There is something special about how design thinking methodology approaches such basic things as requirements gathering. However, the truth is that, in most cases, it is quite impossible to adapt to a typical corporate environment.
On a different note, sometimes I really can’t stand such “innovative people” who come to our territory and start to pretend all that we did until now was literally wrong and they are the only ones with the cure to do it better. Nevertheless, it is something worth trying and exploring if you can.
What Is Design Thinking
Design thinking is a continuous understanding of the target market and Customers. It strives to understand the problems customers are facing, and what are the exact activities they need to do.
It involves as many stakeholders as possible early in the design phase to make sure to capture not only all the relevant facts but also users’ feelings, frustrations, pain points, or their vision of success. It has a lot to do with something called Customer Centricity.
Benefits of Customer Centricity
Customer centricity is the core of the design thinking methodology. It literally puts the customer into the only focus of everything. And not just along the facts (which every project pretends to do anyway). It places there even the feelings and senses the customer might have or show. Let’s have a look at what can be the outcome of such a bold move.
Greater Revenue
There is a potential financial advantage that you can achieve by focusing on meeting the needs and desires of the customer. By understanding and empathizing with the customer, design thinking aims to create products and experiences that not only fulfill their requirements but also exceed their expectations. This could directly lead to increased customer satisfaction, loyalty, and, ultimately, higher revenue for the company.
By prioritizing the customer’s perspective throughout the design process, you can identify new opportunities and uncover unmet needs. Or you can develop innovative solutions that resonate with their target audience. This, in turn, can result in a competitive advantage, as customers are more likely to choose and remain loyal to a brand that consistently delivers value.
Increased Employee Engagement
Design thinking easily increases the positive impact on the motivation, involvement, and satisfaction of employees. It encourages a collaborative approach to problem-solving. Employees from different backgrounds and disciplines are involved in the design process.
This is an unseen approach if you think along the lines of a standard project setup, where each phase of the project has a clear separation of people and roles. Design is usually something only the more experienced people from the team are involved in. But here, the seniority does not matter that much.
By involving employees in the design thinking process, organizations can tap into their diverse perspectives and creativity. This involvement empowers employees to contribute their ideas and expertise, fostering a sense of ownership and engagement in the work they do. When employees feel valued and included in the decision-making process, they are more likely to be motivated and passionate about their work.
Design thinking promotes experimentation and learning from failure. The fundamental idea of progress is to try several different solutions and don’t be afraid of failure. You can sometimes hear the term “fail fast”.
It encourages employees to take risks, explore new ideas, and iterate on solutions. This mindset of continuous improvement and learning can boost employee morale and engagement. It builds an environment where innovation is valued. This is again in direct contrast to the standard project setup.
Ultimately, this all can result in higher productivity and a more positive work environment. It can potentially contribute to attracting and retaining the best talents, as people are more likely to stay and feel fulfilled in their roles.
Higher Satisfaction
Understanding and empathizing with customers is an unusual attitude. More common is to get the most revenue from an opportunity that the customer presents. But if you start focusing on their needs and pain points in the first line and make an effort to deeply understand the customer’s perspective, you’ll find yourself creating products, services, and experiences that truly meet their needs.
That requires involving customers in the design process. With such a move, you effectively create a sense of ownership and co-creation, making the customer feel valued and heard. This can, again lead to increased customer loyalty.
Design thinking also encourages continuously iterating and improving project offerings based on customer feedback. This ensures that the organization remains responsive to evolving customer needs and preferences.
Alignment to Mission
Customer centricity also means alignment with the overall mission and purpose. Design thinking gives you a chance to deeply understand your users’ mission and the values they stand for, and to ensure that these principles are reflected in their products or services.
This applies not only to your team but also to various stakeholders and the community. This consideration of multiple perspectives helps you to make decisions that are in line with their values.
Better Product Resiliency and Sustainability
Building products that are more durable, adaptable, or even environmentally sustainable is something that not too many would consider just a few years ago.
Design thinking brings just that – to consider the entire lifecycle of a product, from its creation to its disposal. It is absolutely possible to design products that are resilient and able to withstand various challenges and changes in the market; you just need to have it as a priority.
This includes considering factors such as material selection, manufacturing processes, and product durability. As a result, you can reduce the need for frequent repairs or replacements, leading to cost savings and a more sustainable approach to consumption.
This approach forces you to consider the environmental impact of the products. It includes factors such as reducing waste, minimizing energy consumption, and using eco-friendly materials. What’s not to like about an approach where you effectively contribute to a more sustainable future?
Now let’s have a closer look at the first step of the customer-centricity design process.
Empathy Map
Focusing now on the methodology itself, the very first step you shall do is to create the Empathy Map. This is a tool that will allow you to gain a deeper understanding of the users you are focusing on. You construct empathy by putting yourself in the shoes of the people you are designing for. The Empathy Map consists of seven pieces that capture different aspects of the user’s experience.
#1. Who You Are Empathizing With
The goal is to understand whom you want to understand. You want to identify his /her role in the project and what is the exact situation to solve.
#2. What Do They Need to Do?
Here is to focus on the user’s observable actions and behaviors. You might want to understand what are the typical actions in typical situations the users tend to take. Come up with a conclusion about what the user needs to do differently and what the success (from the user’s perspective) shall look like.
#3. What Do They See?
This section investigates what the users see in the market or their own environment he/she works in as potential opportunities. Or find out what the user is reading about.
#4. What Do They Say?
Here the focus is on capturing the explicit statements made by the user. It includes direct quotes, phrases, or statements that represent what the user says about their experience, needs, or desires.
#5. What Do They Do Now?
Observe the actions the user is doing today. Even if you can’t see the whole picture, try to imagine what they are usually doing based on the other information you already have.
#6. What Do They Hear?
This is pretty much similar to the See section, but it’s not entirely the same. Hearing about something is not always the same as seeing it as the reality for a fact. Therefore you need to consider also things the users are just hearing about themselves and what the others are saying – which includes colleagues, friends, or even external people entirely.
#7. What Do They Think and Feel?
This section delves into the user’s thoughts and internal dialogue on one hand and the user’s emotions, feelings, and underlying motivations on the other hand. It’s about the user’s beliefs, assumptions, and thoughts about the problem. It’s also about the user’s fears, desires, frustrations, and aspirations related to the problem.
The empathy map is the starting point. However, the real design starts to form with the next step, called the Journey Map.
Journey Map
Assuming the empathy map is ready, the next step in the design thinking journey is the Journey Map :). This is to visually represent the user’s experience throughout a specific process or interaction. Think about it like a typical situation to solve with all the flows and decisions involved, represented in an organized, structured way.
A Journey Map typically consists of a timeline or a series of steps that the user goes through, along with key touchpoints and emotions associated with each step.
Journey Map Elements
Here are the key elements of a Journey Map:
- Timeline or a series of steps that represent the journey. This could be a linear progression or a more complex representation, depending on the nature of the process being mapped.
- Touchpoints are the key interactions or moments of engagement between the user and the product or service. These touchpoints can include physical interactions, digital interactions, or any other form of engagement.
- Actions represent the specific activities that the user performs at each stage of the journey. This helps identify the user’s goals, needs, and pain points at each step.
- Emotions capture the user’s feelings and emotional state at different stages of the journey. This defines the user’s highs, lows, frustrations, and moments of delight.
- Journey Maps also highlight pain points or areas where the user faces challenges or dissatisfaction. These pain points can be opportunities for improvement and innovation.
By creating a Journey Map, you gain a holistic understanding of the user’s experience, identify pain points, and uncover opportunities for improvement. This enables you to create solutions that address the user’s needs and enhance their overall experience.
Now, let’s have a look at how you transfer your journey into real backlog items of relevant stories for the development team.
Story Map
The last step in the process is the construction of a Story Map. This is a tool to visually organize and prioritize user stories or user requirements. It basically translates your Journey Map into prioritized backlog items the team can pick up and implement in the sprints.
The team then understands the user’s journey and the features needed to address their needs. A Story Map provides a high-level overview of the product or service, and it ultimately defines the development plan and prioritizes development efforts.
Creating the Story Map
Here’s how a Story Map can be constructed:
- Start by identifying the key activities or tasks that the user needs to accomplish. These activities represent the main steps or stages of the user’s journey.
- For each activity, break it down into smaller user stories or user requirements. User stories are typically written from the perspective of the user and describe a specific action or need.
- Arrange the user stories horizontally on the Story Map, placing them in the order they would occur in the user’s journey. This creates a timeline or sequence of user stories.
- Add a vertical axis to the Story Map to represent the priority or importance of each user story. What you will get are visually prioritized user stories based on their significance.
- Depending on the complexity of the product or service, you can add additional layers to the Story Map. For example, you can add layers for different user personas, different features, or different iterations of the product.
The ultimate goal with Story Map is to focus on delivering value to the user and ensuring that the product or service meets the requirements defined by the user itself.
How Does It Help With Project Delivery
Now the single important question you might have is: how can a project benefit from this stuff? If an old-school project manager would look at such a plan with those maps inside, he would most likely conclude that there is an enormous amount of unprofitable activities the team is about to do and I bet he would cut out most of them.
But let’s pretend for a moment we have here a fan of design thinking methodology instead, the plan is not cut and so let’s see what are the possible benefits for the team and their development processes.
Enhanced Collaboration
If you have stuck to the processes above, you have prepared a Backlog for the team that was made by cross-functional collaboration within the team. You involved team members from different disciplines, such as designers, developers, and stakeholders, in the design process.
You most likely achieved a shared understanding and alignment of goals (a rare thing, if you ask me). As a bonus, you can enjoy better communication, increased creativity, and improved problem-solving.
User-Centric Focus
You can rest assured that the features you have in the backlog ready to take by the team are of the greatest interest to the user. There is no space for ballast epics or stories that do not have a direct impact on the user. You don’t waste time implementing something that the user does not actually want. It’s a great feeling knowing that every story in the backlog counts to the real value.
Correct Prioritization
The teams have very often problems with clear prioritization of their work (basically, which stories to take first and which can wait). In combination with a weak Product Owner, this problem can grow into even bigger dimensions. But by following the Journey and Story maps, you can’t possibly end up having this problem in your backlog.
The Real Iterative Development
You not only have the right priorities but also the right order of the stories. Story map defines what features must be done first to cover the very basic but, at the same time, what gives the users the greatest value. Then, incrementally you add up to this core another enhancements sprint by sprint until the full journey is delivered.
Improved User Experience
It might sound too generic, but it’s a fact – by considering the user’s journey and organizing user stories accordingly, the team can design a more seamless and intuitive user experience. The adoption of your delivered software is also higher, along the overall satisfaction. Ultimately, you deliver a successful product.
Wrapping Up
When I look at the design thinking process, I always imagine how much more interesting the work we do every day could potentially be. Then, I wake up from the dream and face the hard reality. It’s tempting to think about such a process in your day-to-day work, yet at the same time, it is so difficult to adopt into an established corporate project.
As time flows, there are inevitable small progress steps to see. And those steps are heading in this direction. For me, it is only a question of how long we need to wait till we finally reach that state.
