Detailing Design Thinking

The key aspect of design thinking, to Tom Kelly, creator of IDEO, is a relentless focus on user behaviour. Whatever be the business, observing how users behave can make tremendous difference to outcomes. IDEO brought this perspective to everything they designed – a product, a hospital, a restaurant. It is not just understanding user needs but user behaviour that is core to design thinking. However simple this sounds, companies have strayed away from this because they get caught in an inward-looking approach. For instance, the idea of participatory design is popular with companies but often tends to forget, in promoting a democratic approach to innovation, user needs and behaviour.

Manufacturing, where engineering plays a pivotal role, developed and has practiced the concept of concurrent engineering, where design and engineering work together, to keep feasibility always in sight. In a sense adding to Tom Kelly’s vision, Professor Roger Martin has drawn our attention to the process in design thinking. Taken together, Kelly and Martin probably exhaust design thinking. Some like Mike Payne have argued about what is wrong with design thinking, what it ignores.

Users, users, users; observe, observe, observe

In a design thinking pattern, one starts with a group of users, their interactions with designed artifacts and the meaning that these interactions have in specific environments, the opposite of a data-driven way of finding solutions, where one reaches conclusion when everything is prepared for the moment that re-involves the end user with training and other instruction for how to use the solution you’ve created. Intriguingly, this does pose a question mark over the current fascination with ‘analytics’.

A data-driven approach too can fall a prey to an inward-looking approach, although there can be the strong illusion of being founded on reason. Data analysis, however important, cannot supplant observation of user behaviour, especially in businesses where it is everything.   No wonder that there are complaints later that end users just don’t have the capacity to grasp the fantastic things that have been created for them. Let us say this again: it is very difficult to free people from a product-centric approach. Examples of doing things incorrectly can be found in most software or in early mobile phones, where it was obvious that the end user was never the starting point.  The popularity of the iPhone and other Apple products arise from the obvious end user focus that was applied from the very beginning of design.

Describing the world we live in as a reliability-oriented world, where we want predictable outcomes, Michael McKinney says that the mantra is reduced to this: Success. Repeat. Success. Repeat. Many companies don’t realize the serious limitations of this fixation as it ultimately limits growth and harbors the seeds of our own destruction, because, while reliable outcomes “reduce the risk of small variations in your business, they increase the risk of cataclysmic events that occur when the future no longer resembles the past”. Companies need to incorporate into thinking outcomes that are valid. That is, outcomes that produce a desired result even if the solution employed can’t produce a consistent, predictable outcome. A perfectly valid solution is one that produces a result that is shown, through the passage of time, to have been correct. It is best to have a system that incorporates both—validity and reliability—into their approach. Balancing and managing the two approaches—analytical and intuitive—is what design thinking is all about.

The knowledge funnel

In The Design of Business, Roger Martin presents the knowledge funnel to show how knowledge moves. Each stage represents a simplification and ordering of knowledge. At the beginning is a mystery; a question, the observation of phenomena. Things we see but don’t yet understand. The next stage is a heuristic, “a rule of thumb that helps to narrow the field of inquiry and work the mystery down to a manageable size.” Heuristics don’t guarantee success but do increase the probability of success. The last stage is the development of an algorithm. “An algorithm is an explicit, step-by-step procedure for solving a problem.

Algorithms take the loose, unregimented heuristics—which take considerable thought and nuance to employ—and simplify, structuralize, and codify them to the degree that anyone with access to the algorithm can deploy it with more or less equal efficiency.” He uses the example of the development of McDonalds to illustrate how they proceeded down the knowledge funnel. In 1940 the McDonald brothers opened their first drive-in restaurant in San Bernardino, California. It did well, but by 1950 they began to lose business. Food was getting cold before it was delivered and families were put off by the hoards of teenagers they attracted. They had to develop a winning heuristic. They reduced and standardized the menu, and implemented their Speedee Service System. While the Speedee Service System was good, Ray Kroc thought it left too much to chance. So he refined it and simplified it down to an exact science.

“Kroc relentlessly stripped away uncertainty, ambiguity, and judgment from the processes that emerged from the McDonald brothers’ original insight. And by fine-tuning the formula, he powered McDonald’s from a modestly prosperous chain of burger restaurants to a scale previously undreamed-of”.  The problem is getting stuck in any one stage. McDonalds did well for decades, but eventually the heuristic (Americans want a quick, convenient, tasty meal) changed (Americans want a healthier menu).

Avoiding this cycle is the job of the leader—a leader at any level. As Martin says, “CEOs must learn to think of themselves as the organization’s balancing force—the promoter of both exploitation and exploration; of both administration and invention.” He describes a design thinker as ‘a first-class noticer’.

The trouble with design thinking

In a new book, Fahrenheit 212 co-founder Mark Payne exposes the perils of design thinking. This user-centered approach to solving problems has been employed by companies all over the world. But in How to Kill a Unicorn, Payne argues that the way many companies execute design thinking today falls short. “Design thinking is awesome, but it’s not enough. It’s 100% effective at 50% of what is needed to actually get an innovation to market.”

The myth of design-based problem solving

In the early days of Fahrenheit 212—which now designs ideas for everything from Middle Eastern banks to personal lubricants—strategy teams were spinning grand visions that weren’t going anywhere. His team members immersed themselves in the needs of users, employed traditional design problem-solving, and found that their great ideas were still dying in the client pipeline as they made their way up the rungs of approval. For one early client, the Fahrenheit team devised a grooming product for men: a shaving cream that slowed the regrowth of beards, allowing a shave to last longer. It was perfect for guys who hate shaving. But on the business side, it was a disaster. The company in question didn’t have the technology to make the idea a reality, which would’ve required millions of dollars in R&D. Plus, a shaving product that reduces the demand for shaving products didn’t fly with the client.

Payne realized ideas that design solutions for the user are still as unlikely to reach market as those created through any other method. “Design thinking in the hands of brilliant designers does really good things. When it is air lifted into other contexts, it produces a lot of heartache.” In other words, placing too much emphasis on one side of the design equation had invited its own struggles—the most glaring being that without a viable business strategy built right into an idea at the outset, great ideas that benefit consumers would never reach those consumers.

Post-design innovation

Payne and his team say the next chapter of design-based innovation must be “two-sided”, which must permeate everything from internal hiring to how you set up your offices to how you approach big meaty business problems. The business side isn’t just brought in to approve what creatives are planning, it’s part of the R&D that leads to a mutually sanctioned idea. (This is nothing but the concept of concurrent engineering which has been used by traditional manufacturing especially automobiles, where design and engineering work together so that the feasibility of the idea is never lost sight of and no time is wasted. Concurrent engineering is still in use.)

A perfect example is Progressive Insurance. Where competitor Geico is the minimalist, operating with little frills and overhead and advertising heavily slashed rates, Allstate and State Farm are at the other end of the spectrum. They tout concierge-like service and more inclusive plans. But before an important innovation from Progressive, none of the largest auto insurance companies had identified a way to bar high-risk customers from purchasing their products. Cue the online rate comparison tool from Progressive. It allowed auto insurance shoppers to quickly calculate a quote, allowing low-risk drivers who were receiving attractive rates to quickly purchase insurance online. But most importantly, the technology ensured that high-risk drivers were fed high rates that sent them running from Progressive to their competitors. Thus, a solution that was attractive to (most) users and the business.

Payne also cites an example from Fahrenheit 212’s own work—the first time Samsung presented his team with translucent LCD technology. Business and creative simultaneously got to work, researching markets hungry for innovation alongside idealistic applications for see-through LCD screens. Then, they mapped impact and feasibility on an XY axis, weeding out ideas that weren’t transformative enough or doable in the near future. What they landed on—translucent LCD panels on grocery store freezer doors that tell users what’s inside before they open the door—wasn’t the most exciting idea they had, but it shot straight to market because of its potential to save energy and provide a new platform for advertising and digital coupons. “We’re designing the consumer proposition and business proposition in real time. This is what’s next after design thinking”.

Service design

An addition was made to participatory design and user-centered design with the idea of service design. This began when almost every business was beginning to be seen as a service. Intuitively, this was imbued with a craftsmen-orientation as it called for attention to what do users do with the product. It built on user-orientation.   Lucy Kimbell best sums up the development of service design as: ‘[it] Draws on several traditions including product, environment, experience and interaction design”. Kimbell and a few other scholars discuss a new perspective rising in business; from a closed value chain to understanding how and what the user does with a product (or service); including their journey and experience. In the software industry, many have suggested this approach to get application developers to always think of an application as something that users use, to go beyond an engineering fixation. This perspective is another  step forward in the evolution of design methodology, for rather than thinking about end user experience of a product or service (user-centered design) attention has shifted to understanding the use, interaction and journey of that product/service after it has left the hands of the provider.

Takeaways

User behavior is the key but is not easy to understand and articulate

Companies tend to get caught in an inward-looking approach, sometimes even with data-driven approaches

We live in as a reliability-oriented world, where we want predictable outcomes

Without a viable business strategy built right into an idea at the outset, great ideas that benefit consumers would never reach those consumers

Two-sided innovation is the way out

There is an urgent need to go beyond an engineering fixation