Design Thinking Kills Innovation.
That’s a bold statement we were confronted with, but also the one we couldn’t leave unnoticed nor uncommented. Especially not since we always preach to our clients about how design thinking can help them create innovation. But how come are we confronted with such a statement when in reality design thinking stands for the exact opposite, for creating innovation?
What is design thinking?
Design thinking in general addresses creating a solution that fulfills human needs and solves human problems. That can be achieved by a process which uses a set of tools that aim to put the user in the heart of the development process in order to create a product that is useful for and desired by the users. When discussing design thinking, it’s also important to note that using the design thinking process guarantees that that the solution is not only desired by the users, but also technologically feasible and viable from a business perspective. As a starting point, we advise our clients to begin with a research in order to find out what exactly people need. Sometimes, it happens that the problems that arise may be addressed with a new product.
How can you create innovations with design thinking?
Where does that statement, that supposedly design thinking kills innovation, come from? Well, our clients argue that by asking the users in a research what they like and what are their wishes and expectations, we won’t get any new ideas and thus no innovation will happen either. Just as Henry Ford so famously stated: “If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.” — and we would still be riding horses nowadays, instead of increasingly developing more comfortable, faster and more sophisticated cars. Admittedly, he is right about that, but still it’s for a good reason that big companies such as Apple, IBM, IKEA or Google use the design thinking approach and develop quite successful products with using it. So how is that possible? It is because people who come up with that argument still didn’t completely understand what design thinking is and how it works — they lack an essential understanding about it. To be able to really create innovative products you have to understand and follow a few important steps, which are:
1. Understand the users.
Of course it is an important step to find out what people like and dislike, what their wishes, desires and ideas are, but it’s just one step of the process. What’s of similar importance, if not even more important, is to understand why they do like or dislike something, why they have a certain wish or idea. Discovering the underlying need, the hidden motivation behind those wishes and ideas is the crucial part. And here it’s absolutely necessary to involve real users as the needs often lie deeply hidden.
So, it’s important to conduct a research and closely observe what the users say and do, how they behave and react. Researching is important because the user’s needs are so deeply buried that the users themselves often can’t state their needs when asked; and if only observed superficially, their actions might be misleading and guiding the design into a wrong direction. But when observed and interviewed closely and carefully, the needs can be uncovered, and base a starting point for new product opportunities. That’s the manner in which Henry Ford understood the need behind people’s voiced desire for faster horses; it wasn’t about horses at all, but plainly about getting from one place to another- faster. By understanding this basic need behind their wish, he was able to come up with a new way of addressing this need.
2. Don’t think product-driven
However, it’s not only about understanding the users’ needs, another crucial part is to avoid product-driven thinking. The idea comes first and the product follows. That might sound illogical, given the fact that it’s a product that should be developed, produced and sold in the end, and that selling products is what drives the business. But like that, by already having a product in mind and using it as a starting point for new ideas, we restrain our creativity. Lorenz Hagenmeyer, director of the User Experience Strategy at Bosch, illustrates this problem in his talk at the World Usability Day by asking “What would we [Bosch] have done to reinvent the taxi-market? We would have developed the best, prettiest and the most comfortable taxi ever.” But that’s not really an innovation, and the question is how successful they would be with that. He compares that to Uber, who created a true innovation and success by creating a taxi-business that basically works without taxis at all and with which they completely changed and reinvented the taxi-business.
Understanding these two crucial parts, one can begin to understand how innovation works with design thinking. First you have to understand the needs people have and this understanding opens up opportunities for addressing those needs. The next step is not to think about how you could use your product — or any specific product that is — to address this need, but to freely explore all the possibilities addressing and fulfilling this need. In the last step think about the product that could best be used for doing so. And there we already stated the next important step in the process — freely exploring possibilities.
3. Explore possibilities and get feedback on your ideas
Really good ideas are rare, but if you have a lot of stupid ideas it raises the possibility of having a good one among them. That is why it’s so important to come up with a lot of ideas, as it takes many to really discover one that is a game changer. Therefore, designers need to have the room, time and tools to come up with lots of crazy ideas, no matter how stupid they may sound at the beginning. But not only having the room to come up with the ideas is important, it’s also necessary that these ideas can be built and explored — of course not as completely finished products, but as quick and rough prototypes.
By making the ideas tangible in form of prototypes everyone can test and therefore comprehend and understand the ideas and engage with them. In that way, you quickly and easily uncover which ideas make sense and which don’t, where the strengths and weaknesses of an idea lie and what opinions others have about it. So, by testing and exploring the ideas through rough and rapid prototypes you get feedback from the others — in the best case real users — about your idea in a quick and cost-effective way. That allows you to decide which ideas make sense, and based on this feedback and information, you can decide which ideas should be pursued or are promising in some way. This allows to build up on ideas and also to turn apparently stupid ideas into awesome features or products.
So, the bottom line is that correctly applied design thinking indeed can lead to innovative, game changing ideas and solutions. However, for that to be possible, it’s important to remember these three core points:
- Understand! — And this means not only to understand what your users do or want, but especially why, and what the underlying needs and motivations are.
- Ideate! — Come up with as many ideas as possible, no matter how unrealistic or crazy they might sound and don’t think product-driven, but completely free of how the solution could be applied and only focused on which need or problem needs to be solved.
- Prototype and test! — Make the ideas tangible to enable others to understand and explore them, and get as much feedback as possible to find out which ideas are worth pursuing.
Julia is a UX Researcher at COBE working at the crossroads of science and human behaviour to create not just a product, but a feeling. She’s enthusiastic about finding out what motivates people to be able to craft delightful experiences for them. While doing that she loves to indulge in her coffee addiction, travel the world or spend her time with DIY-projects to revamp her home decorations.
If you liked this one, be sure to come back again, ’cause there will be more! First one to follow is an article about Personas —explaning if, why and how to use them. Meanwhile, check some other articles from COBE design team:
