Design Thinking: Beyond the Bounds of Your Own Head

THOMAS WENDT UX Strategist

Surrounding Signifiers

[email protected] @thomas_wendt

WILL EVANS Managing Director

TLC Labs

[email protected] @semanticwill

WHO ARE WE?

#NYinnovates

LET’S START WITH AN EXERCISE

WHICH IS TIMEBOXED

CHARACTER SKETCH

What is Design Thinking?

“Everyone can – and does – design. We all design when we plan for something new to happen, whether that might be a new version of a recipe, a new arrangement of the living room furniture, or a new layout of a personal web page. The evidence from different cultures around the world, and from designs created by children as well as by adults, suggests that everyone is capable of designing. So design thinking is something inherent within human cognition; it is a key part of what makes us human.”

Nigel Cross

“Design is now too important to be left to designers.”

Tim Brown

ANOTHER DEFINITION

An approach to solving problems by understanding people’s needs and synthesizing

insights to solve those needs – in context.

DESIGN THINKING PREMISE

Only through contact, observation, and empathy with customers can you hope to design solutions

to fit their needs.

AS OPPOSED TO?

•  We have this problem, lets jump in and brainstorm a solution

•  We have a new technology, what can we possibly use it for?

•  Our competitors just launched X; how quickly can we also do X?

THREE OVERLAPPING CONSTRAINTS

WHERE IS DESIGN INNOVATION?

IDEO’S DESIGN PROCESS

*

Insight about customer behavior and work patterns were never discovered sitting at your desk.

*

Research, when done well, creates a deep sense of empathy for others.

*

Understanding context involves being-there.

*

You are not the user.

4 ELEMENTS OF DESIGN THINKING We have this problem, lets jump in and brainstorm a solution We have a new technology, what can we possibly use it for? Our competitors just launched X; how quickly can we also do X? •  Empathy through research •  Framing the problem •  Generative ideation •  Prototyping & validation

We have this problem, lets jump in and brainstorm a solution We have a new technology, what can we possibly use it for? Our competitors just launched X; how quickly can we also do X? •  Empathy through research •  Framing the problem •  Generative ideation •  Prototyping & validation

4 ELEMENTS OF DESIGN THINKING

BASICS OF CUSTOMER RESEARCH

THEORY AND PRACTICE

Theory Thought Disengaged Frivolous Virtual

Practice Action Invested Productive Real

THEORY AND PRACTICE

Praxis

Process by which theory, lesson, or skill is enacted, practiced, embodied, or realized.

THEORY AND PRACTICE

“Apart from inquiry, apart from the praxis, individuals cannot be truly human. Knowledge emerges only through

invention and re-invention, through the restless, impatient, continuing, hopeful inquiry human beings pursue in the

world, with the world, and with each other.”

Paulo Freire

SYMPATHY syn - together pathos - feeling 1. harmony of or agreement in feeling, as between persons or on the part of one person with respect to another. 2. the harmony of feeling naturally existing between persons of like tastes or opinion or of congenial dispositions. 3. the fact or power of sharing the feelings of another, especially in sorrow or trouble; fellow feeling, compassion, or commiseration.

EMPATHY

en - in pathos - feeling 1. the intellectual identification with or vicarious experiencing of the feelings, thoughts, or attitudes of another.

In the absence of direct experience, vicarious identification becomes our

substitute.

“Our real goal, then, is not so much fulfilling manifest needs by creating a speedier printer or a more ergonomic keyboard; that’s the job of designers. It is helping people to articulate the latent needs they may not even know they have, and this is the challenge of design thinkers.”

Tim Brown

“To understand a hammer, for example, does not mean to know that hammers have such and such properties and that they are used for certain purposes—or that in order to hammer one follows a certain procedure, i.e., understanding a hammer at its most primordial sense means knowing how to hammer.”

Hubert Dreyfus

Customer Research HOW MUCH RESEARCH?

Lots

People

Insights

12

Lots

People

Insights

A RESEARCH HEURISTIC

UX RESEARCH/EMOTION CURVE

Malkovich Bias

The tendency to believe

that everyone uses technology

the same way you do. - Andres Glusman

ETHNOGRAPHY

Literally “writing culture” Ethnography is: 1.  The process of “deep hanging out.” 2.  The richest research method we have. 3.  Something you should be doing all the time.

Ethnography Allows Us To

1. Discover the semantics of living

2. Decode signifiers of cultural practice

3. Understand the language people use.

CONTEXT

Keys To Good Ethnography

Delve deeply into the context, lives, cultures, and rituals of a few people rather than study a large number of people superficially.

This isn’t about booty calls, this is about relationships.

Holistically study people’s behaviors and experiences in daily life. You won’t find this in a lab, focus group, or 5 minute interview

on the street.

Learn to ask probing, open questions, gathering as much data as possible to inform your understanding.

Practice “active seeing,” and “active listening.” Record every minutiae of daily existence, and encode on post-its.

Use collaborative sense-making activities like cynefin and affinity diagramming to understand and formulate a narrative of

experience.

Map the stories and insights back to the original customer hypothesis and problem hypothesis.

Did it validate or invalidate your hypotheses?



FRAMING AND SENSEMAKING How do we make sense of the world so that we can act in it?

ON FRAMING

“A frame is, simplistically, a point of view; often, and particularly in technical situations, this point of view is deemed “irrelevant” or “biasing” because it implicitly references a non-objective way of considering a situation or idea. But a frame – while certainly subjective and often biasing – is of critical use to the designer, as it is something that is shaped over the long-term aggregation of thoughts and experiences.” Jon Kolko

FRAMING THROUGH VISUALIZATION

“By taking the data out of the cognitive realm (the head), removing it from the digital realm (the computer), and making it tangible in the physical realm in one cohesive visual structure (the wall), the designer is freed of the natural memory limitations of the brain and the artificial organizational limitations of technology.” Jon Kolko

SENSEMAKING The act of assigning meaning to experience. Extraction of meaning out of a situation. Sometimes purposeful, sometimes not. Micro and macro.

The place of your multiple affiliations or belongings.

CYNEFIN



GENERATIVE IDEATION

Abduction Induction Deduction

What could be.

What likely is.

What logically

is.

DESIGN EPISTEMOLOGY

DESIGN EPISTEMOLOGY

Abduction Induction Deduction

Design Science Absolute Truth

DESIGN EPISTEMOLOGY

Ideation Process

KNOWLEDGE FUNNEL

CREATE PITCH

CRITIQUE

Generate lots of design concepts (options*) Present concept as stories

Check stories for coherence Integrate (steal) & Iterate

Critique using Ritual Dissent Converge around testable solution hypotheses

DESIGN STUDIO

*See Chris Matts Real Options Theory



PROTOTYPES AND VALIDATION

WHY PROTOTYPE?

•  Explore • Quickly create testable solution options • Identifies problems before they’re coded • Reflection-in-action*

•  Experiment • Early frequent feedback from customers • Low opportunity cost

•  Evolve understanding of customer behaviors

* “Theory in Practice,” Chris Argyris & Donald Schön

GET OUT OF YOUR

HEAD

WHAT FIDELITY? •  Low fidelity

• Paper •  Medium fidelity

• Axure • Omnigraffle • Indigo Studio • Clickable Wireframes

•  High Fidelity • Twitter Bootstrap • jQueryUI • Zurb Foundation

Beware of “endowment effect,” also called the divestiture aversion. Once people invest time/effort “sketching with code,” its very difficult to throw the concept away and explore new options.” Identify what you want to learn, pick the least effort to go through Build > Measure > Learn

From insights, you can create multiple problem & solution hypotheses sets.

It's not about designing the one right solution and refining.

It's about testing many solutions to multiple problem hypotheses.

It's about many small bets.

MAXIMIZE OPTIONALITY

Conclusions

We have this problem, lets jump in and brainstorm a solution We have a new technology, what can we possibly use it for? Our competitors just launched X; how quickly can we also do X? •  Empathy through research •  Framing the problem •  Generative Ideation •  Prototyping & validation








DESIGNER’S MANTRA

We cannot think about solutions until we understand the problem.

DESIGNER’S PARADOX

We cannot think about solutions until we understand the problem. AND We cannot understand a problem until we think about solutions.

Thanks!

THOMAS WENDT @thomas_wendt [email protected]

WILL EVANS @semanticwill [email protected]

Design Thinking: Beyond the Bounds of Your Own Head

Design

thomas wendt

design thinking

tim brown

lets jump

research framing

validation

design

framing