What is Design Thinking?”

Design Thinking is a process for creative problem solving that is human centered, collaborative and  prototype driven.

The Design Thinking Process

There are two essential success factors of the Design Thinking process:

• Separation of problem understanding and solution creation (explore module and create module)
• First create options then make choices (= Design Thinking diamond)

Empathy phase in Design Thinking – understanding the target group and the current experience

Techniques and guidelines

• CONSUMER JOURNEY: Keeping track of all the interactions a consumer has with a product, service, or space and identify all steps where a consumer doesn’t feel well with the experience.
• EMPATHIC INTERVIEWS: Prompting people to tell personal stories about their experiences.
• EXTREME USER INTERVIEWS: Talking to people, who really know – or know nothing – about a product or a service and evaluating their experience using it.

Problem statement – define a specific problem that needs to be solved for a specific user

Techniques and guidelines

• FORMULATE PROBLEM DEFINITION: How might we help a specific user to reach a certain goal, (because of insight?). The
  “How might we questions” sets the frame for potential solutions.

Ideation phase – generate as many ideas as possible with intense brainstorming

Techniques and guidelines

• COMBINATION OF INDIVIDUAL & GROUP BRAINSTORMING ACTIVITIES: Bring everybody’s ideas on the wall.
• ENCOURAGE WILD IDEAS: Embrace the most out-of-the box notions because they can be the key to solutions.
• BUILD ON THE IDEAS OF OTHERS: No „buts“ only „ands“.
• APPLY DESIRABILITY, WOW-EFECT & VIABILITY to find best ideas.

Example activities:

1. Silent brainstorming for at least 10 minutes – time needs to be long enough to experience a stagnantion, as only then team members think beyond obvious solutions.
2. Sharing of silent brain storming ideas without any judgement. Encourage to listen and directly build on ideas of others.
3. Gaining new perspectives that generate further ideas by asking inspirational questions, such as

   What would Google do?

   What would amazon do?

   What would Apple do?

   What would Starbucks do?

   How could solutions look like, if money wouldn’t matter? 

   Mashups – do new solutions arise, when we combine ideas?

At the end of the ideation diverge phase, often more than 100 ideas are generated in less than 1 hour by each team.  In the follwoing ideation converge phase it is all about finding the best idea quickly: We recommend the following 5 step process for selecting the best idea:

1. Try to categorize the ideas.
2. Ask for each idea: Does it have a great desirability from the perspective of the target user? If no, trash it. If yes =>
3. Does the idea have a high WOW-factor (a solution journalist would be keen on reporting about, because it offers a true benefit and is an innovation). If no, trash the idea. If yes =>
4. Is the idea viable? If no, trash the idea. If yes, keep it on the board.
5. Apply butterfly test for the remaining ideas: Voting with sticky dots. Each team member gets 5 sticky dots.

Rapid Prototyping – visualize idea & create common understanding

Techniques and guidelines

• PROTOTYPES SERVE AS COMMUNICATION TOOL: Visualization of possible solutions create a common understanding of the solution.
• ROUGH & FAST: Prototypes are first created on paper in form of a storyline with screen cards: Tell the story of how the life of a persona looks like using the new product or service.
• NO FRILLS: Prototypes shall demonstrate an idea without sweating about the details.

Test desirability and relevance of idea with target users

Techniques and guidelines

• PRESENT PROTOTYPES TO TARGET USERS: Gain feedback to understand what aspects of the idea are attractive (= high DESIRABILITY) and weed out ruthlessly week points. Adjust solution and iterate idea to an optimal solution to the problem.