

Design Thinking

Design Thinking can be a customer-centric development process that creates desirable product designs that are profitable and sustainable over product lifecycle and scale. It goes beyond the traditional focus on the features and functions of a proposed product. Instead, it emphasizes understanding the user problem and how is to be solved, the context in which and how the solution will be used, and the growth of that solution.

Details for Design Thinking

Traditional waterfall approaches to product development are sequential: Requirements are defined; then, solutions are designed, built, and delivered to the market. The focus tends to be on the most apparent problems. Often, success is determined by implementing a solution that meets the requirements instead of the needs of the user, resulting in products and services with unusable or ignored features that frustrate users and fail to meet the business goals of the enterprise.

Design thinking represents a profoundly different approach to product and solution development, in which divergent and convergent techniques are applied to understand a problem, design a solution, and deliver that solution to the market.

Design thinking also inspires new ways to measure the success of product and tech efforts:

Desirable – Do users want the solution?

Feasible – Can we deliver the right solution through a combination of build, buy, partner, or acquire endeavors/activities?

Viable – Is the way we build and offer the solution creating more value than cost?

Sustainable – Are we proactively managing our solution/service to account for its expected product-market lifecycle?

The Problem Space and the Solution Space:

The core processes of design thinking appear visually as a ‘double diamond’. This represents the focus on thoroughly exploring the problem space before creating solutions. The activities associated with exploring the problem are elaborated as follows:

Discover – The discover phase seeks to understand the problem by engaging in market and user research to identify unmet needs. This creates fresh perspectives that drive innovation. Unlike research that confirms or refutes a hypothesis, the inquiries associated with the discovery phase occur without preconceived notions about how users should work. Instead, it focuses on how users do work.

Define – The define phase focuses on the information gathered during the discover phase, using convergent techniques to generate insights into the specific problems and/or unmet needs. These create opportunities for the business and new product development.

With a clear understanding of the target market and the problems it’s facing, the companies can move towards designing a solution, the second diamond of design thinking. These are:

Develop – The development phase uses journey mapping, story mapping, and prototyping to design potential solutions to problems quickly and cost-effectively.

Deliver – The deliver phase produces artifacts that are suitable for creating the solution and vary based on context. They often start as prototypes that are expressed as a validated set of Features in the Program Backlog for ongoing delivery through the Continuous Delivery Pipeline.

Increasing Design Feedback Through Prototypes

A prototype is a functional model of the Feature or Product product teams wishes to build through user research & Data analysis on the previous in-app user engagement and final conversional numbers. It helps the product team clarify their understanding of the problem and reduces the risk of developing a solution.

Prototypes provide a myriad of benefits to product teams:

Fast feedback- By definition, a prototype is cheaper and faster to produce than a full solution. This enables faster feedback from users and customers, increased understanding of solution requirements, and greater confidence in the final designs.

Risk reduction- Prototypes can reduce technical risk by enabling Agile teams to focus initial efforts on the aspects of the solution associated with the highest risk.

Models for requirements- Prototypes can provide more clarity in the requirements of the desired feature or solution than pages of documentation.

“Good design is like a refrigerator—when it works, no one notices, but when it doesn’t, it sure stinks."