What Is Design Thinking?

Overview of Design Thinking

Design Thinking has a lot of facets that we distill into one core idea: Design Thinking is a way to solve problems. It’s not the only way. It might not even always be the best way. But, it is an extremely effective way to radically increase your likelihood of success when you’re solving a problem. Design Thinking is often referred to as a process, and, in fact, it does include specific ordered process steps. However, it’s also a philosophy, a mindset, a set of core principles, and a satchel full of tools. In essence, Design Thinking is a cohesive framework for innovation that can be used in a multitude of areas ranging from creating something new to running a business to managing interpersonal communication. And, if you’re an entrepreneur, it is a remarkable approach for identifying the problem that you should be solving for people. If you’re looking for an official definition, here’s our favorite: Design Thinking is a human-centered process for identifying and solving problems that results in effective, innovative solutions.

History of Design Thinking

The term Design Thinking was popularized by Stanford University and IDEO after the founding by David Kelly and Hasso Plattner of the Stanford d.school in 2005. However, the process itself isn’t new or even particularly that novel. It’s a process that has been evolving since the time of Plato and more solidly since the 1960s by collecting the best tools and ideas together from the social science, engineering, and art fields.

In his comprehensive article on the history of Design Thinking, Jo Szczepanska describes how it emerged from the work of many diverse thinkers and practitioners. In the 1950s and 1960s, Buckminster Fuller pioneered the idea of Design Science—the idea that design teams should be composed of elite experts in their fields who could come together and solve problems by meshing their backgrounds in novel ways. This approach was not user-centric, but embraced the idea of expert collaboration to solve longstanding difficult problems in new innovative ways.

Concurrently, folks in Scandinavia were practicing an inclusive, democratic version of product design called The Scandinavian Approach. In contrast to Fuller’s emphasis on expertise, in The Scandinavian Approach, everyone was invited to join together in a workshop format in which designers played the roles of facilitators. Users, engineers, and designers would work together to codesign products, services, and policies they would want to use. The Scandinavian Approach integrated end users into the early phases of product development, thereby introducing a key feature of Design Thinking: the incorporation of user research, prototyping, and testing to create and evolve solutions.

At this time in the 1960s, people began designing nontangible products called software that users would interact with outside the physical world. This new area of design borrowed heavily from the existing design and research fields, including psychology, computer science, anthropology, industrial design, and architecture, to figure out how to successfully navigate human interactions in nonphysical space. In this context, The Scandinavian Approach, also called participatory design in the United States, was particularly appealing.

However, participatory design was still rudimentary in thinking through the relative roles of the user, the designer, and the engineer—viewing the user’s needs as equal to those of the engineer, for example. In the 1980s, when he was vice president of the Advanced Technology Group at Apple, Don Norman coined the term user-centered design, which placed the user’s overall experience at the focus of the entire design effort, not, for instance, just as the focus for a constrained user test. Norman and others stated that users are the most important element of information systems. Moreover, systems must be designed for users and their needs, not only for the narrow system but also for the entire context in which the system will exist.

In the 1980s, as all this participatory design exploration was under way, researchers Nigel Cross and Donald Schon decided to figure out what “real” designers did differently than others to stimulate creative thinking. Cross emphasized techniques like brainstorming and sketching to stimulate creative thinking (see Figure 1-1). Schon highlighted the reflective practice of strong designers who allow themselves to experience ambiguity and puzzlement and then run experiments to figure out whether their educated guesses are correct.

Figure 1-1. Mia Silverman brainstorming and sketching early ideas on a whiteboard

In 1991, IDEO formed as a joint merger that started combining the ideas of Fuller, The Scandinavian Approach, and many others into one integrated design philosophy. They hired experts from disparate academic fields like anthropology, business, and healthcare, like Fuller had done, but also integrated user research, participatory design, prototyping, and creativity techniques into one cohesive process. IDEO didn’t create the term Design Thinking or discover the process, but it began popularizing its systematized flavor of the approach, sending employees to teach at businesses and universities, and eventually recording a much-publicized shopping cart video with Nightline on ABC that reached the mainstream. IDEO particularly emphasized that its approach was something that anyone could do (see the shopping cart in the video linked above).

In their book Creative Confidence, Tom Kelley and David Kelley of IDEO wrote:

It turns out that creativity isn’t some rare gift to be enjoyed by the lucky few—it’s a natural part of human thinking and behavior. In too many of us it gets blocked. But it can be unblocked.

By the late 1990s, universities like Stanford and Carnegie Mellon in the United States and others in Europe were teaching design techniques to nondesigners across myriad fields.

Also in the 1990s, the application of Design Thinking began moving beyond physical and software experiences into the realm of service design, or thinking about how humans engage with any type of nontangible system. In his seminal 1992 paper, “Wicked Problems in Design Thinking,” Richard Buchanan, then head of the Carnegie Mellon School of Design, proposed that design has the potential to attack complex, ambiguous challenges of any kind. Buchanan wrote:

...design has no special subject matter of its own apart from what a designer conceives it to be. The subject matter of design is potentially universal in scope, because Design Thinking may be applied to any area of human experience.

In the twenty-first century, the solving of Wicked Problems—those that are complex, multidimensional, and difficult to define—then increasingly drove Design Thinking outside of design firms to businesses, a wide variety of organizations, and even into the notice of some of the general public. These indeterminate problems require a creative solution and Design Thinking provides the mindset and tools to approach them successfully.

Then, in 2005, Stanford started the d.school or the Hasso Plattner Institute of Design, to explicitly evolve and teach Design Thinking as a discipline that people across all fields could learn. So, at it’s core, Design Thinking is a codification of decades of processes, tools, and approaches to solving problems by placing the focus on humans at the center.

Where Design Thinking Is Used

The amazing thing about Design Thinking is that it’s agnostic about the type of field or problem to which it’s applied. We’ve used Design Thinking to help our clients create processes across a wide range of domains, from communicating a complex server installation, to redesigning the interior of a refrigerator, to designing how a network for electric car charging should work. We’ve also applied it to our own lives from planning a party to helping one of our children deal with a social issue at school. It’s the same user-centered process applied to a variety of content areas.

Design Thinking has been particularly embraced as a source of innovation in the business world at various stages of development. For startups, Design Thinking shifts the focus from the inward-looking beliefs of a small team to the customer—helping identify the real problems the entrepreneur should be solving. For big corporations, it balances the need for consistent, repeatable performance with innovation and disruption. And, internal organizations and governments can use Design Thinking to craft policy that actually works.

In situations characterized by competing demands, changes, and varying constituents, Design Thinking offers a particularly strong set of tools for understanding and organizing chaos, much as the infamous image in Figure 1-2 demonstrates.

Figure 1-2. Infamous figure of going from the chaos of research and discovery to the simplicity of a solution

In summary, we can flexibly apply Design Thinking to a wide variety of problems in various fields and stages of development. It is appropriate for use by early stage startups and large organizations as well as policy-making organizations to think about problems in a new way.

Why Design Thinking Is Effective

Design Thinking is particularly effective for two reasons. One is that it has a laser focus on the actual, human roots of a given problem. By understanding and empathizing with the distinct human stories that define a problem, you are able to solve for real needs from the beginning. And, by remaining in touch with users throughout the design cycle, you can stop guessing and make decisions based on actual human feedback.

Second, Design Thinking provides a defined, replicable approach for a creative process. When followed correctly by skilled practitioners, it virtually guarantees an effective, innovative solution to problems, ranging from the simple to the fabulously complex and ill-defined. This has been proven many times over by studies at Stanford, well-known companies, and in our own work covering almost two decades at Sliced Bread Design. We don’t want to take on a problem without the assurance that we will deliver a strong solution. Design Thinking gives us the confidence to offer that kind of guarantee.

How It Works

Let’s look at the elements that make design thinking so effective.

Mindsets

Many begin thinking about Design Thinking by going straight to the process because it seems the most tangible. We start with mindset, which is the foundation of the process. In fact, if you just take on a Design Thinking attitude when processing problems, you are in great shape already. A review of Design Thinking literature backed by our own experience leads us to divide our Design Thinking mindset into these seven tenets:

Empathy

Empathy is the root of Design Thinking. Design from a place of understanding the humans who are going to be using your design. If you don’t do anything but focus on empathy while regularly engaging with your users in any way you can, you are already 50 percent of the way there.

Radical collaboration

Involve those who might not be traditionally included in your work sessions. Bring engineers, marketers, designers, and others around the workplace together and see what they have to say. Involve people from other departments or projects who don’t know about your work but could have a new perspective.

Yes and…

Build on ideas that you don’t like instead of squashing them. If someone proposes something you don’t think will work, think about how it can be built into something that’s more promising. Think of “bad” ideas not as dead ends but as steps on the path to the best ideas. Ask questions about why someone came up with them and see if you can solve things a different way.

Thinking by doing

Stop talking and make something. Sketching, building something out of modeling clay, or enacting a skit gets you out of your head and creates new opportunities that you hadn’t imagined before. Furthermore, people can argue endlessly about a vague understanding of what is in one another’s head. Making something that your team and users can comment on will completely change the conversation and save time.

Iteration

Continue past the first idea. Embrace feedback and take a stance of wanting to create multiple versions of everything. This means considering multiple solutions at the same time and iterating the solutions numerous times before you’re satisfied.

Go broad to go narrow

Move beyond a narrow focus of the problem or solution often driven by unspoken limiting assumptions. Start broad, explore the entire problem space, and see if there is something that you missed or can include in your consideration. Then, narrow your focus and go broad again with a lot of ideas within that newly narrowed field. This pattern of broad-to-narrow thinking is a key way that designers notice nonobvious options.

Embrace ambiguity

And finally, embrace situations that are ambiguous, messy, and difficult. Design Thinking demands nonlinear thinking to cut through situations that might seem chaotic. Try to learn as much as you can from different perspectives and propose patterns or frameworks that could make the mess make sense.

Taken together, these seven mindsets underlie all the processes and tools of Design Thinking. Let’s see how they come together with the process in a case study for Airbnb.

Case Study 1: Airbnb

Airbnb was failing as a startup and felt stumped on how to increase revenue. In an effort to figure out what wasn’t working, the team interviewed customers and took a closer look at their listings. Through that process, they realized that their listings all had a common problem: the photos were unappealing or nonexistent. The team hypothesized that better photos would be the key to increasing bookings, so they came up with an idea to run a quick experiment where they flew themselves to the homes of various Airbnb hosts to take more professional-looking, high-resolution photos free of charge. After posting the improved photos, the team saw that their weekly revenue immediately doubled. The success of this experiment was the first step to transforming the failing startup into a successful billion-dollar business. To this day, the Airbnb team positions Design Thinking values at the core of its company culture. For example, new employees are given $2,000 to take a vacation during their first weeks on the job so they can develop empathy with their customers.

Process and Tools

Now, let’s break down what happened in this Airbnb case study from a Design Thinking process perspective. There are many diagrams of the Design Thinking process, and our favorite is this cyclical version pioneered by designer Michael Barry. Let’s break down the steps beginning at the lower left of Figure 1-3.

Figure 1-3. Design Thinking process diagram

Observations

Observation is the core of Design Thinking—empathy through user research. Go out and understand what is happening by observing and interviewing users. Gather data by understanding the human stories. The design process is cyclical, and the first time you cycle through this quadrant, the type of user research you’re doing is called Needfinding because it’s about understanding a user’s needs. This first cycle is also the time to interview all the stakeholders who understand the business opportunity and technology options. As you subsequently cycle through this quadrant, you’ll do different kinds of user observation and inquiry such as rapid experimentation, usability testing, and cocreation sessions. In the AirBnb case, the first cycle included interviewing potential customers about how they used the site, which led directly to the insight about the photos. The second cycle involved running a rapid experiment on a prototype of their photography idea to validate if it would help.

Insights

After you’ve completed your observations, you will have a lot of information and data that you’ll need to synthesize into insights that are going to drive the rest of the process. In the first round, your insights will be focused on defining the problems that you will be solving. What stories did you hear in your research that really stick out? What needs did you uncover? What frame will you take on the problem space? In subsequent iterations, insights will be focused on learnings from user testing and rapid experimentation to evolve your designs.

An insight driven by Design Thinking is a new perspective about the problem that is not something you would have come up with sitting alone thinking about the problem really hard. An insight is something you can preface with, “I was surprised to discover that....” It can be small, but it can’t be obvious. In the Airbnb case, an initial insight might have been that people are comparing Airbnb listings to a hotel that is presented with professional photography. One typical output of the insight step of the process is to develop “How might we…” questions that would seed a brainstorm. For example, “How might we make Airbnb listings as visually appealing as a hotel advertisement?”

Two great tools for unpacking data to get to insights are journey mapping and affinity diagrams. Journey mapping is a visual timeline of the full story of an experience from one individual’s perspective. What is that one person doing, thinking, and feeling at each step in their experience? Figure 1-4 below shows an example of a journey map that illustrates a researcher’s experience with collaboration on a document.

Figure 1-4. An example of a comprehensive journey map, showing a researcher’s experience with digital collaboration

Affinity diagramming is grouping research findings together based on relationships and seeing what patterns emerge. The process requires grouping, discussing, seeing new patterns, and regrouping, which leads to new and deeper insights. Figure 1-5 shows a team of researchers clustering stickies and discussing the affinity diagram that results.

Figure 1-5. Clustering stickies into an affinity diagram

Concepts

Next in the process, the insights from the previous step are used to seed a brainstorm. In Design Thinking, brainstorming is taken to a new level through structured rules that encourage creativity and link to real user needs. Brainstorming is also one of the best places to incorporate radical collaboration by bringing in people from different backgrounds and perspectives.

Brainstorms typically begin by reviewing the brainstorming rules:

  • Defer judgment

  • Encourage wild ideas

  • Build on the ideas of others

  • Have one conversation at a time

  • Be visual, go for quantity

  • Stick with deadlines

Nominate one person as the facilitator. This person is tasked with keeping things moving, adding in fresh brainstorming prompts, and encouraging everyone to participate. Everyone should have their own sticky note pad and pen to write their ideas.

When a brainstorming session is over the group uses various voting techniques to down-select ideas and identify the ones they will move forward with. Discussion and sketching then leads to the selection of a few ideas that will proceed to the prototype phase.

Prototypes

After the concepts are chosen, the final step in the Design Thinking cycle is about thinking by doing by creating prototypes. This is when you actually make something that people can react to, whether it’s a model, an HTML wireframe, or a skit—it all depends on what questions you are answering. The purpose of your prototype might be to explore the idea space, to create something to test an aspect of the idea in the next observation cycle with users, or to convince others to fund the idea.

What is important in the prototype is to create and then quickly cycle back to the observations phase to test the prototype with experiments or user tests. Don’t get stuck in too many rounds of prototyping without testing as you may be going down the wrong path altogether. As you move through iterative cycles, the prototypes will become more and more refined, culminating in the final solution.

Now repeat…

When you reach the last step in the cycle, you start over again by getting feedback on your prototype from users in some way. This leads to more insights, which leads to new ideas, which leads to a prototype...well, you get the picture!

Let’s take a look at some additional case studies about how companies use Design Thinking.

Case Study 2: GE Adventure MRI

GE had MRI machines that made children cry. Pediatric patients were often so scared of an MRI machine that they had to be sedated. This was especially problematic for kids who were chronically ill and had to have frequent MRIs—this big machine became the monster of nightmares on a regular basis. Doug Dietz was an industrial designer working for GE Healthcare who had designed the classic MRI. In his Ted Talk, Dietz describes how he saw a terrified little girl forced into his machine, and thought there must be a better way.

Dietz began by observing children at a daycare center and talking to children’s medical-care specialists about what it meant to be a pediatric patient. He learned that many chronically ill children don’t get to do as many adventure-filled activities as their healthier friends and siblings. Many can’t go on fun trips or spend a week away at camp. This insight led to a “How might we…” question that invited a completely different approach to MRI design: “How might we bring a sense of adventure to the MRI?”

He began brainstorming, prototyping, and testing ideas with the help of a multidisciplinary team of volunteers from GE, experts from a children’s museum, doctors, and hospital staff. This led to the development of the Adventure MRI (Figure 1-6)—an MRI experience that might have a pirate theme that starts in the waiting room and continues into the machine. GE describes the machine as follows:

In the Pirate Adventure, a visual transformation of the equipment that was available before, patients are on a dock. There is a shipwreck and some sand castles in the corner. Children then walk on the plank to be scanned. The Coral City Adventure in the emergency room gives children an underwater experience. It has a disco ball that makes light like bubbles around the room; children get into a yellow submarine and listen to the sound of harps whilst the procedure takes place. The Cozy Camp gives children the chance to be scanned in a specialized sleeping bag, under a starry sky in an impressive camp setting.

By taking a Design Thinking approach, Dietz developed an MRI machine that revolutionized the way that children experience having a scan. Their anxiety was gone and many asked if they could come back to do it again the next day!

Figure 1-6. The GE Pirate Adventure MRI

Case Study 3: Redesigning the Customer Contact Center at Toyota

Toyota wanted to improve the long wait times and low customer satisfaction with its support center, so it turned Design Thinking to its own internal processes. To begin, a team of researchers intimately familiarized themselves with the customer representative experience by interviewing representatives and going through the actual training process themselves. The team soon discovered that a multitude of inefficiencies prevented service representatives from being able to quickly resolve issues for callers. For example, representatives had to look in multiple databases for answers, even looking in physical file cabinets. The team concluded a truly transformative solution needed to unify the disparate sources of information and get buy-in from all participants involved in the process. To ensure that everyone would support the changes, the team involved all stakeholders in the research to gain empathy for every stakeholder’s point of view. It communicated research findings to everyone using journey maps and encouraged feedback. To smooth implementation, the team prototyped having representatives act as ambassadors to communicate changes to their peers. It even made the training process feel fun by hosting ice-cream socials, contests, and a “sandbox” space where representatives could take classes and learn without any pressure.

As a result of this user-centered design process, the project was a wild success—employees felt highly invested in the new process and software tools and call times with representatives were reduced, leading to savings of millions of dollars.

Impact of Design Thinking

After people understand how Design Thinking works, the conversation often turns to the question of quantitatively measuring its impact. Does Design Thinking provide consistent measureable results?

One issue with quantitative measurement is what’s known as the Butterfly Effect—the idea that small local changes can have large effects elsewhere, like a butterfly flapping its wings in Brazil triggering a hurricane in Florida. Just as it would be extraordinarily difficult to trace the cause of the hurricane to the butterfly, it can be tricky to trace the full impact of Design Thinking practices in an organization. Understanding the complexity of modern systems, a McKinsey report on the power of Design Thinking writes:

We have a new generation of designers who were trained to understand how to blend technology and business, and they’re a lot more agile in moving from these different spheres. So, instead of having siloed conversations, now we can have an integrated conversation.

These integrated conversations have business impact greater than any one specific Design Thinking project, but it’s difficult to measure.

Traditionally, companies are great at measuring how well things are executed—on time, on budget, or the number of widgets completed. They are weaker at creating metrics for measuring creative behavior and the development of innovations. In fact, according to the paper “How Can Organizations Adopt and Measure Design Thinking Process?” by Katie Rapp and Caitlin Stroup, only 24 percent of Design Thinking users measure anything about the impact of their program. This could be because Design Thinking is relatively new as an increasingly common business practice, thus it is difficult to define what to measure, or because resources are not available.

However, studies looking across organizations have noticed that those that have embraced Design Thinking have enjoyed superior market success. The McKinsey report notes that design-oriented companies have outperformed others over the past ten years looking at both customer satisfaction measures like Net Promoter score and also overall revenue increases. A 2005–2015 study conducted by the Design Management Institute (DMI) has shown that design-driven organizations, identified based on six criteria, have outperformed their peers on the S&P by 211% (see Figure 1-7). The DMI Design Centric Index demonstrates that making design a priority results in a financial advantage. It’s not surprising that iteratively designing with a deep understanding of your customers creates competitive advantage.

Figure 1-7. DMI’s Design Value Index shows that companies that scored highly on a set of six criteria that reflects best practices in design management had a 211% return over the S&P 500

Internal Measurement

Some companies implementing Design Thinking are trying nonfinancial measures for benchmarking internal success. Some are measuring the frequency of Design Thinking activity such as how many teams are using the approach, how often the processes are being used, or how many projects have been launched and funded. Academic research has shown a correlation between the number of iterations on a concept and the success of the project. For example, a study by Dow et al. in 2010 suggests that developing prototypes in parallel results in stronger final solutions.

The emphasis on collaboration, risk-taking, and creativity also affects work culture positively. This has led companies to measure things like team engagement. As a case study, Intuit has been particularly successful at measuring the impact of Design Thinking programs and disseminating results internally. The company’s Central Innovation Team regularly publishes success stories of Design Thinking in books that it shares with all of its internal departments. The books combine specific product stories with financial measurements like revenue, cost, and profit so that they form a cohesive story of empathy and value.

How to Get Started on Your Own

Anyone can learn the Design Thinking process and use it to understand and solve problems. However, it will take practice to be able to do it well. We like to use a soccer analogy. Anyone can learn the rules and techniques of soccer and be a fantastic spectator. However, it’s only through a lot of practice that someone can become a great player or a soccer superstar like David Beckham. Just like anything else, the best way to improve in Design Thinking is through practice and coaching.

To begin, we recommend taking a class or a workshop (see the Rapid Prototping & Rapid Experimentation and Design Thinking for Non-Designers workshops from O’Reilly). You can also read a book to gain an introduction and understand the rules of the game, but many of the skills like how to interview people effectively or how to pull out the insights from your interviews can’t be learned without watching others model the right techniques and then trying it out. Join a group in which you can receive coaching from experts. If you have the resources, hire a Design Thinking coach or recruit a mentor—there are a lot of nuances and coaching is truly the best way to learn. If you hire an expert, make sure that person fully understands the need for you to be involved; otherwise, your coach will be breaking one of the rules of Design Thinking: collaboration.

Launching a Design Thinking Program Where You Work

As the hype around Design Thinking has increased, many have rushed to fashion themselves as expert design thinkers after taking a half-day workshop introducing them to the basic processes and tools. At worst, nondesigner trainers “help” companies implement Design Thinking as a basic step-by-step process. We’ve also noticed a trend by which companies treat Design Thinking as a one-off workshop you do at the beginning of a project to kick things off and then never return to again. The outcome is often a skit in which everyone laughs at the clever idea and then goes back to what they were doing before. This results in a situation in which Design Thinking becomes synonymous with the place ideas go to die. For example, a group might host a brainstorm but then have no real mechanism for moving radical ideas from the brainstorm to a real project. To be effective, Design Thinking must be followed in a cyclical, integrated manner, which does not fit well with the model of a faux expert or a pop-up workshop. These quick fix approaches will lead to society perceiving Design Thinking as another over-hyped failure without realizing its true potential.

In our work with companies and organizations, we have noticed several best practices that distinguish those that have been able to embrace Design Thinking effectively:

Offer coaching

We can’t emphasize enough the importance of offering ongoing coaching, not just training, if you really want to create a Design Thinking–driven organization. The process is deceptively simple but difficult to execute well. Small mistakes like identifying only banal insights from your observations or not digging deep enough to get to the true gems can derail the entire process from the start. Experts are good at what they do. Set up an advisory system that your employees and teams can readily access.

Focus on the mindset to start

Begin by emphasizing the mindset rather than the process. Especially if you don’t have a strong coaching program, encourage teams to think about how they will embrace empathy for users. It’s OK for them to find their own path. Ask teams to collaborate with others they haven’t worked with yet, and invite new people from other departments to meetings at which ideas are going to be discussed. Encourage a mindset of Yes and… where people build on ideas instead of harping on what is wrong with them. All of this will form a strong foundation for moving forward with the tools and methods of the process once you have the resources to embrace them more fully.

Start small

A first Design Thinking project should be bite-sized. Don’t begin by redesigning your entire HR experience for hiring or try to invent the next big thing. Instead, try it out on a small manageable problem for which you might interview a few people to get their viewpoint and see how things go from there. Encourage teams to try a low-stakes, time-boxed project—perhaps one week at most. This will result in a lot of learning and start to build confidence that people can do this on a larger scale, preferably with expert guidance.

Think about implementation

Many Design Thinking–focused projects fail because there is no well-defined path to implementation. Organizations usually have defined, or at least well-traveled, product or service development processes. To be truly successful, the Design Thinking process needs to be thoughtfully integrated with those processes so that ideas that emerge don’t become orphaned and die in a corner. Each company’s process for getting through implementation to launch will differ, so you’ll need to do some customization for your own needs.

In particular, we have noticed that Lean Startup dovetails particularly nicely with Design Thinking. Design Thinking has a lot to say about how to identify the problem you should be working on and then iterate and test solutions. Lean Startup also advocates that approach but doesn’t provide as many tools as Design Thinking. Instead, Lean Startup processes really shine when you begin thinking about continuing the iterative testing mindset into implementation where Design Thinking starts to trail off. Think about how both might complement each other at your organization to form a comprehensive plan for innovation from start to launch. Forge a thoughtful, unified path that works best for your organization.
Change the culture

A big part of Design Thinking is trying new things, learning from failure, and building on it. This means that to succeed, it must be safe for employees to fail. It must also be safe for employees to take the time to engage with users and iterate, even if that means shipping one week later. Yet, in performance reviews, employees are often assessed based on measures like on-time delivery, quantity of work, and number of successes. If you’re serious about creating a design-driven organization, think about how your culture supports the mindset that Design Thinking demands. Could performance reviews emphasize engagement with customers rather than just on-time delivery? Could failure early on be rewarded for saving the company money (instead of blindly pursuing bad ideas)? For example, Google X, an innovation group within Alphabet, rewards teams that successfully kill ideas by giving them bonuses and vacation time. Telling people to follow Design Thinking must be supported a culture that recognizes and rewards Design Thinking behaviors.

Don’t use Design Thinking for everything and everyone

Although you can use Design Thinking to address any problem, it’s overkill to use the entire process for everything. Many problems are already well understood and can be addressed with targeted solutions that don’t need to be innovative to be effective. Some things, like coming up with the right algorithm for sorting a database quickly, don’t benefit from user involvement. Forcing teams to use Design Thinking inappropriately or as a blanket philosophy undermines its efficacy.

Summary

We hope you now have a clear understanding of the mindsets, processes, and key tools of Design Thinking, a user-centered design approach for understanding and solving problems. Design Thinkers begin by embracing the following mindsets: empathy, radical collaboration, “yes and…,” thinking by doing, iteration, go broad to go narrow, and embracing ambiguity. Then, they use these mindsets as the foundation for the Design Thinking process that moves from observation, to developing insights, to ideating concepts, to creating prototypes that are then tested by cycling back to observation of how people engage with the prototypes. You can use Design Thinking in a variety of fields and in various stages of product development. The concepts are easy to understand, but it takes practice to utilize them effectively. We encourage you to learn more about Design Thinking, try it yourself, and get a coach to practice your skills. Check out the Reading List for a strong set of additional resources.

For Additional Reading

Power of Design Thinking

Design and the Creative Process

  • Kelley, David and Tom Kelley. Creative Confidence: Unleashing the Creative Potential Within Us All. New York: Crown Business, 2013.

  • Seelig, Tina. inGenius: A Crash Course on Creativity. New York: HarperCollins, 2012.

  • Moggridge, Bill. Designing Interactions. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2007.

Observation and Empathy Building

  • Goodman, Elizabeth, Mike Kuniavsky, and Andrea Moed. Observing the User Experience, Second Edition: A Practitioner’s Guide to User Research. Waltham, MA: Morgan Kaufman, 2012.

  • Weiss, Robert. Learning from Strangers: The Art and Method of Qualitative Interviewing Studies. New York: The Free Press, 1994.

Idea Generation

  • Ayan, Jordan. Aha! 10 Ways to Free Your Creative Spirit and Find Your Great Ideas. New York: Potter Style, 1997.

Prototyping, Testing, and Experimentation

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