Design Thinking Applied

Digital innovation, if it is to deliver a measurable competitive advantage for any organisation, must go faster than traditional IT development cycles allow. Ideas generated in online or face-to-face workshops should be translated into prototype apps and iterated in the same meeting. This means taking advantage of technologies that collapse the distance and time between ideation and delivery of next generation enterprise IT. This also means applying the right thinking to how innovation gets done with next generation digital platforms: Design Thinking. 

So, what is Design Thinking? It is, in essence, a human-centered approach to solving problems.

Design Thinking: The Tools

Before discussing Design Thinking as a method for digital innovation, it is important to consider the tools needed to make the process go faster. This means adopting technologies that enable next generation IT solutions to be created in minutes and hours, not days and weeks - at least to create and validate prototypes that work with real world desktop, tablet and smartphone user devices.

These technologies are grouped under a new category: 'application Platform-as-a-Service (aPaaS)'.

The use of aPaaS technologies is described in another blog post: More Clicks, Less Code. The single biggest advantage to introducing aPaaS tools into digital innovation is the inherent ability to collapse time in the process, and provide participants with a stronger sense of achievement and validation, through a near real-time realisation of ideas into prototypes and beyond.

Design Thinking: The Method

The Hasso Plattner Institute of Design at Stanford University (d.school) is home to great Design Thinkers. At the d.school, Design Thinking is expressed as five steps in the innovation process: Empathize; Define; Ideate; Prototype; and, Test. For digital innovation in the cloud, and armed with aPaaS tools, this means that all five steps could be engaged in a single meeting or rapidly-phased meetings, delivering a strong sense of progress from initial ideas to prototypes and beyond. This is digital innovation applied in minutes and hours, not days and weeks.

In any Design Thinking engagement focused on digital innovation, the participants may be a combination of business and/or consumer users, internal IT specialists and an external digital agency or similar expert IT solutions provider. In my own work with Being Guided, I find that the most important thing about the five steps defined by the d.school is Empathize: ensuring that the right tone is set for all subsequent four phases of work - and beyond. 

An aPaaS technology enables Design Thinking?—?not abstract software engineering?—?to drive real world Service Designs, following the five steps set-out above. For digital innovation with next generation IT, this translates into apps and workflows that should conform to three simple Design Principles: (1.) Meaningful Journey; (2.) Fierce Reduction; and, (3.) Progressive Disclosure.

Meaningful Journey means apps used on desktop, tablet and smartphone devices that work the way users intuitively think and work.

Fierce Reduction means eliminating everything you can from a process, task or set of tasks: applying lean thinking to Service Design.

Progressive Disclosure means limiting what users sees on a device screen only what they need to see and act upon: avoid cognitive overload.

In developing empathy, it is important to discover hidden needs alongside those problems more clearly expressed by stakeholders. In many ways, this goes against being purely 'data-driven': you need to look at the people, not just the data. It is wrong to try to create an artificial layer between business and personal: all business is personal - and vice versa.

If digital innovation is to improve business processes, then firstly, there must be empathy with its users. This means paying great attention to creating a Meaningful Journey, eliminating waste and complexity of processes and tasks with Fierce Reduction - and finally, from prototyping and beyond - enabling Progressive Disclosure to reduce stress and maximise ease of use of a new cloud app.

Improving business processes with Fierce Reduction is all about introducing Lean principles into a quest for simplification, and/or increase in user experience, and/or increase in effectiveness of task execution. This is sometimes referred to as a five-step process:

1. Specify value gained by the user.

2. Identify all steps in the 'value stream' and eliminate non-value-adding steps (Fierce Reduction).

3. Make the value-creating steps occur in a smooth and intuitive manner (Meaningful Journey).

4. As flow is introduced, let user pull value from the next upstream activity or task.

5. Iterate the process until maximum value is created with least waste.

Design Thinking: The People

Design Thinkers are both designers and non-designers: but what they all have in common is being inherently curious, empathetic, challenging, non-judgmental and open-minded. With digital innovation, a lack of clarity about technology choices can lead to ineffective translation of ideas to timely prototyping and testing phases. Equally, tech expertise can create closed-mindedness, and an inhibitor to curiosity and exploration. To adopt a 'beginner's mind' is actually helpful to solving problems with digital innovation: to look at business challenges in new ways.

As Design Thinking becomes increasingly embedded in business school education, following the example set by Stanford University and the d.school, management will increasingly recognise that data-driven decision-making alone is wrong: you need to look at the people too. When following the five steps of the d.school approach, digital innovation requires Design Thinkers to facilitate open communications among all key stakeholders and would-be users of a next generation cloud app.

Design Thinkers recognise that concepts of being right-brain creative or left-brain logical are better explained by the notion of creative and logical thinking taking place together. In some ways, a cold corporate culture may have a lack of a collective 'Limbic System' (low emotions) whereas Design Thinkers tend to exhibit strengths in this area: high-levels of curiosity and ability to communicate and ask the right questions. 

To empathize, Design Thinkers need to embrace three key attributes: Immerse; Observe; and, Engage. The rewards from this done right is the discovery of both explicit and implicit needs: resulting in unexpected solutions and outcomes for digital innovation.

Immerse means experiencing what the user experiences.

Observe means observing user behaviours in the context of their lives.

Engage means interact, interview - all in short intercept encounters.

Design Thinkers embrace the three basic questions: What?; How?; and, Why? The 'What?' becomes observable facts; the 'How?' is all about emotional responses; and, the 'Why?' becomes the inferences drawn. All of this builds a picture, as the process moves through the five steps of Empathize, Define, Ideate, Prototype and Test. 

Design Thinking: The Network

At Being Guided we are Design Thinkers, focused on bringing new digital innovations to market and constantly seeking new ways to achieve more for less from IT spends. We are not a hierarchy, but a network: bringing together a diverse group of people who are designers, and non-designers, but who are all, at heart, Design Thinkers: curious, challenging inquisitive, empathetic. Our teams are virtual teams - bringing together business and public sector organisations, digital agencies, IT solutions providers and independent subject matter experts - all focused on measurable value creation from digital innovation, in the cloud.

Wherever possible, we build engagements around a Deliverables, Not Hours business model: which means that end-clients only pay for value created, not time consumed per se. It also means we are motivated, as true Design Thinkers, to constantly challenge business-as-usual in IT - and this is where our adoption of visual development with no-code technology and aPaaS innovations has been applied. Learn More