Design Thinking

The human mind is a marvellous biological machinery. It is capable of logical reasoning and wonderful creativity. The outcome of this great endowment, in this generation, is the ability to create an innovative idea that can sell. But many designers make the mistake of designing with the outcome as their thought process i.e. “creation of an innovation that can sell”. This puts the product development process at an inherent risk. When the focus is not the process but the outcome this leads to chaos. To reduce this chaos and return to a process and human centric product development, a new methodology has emerged that integrates the human, business and technological factors in design, called as design thinking.

Design Thinking is a human-centric problem-solving method to understand and design a solution for actual users of the product. The solutions in the form of products, services, processes, teams, etc. can be adopted quickly because they are created from an end-user’s perspective.

The outcome driven design jumps randomly between each design step to produce the output, whereas the process centric design iterates a definite set of steps to produce the output, this is depicted in Figure 1.

Rules in Design Thinking

1. The Human Rule

All design activities must be performed with a human centric point of view. This means all problem solving must take place to satisfy the human needs and to acknowledge the human element in the design team members.

2. Ambiguity rule

Designers must preserve ambiguity; this means open to experimentation at the limits of the designers knowledge. The team leaders must create an atmosphere to allow freedom to think differently.

3. Re-Design Rule

All design is a re-design problem. The products that we make to satisfy the human needs are subjected to evolution, as the social circumstances change constantly. It is imperative to analyse and understand how the problems were addressed in the past and build over it.

4. Tangibility Rule

Making the ideas tangible always facilitates its communication. Prototyping has now become a media of communication, as it communicates to the consumers or the investors that the idea that has been conceived is tangible and can be manufactured into a product that can be sold to generate substantial revenue.

Key Mindsets

• Foresight: Foresight predicts the future needs. Try to explore all the ways it can be handled, used, misused, mishandled so that there is no unintended use. Use creativity to innovate as many solutions as possible.
• Get Inspired: Idea generation is mainly due to inspirations from the surroundings. So, use the surroundings to get inspirations and motivations. Observe the surrounding to see how people use different products or services and see if it can be implemented or improved for other products.
• Feedback driven: The only way to exactly know the need of the user is to ask directly. Feedback is very crucial for design thinking. To ensure that the things are going as per user’s expectations, try to get feedback at every stage or after any modification.
• Learn by doing: Acting on the concept is the only way to verify it. So, if you have a concept in mind, rather than assuming that it will work, verify it by testing. It will give you a chance to explore the concept and learn something.
• Visualization: Creating visualizations to communicate the ideas will make it clearer. By using visualization, the others don’t have to imagine or assume anything. It will eliminate the possibilities of miscommunication. It can be done by sketching, drawings, models, examples, etc. While using it, ensure that the interpretation also is clear.
• A negative result is a result: Since design thinking is an iterative approach, there are chances that some concepts may not work or implemented. The focus should be on to learn from it and avoid it to create a successful product.
• Collaboration: Most of the problem cannot be solved by a single person. Inputs from other peoples are key to the design thinking. It can bring all the experiences, success, and failures on the table to find the solution.

Key Methodology

Implementing design thinking into Product design & development can be broken down into 5 steps:

1. Empathize

As design thinking is based on the user experience, the first step is to know the users. User research provides insights on important and useful answers for product requirements. It's good to have answers to questions such as what is the necessity of the user, how important it is to complete it, How the product will fulfil those needs, are there any other alternate solutions besides the product that can fulfil their requirements, how likely it is for users to use the product instead of other alternatives? This allows the designer to set customer centric design goals.

2. Define

Once the designer has all the data, it can be segregated and analysed. This step can be divided into two halves which is user requirements & design goals.

At start, all the requirements of users should be listed down and sorted according to their priorities to see which are more crucial to users. The goal is to make a problem statement so that design goals can be set. Identifying the key problems can simplify the scope of the project.

Once a clear problem statement or definition is made, designers can discuss and set the target. It is important to know that in this step, the focus is on what problem should be solved, rather than how to solve the problem.

3. Ideate

In this stage, the designer uses brainstorming to find all the conceivable solutions, individually or as part of a team. The brainstorming session should be conducted as an open discussion rather than a review. Criticisms and discarding of ideas should be avoided. Every idea that is generated should be noted down.

Once the ideas are generated, a review session to select the best solution can be done. The agreed solution should be communicated with all the team members and users if possible. It can be done with the help of sketches, examples, simplified CAD models, etc.

4. Prototype

A prototype is an early replica of a product that is used for validating the concept or design. The prototype is also helpful for getting feedback on the product. Below is a list of types of prototype and their applications.

• Proof of Principle Prototype: It is used for testing a concept of design to see that the approach of design is right.

• Working Prototype: This prototype has all the functionality and used for sharing with investors or stakeholders.

• Visual Prototype: It represents the actual look of the product without any functionality.

• User Experience Prototype: This is used to get feedback from the actual users. It consists of functionalities and appearance on which the feedback is required.

• Functional Prototype: It is the combination of working and visual prototypes and can be considered as the first version of the product.

5. Test

Testing of the prototype or product is done to validate the design. The tests depend on what results are required. One of the main advantages of using multiple types of prototypes for testing is to get segregated results for each test. The results can be analysed further to improve the design and create more improved prototypes until it converges to a final product.

Advantages

• Design Thinking creates a vibrant interactive atmosphere that promotes learning through the rapid conceptual prototyping [1].
• The Design Thinking process teaches people how to innovate and problem-solve.
• The Design Thinking process fosters teamwork and collaboration.
• The Design Thinking process offers a proven competitive advantage.
• It allows you to analyse the problem to determine its root cause.
• It ensures that your final product meets objectives and client requirements.
• It makes you continually expand your knowledge.
• An iterative process, constant improvement, and learning.

Limitations

• Design Thinking projects usually have a medium-long duration. Having a fixed deadline for launch can limit the full potential of the methodology.
• Design Thinking requires the direct involvement of users who must be put in a position to make their contribution (availability of time and resources).
• Using the design thinking methodology may create clashes with the policies of an organization or enterprise.

Improvians Take

Design thinking helps in product design by interacting with actual users that will use the product or service. It requires constant creativity and adaptability to a continuous basis. For that design thinkers observe and interview with the end-users. It tries to covers all types of users to get comprehensive knowledge of user’s expectations. It also tries to create all the potential solutions to eliminate the risk including impossible or not feasible solutions. Prototype development is given more priority to get early feedback on the product. Once the initial prototype is done, design thinking tests and improves the design again and again until it becomes something that will satisfy end-users. Design thinking focuses on finding the root cause of the problem and removing it so that the problem gets fully eliminated.