Design Thinking (5 day idea development flow with templates)

Creating is not easy, mind has many mechanisms which often take us down a very narrow roads which at the end make us create something that is not really useful - in business environment we don't want many of these occasions if any.

Taking writing as a creative process, no matter if we are starting a short story, a novel or a business email, we usually start with some basic idea in our mind.

From there comes the first draft, something interesting happens at this stage as we go from the ideation to implementation. We slowly start taking this draft as the only possible solution for the case we had in mind.

All of a sudden, it starts being hard to get back to the ideation stage for this particular situation, we slowly but surely fall into the tunnel vision mode.

Given we are all pretty much familiar with the mentioned situation, imagine how many better ideas we miss when trying to develop a product, project, choose the right tool for the job which in many cases later on comes as something we need to spend a lot of time fixing.

When creating we always try to make value, companies are no different and strategies they take trying to make this happen fall under two major groups:

• Effectiveness - Company is trying to be innovative and cares mostly about the impact, having costs at the second priority place
• Efficiency - Company is trying to get the most out of the business model, optimizing costs and being creative in extracting value

Ideally, we would like to be able to combine these two with anything we work with and have a cohesive system which is:

• Adjustable to project / product size
• Allowing creativity and efficiency
• Well documented and able to evolve as variables change and evolve

Design Thinking

Design Thinking system has been around for a long time, evolving from the purely design related process to the more all around and omni-applicable approach.

There are many resources and tutorials online which provide extensive training, therefore in this occasion I will focus on the hands on material for a five day adjusted design thinking idea development flow.

Design Thinking consists of six main stages, although the names and number of steps can be customised. Here are the ones I will focus on:

1. Understand
2. Observe
3. Define Point of View
4. Ideate
5. Prototype
6. Test

Understand

It’s an early stage of the idea development, team gathered to start understanding what needs to be solved. At this step we want to keep things open minded, desire is to gather as many relevant and detailed data points to help us shape the idea later in more hands on stages.

Having in mind that article has a scope of up to 5 days to finalise the design thinking work, my proposal for the “Understanding” stage is the “Interview for Empathy”.

Observe

Team went through the understanding stage, glimpses of the problem definition are taking shape, it is time to start understanding how is customer or user of your current or potential product / service behaving today in the context where they encounter the problem that you are trying to solve.

For this step, if you are trying to get a quick definition of the context, my proposal is the template for Customer Journey mapping. It will provide you with 360 degree overview of all variables that matter which is going to become a strong base for the latter stages of the process.

Define Point of view

Problem can be accessed in so many ways, therefore it is very important to get the team on the same page regarding the approach you will take to resolve problem you are dealing with.

In the case of Design Thinking creative process, you are always trying to deeply understand the user, therefore at this point you are continuing on top of the Customer Journey mapping experience.

For the POV definition stage in a short creative process, I suggest the use of the “How might we questions” template which is going to provide streamlined problem statements as well as their prioritisation based on previously obtained and structured information.

Ideate

At this point your understanding of the problem went from wide to a very structured and defined. You now understand your user and the context very well, therefore it is time to finally get creative.

At this stage you want to use information previously obtained to define the scope of the creative space at one side but also leave freedom of creativity in order to not miss on any great idea.

For that purpose I suggest the “Dot voting” template, defining design principles will put everyone on the same page and will put obtained information to the best use. Voting and clustering will provide a great editing of the ideas, judging them against the information we have. Last step will define the following actions and who has ownership over them.

Prototype

Although the Design thinking process can feel a bit daunting in terms of thinking, defining, understanding it is all done with a purpose. Main idea is to do the groundwork so well that it allows you with a plethora of problems which if solved you know the users will be happy about using the product / service you created.

And not just that, all the work you do before prototyping will also allow you to come back to any previous step based on the new information you obtained in order to test new hypothesis. Intention is that once the ground work is done, later on you use it to judge new ideas against and as a well of information which can at any time be expanded.

You did a great work so far and now it’s time to create something that can actually be used and tested. Prototypes vary in fidelity and the base recommendation is to make a prototype which is testable and not spend ages before testing it and getting feedback.

For the short time I chose to have as a scope, my proposal would be “Prototype to test” template, remember to always use the previous archetypes to judge your solutions against.

Test

Prototype stage has been a whirlwind of attempts to find the middle ground of what needs to be build and how to make the testable prototype out of the pure ideas.

Prototypes are now available and it is time to get the real feedback from users. In order to do this, you can use the “Testings sheet” template. Make sure to plan each prototype testing since missed details can have long reaching consequences and can make a difference in choosing what will actually be chosen as the final idea to make into a final product / service / project.

Conclusion

That is it for the article which tried to be exhaustive and present how to structure a short creative process using Design Thinking approach. Worth remembering is that you can and should come back from any step to the previous one when you realise that there is information missing or that hypothesis needs more exploration.

Design Thinking is an extensive framework and if taken as a way of thinking about development it can solve most of the roadblocks that are encountered in traditional workflows, further more it can uncover solutions which would otherwise never come to mind as a possibility.

I highly recommend Design Thinking Toolbox website for more tools, as well as the the Design Thinking Toolbox book.

Note: I will be refining this article in the future, in a pure design thinking fashion this version is an MVP. Of course feel free to reach out with your thoughts and experiences, I would love to hear them.