Demystifying Design Thinking

(Posted 11/05/2015: https://americas.nttdata.com/blogs/digital-dialogue/2015/november)

For many people, the phrase design thinking (DT) conjures up images of art-school grads painting multi-colored canvases, or, in an IT context, designers deciding on color schemes for a new mobile app. However, for enterprises embarking on a digital journey, there is a renewed appreciation of DT, bringing it new prominence on the techno-buzzword list.

Coined possibly at MIT in the 1960s, DT described a contrarian method for designing (and building) things, with the user as the center of focus. Popularized by the D School at Stanford and IDEO, among others, DT has come to mean a design and build approach that favors early, deep user-behavior observation and interaction to understand a problem. It emphasizes ideation based on creating requirements from observing users, using rapid prototyping methods, and designing multiple iterations based on user feedback to arrive at highly usable solution. 

Software design and engineering teams tend to approach business problems by breaking the problem statement into smaller components, architecting a solution based on detailed functional requirements, and designing and building each component and the architecture in which the components will coexist. 

The user enters this traditional process only at the beginning (to provide functional input) or the end (during usability testing). Whether development follows a waterfall, plain iterative, or agile method, the user is still at the periphery rather than the central focus. 

These projects typically met functional completeness and/or financial targets, but they rarely met usability goals for user communities. Non-design-thinking-based IT projects suffer from a low return on engagement (ROE)—a measure of how a customer or internal employee will engage and transact with the product, service, or brand and for how long.

Today, enterprises desperately seek to establish long-term brand engagement while cutting costs and improving speed to market. Established enterprises hope to achieve these objectives by harnessing digital technologies: building mobile apps, developing dashboards for big data analytics, migrating to the cloud, or integrating social sentiment into enterprise decisionmaking. 

They face an uphill battle, in part because achieving such a goal is not possible without embracing DT. DT skills create tremendous user empathy, ensuring adoption from even the most finicky users. A DT approach can also dramatically speed up time to market for new products or services and help companies adapt to changing business cycles. Most importantly, DT can save an older enterprise from disruption by nimbler startups, for which DT is a core competency.