Design Thinking 101

I have good news if you’re curious about Design Thinking: You’re probably already practicing some of its principles without realizing it.

That’s because Design Thinking is not some trendy new trick to unlock innovation. It’s an extremely practical, common-sense approach that puts labels and discrete steps around innovation to systematically de-risk whatever you’re trying to do.

It’s been proven to work across loads of studies looking at different metrics. Design Thinking, and more broadly human-centered product design practices have a big impact when they’re adopted by an organization:

• 32% higher revenue (Source: The Total Economic Impact of IBM's Design Thinking Practice)

• 2x faster delivery of outcomes to market (Source: The Value of Design)

• 211% performance compared to S&P 500 (Source: McKinsey's The Business Value of Design)

So what does Design Thinking entail, exactly? It’s not donning a black turtleneck and declaring yourself an artist or a visionary. In fact, it’s the complete opposite.

It’s about adopting a Beginner’s Mindset. No special outfit required.

If you’ve attended a school or read a parenting book in the last 20 years, you’ll probably recognize some overlap with the Growth vs Fixed mentality that’s become standard in how we talk to and teach kids.

In Design Thinking, the first thing you must do is acknowledge that the user’s needs and perspectives come first, and then further acknowledge that you might not know what those needs and perspectives are yet. Like the Growth mentality that's now pervasive, it's about acknowledging the gaps in your own expertise as the first step to filling them. Once your team is ready to learn about your users' first-hand experiences, you’re ready to undertake a sprint to work through the five phases of Design Thinking.

Empathy – first-hand, qualitative research is the best place to start as you build empathy for users. Would-be innovators often get laser focused on their end users’ surface needs or buying levers. I like to challenge clients to not just think about their buyer or user, but who is involved along the way? For each group, do we understand how they impact the eventual success of the thing we’re trying to make?

Define – once you’ve completed firsthand interviews, it’s time to focus in on the most meaningful insights you want to pursue. What problem are we trying to solve for our users? Do we understand the impact it current has on their life, or what pain it’s causing them today? What limits or parameters do we need to draw before we start to brainstorm solutions? What’s the upside of a potential solution?

Ideate – this is where people are used to starting their innovation process, in a big fun brainstorming session. If done correctly, there WILL be bad ideas in brainstorming, because that means people are willing to take big swings and trust their colleagues not to judge them for it. This is a great opportunity to bring in cross-functional perspectives and share inter-team insights.

Prototype – there are so many ways to create a prototype for your idea. When I was preparing my Human-Centered Product Design course for York University’s Schulich School of Continuing Studies, I prototyped my curriculum by advertising open enrolment workshops on Eventbrite based on different lesson plans I was thinking about. Though the audience wasn’t a 1:1 match for my future Schulich students, it helped me gauge demand for certain topics and better understand the flow of the material.

If you have a digital product, you might create a clickable prototype or walkthrough of the experience to validate with users. It’s all about creating a real demonstration for the key features and experiences that will make or break your MVP.

Test – One of the biggest challenges in testing is to be truly open to user feedback. If there’s no risk of failure, it’s not a real test. If you’ve designed your test properly, the outcomes will serve to measure how well your innovation aligns with the customer need you’re trying to solve for, move you closer to understanding your business’ ability to deliver the solution, and add realistic data to inform financial models.

And once you're done, you go back to the beginning and start again, because in real life, user needs change over time. Your innovation might have been a slam dunk, but that doesn't mean that the context in which your users are employing them has stood still.