Design thinking: The secret to digital success
Design thinking is becoming a key pillar in digital transformations, with more enterprises tapping the design philosophy to deliver user-friendly products and services.
Senior Writer, CIO | 18 APRIL 2019 18:00 SGT
What is design thinking?
Design thinking is emerging as a major ingredient for digital transformation success. But what exactly is design thinking, and how are leading CIOs harnessing its power to enhance business value?
Design thinking practitioners observe and analyze user behaviors to gain insights into their needs and wants, according to Gartner. Ideally, they can use this information to create digital products and services that help them acquire and retain customers.
This innovation philosophy is gaining sway among businesses, with CIOs leveraging design thinking as a key part of their IT and product development strategies.
Design thinking vs. human-centered design
Design thinking is closely related to human-centered design — so much so that the terms are often used interchangeably. Experts differ both on the degree of difference between both philosophies, as well as whether there is a difference in practice.
Some experts, such as Gartner analyst Marcus Blosch, say human-centered design is an umbrella term under which design thinking sits. If human-centered design is the philosophy that puts people at the center of digital solutions and services that are being designed, design thinking includes the best practices used to build those solutions.
“It’s about finding out peoples’ behavior, motivations and needs and coming up with solutions and services to match,” Blosch tells CIO.com. Human-centered design includes practices such as social network analysis or narrative analysis. “The toolbox is wide and varied,” Blosch says.
On that score, Shelley Evenson, managing director of Accenture’s Fjord design consultancy, agrees. Evenson says that human-centered design falls under design thinking. “But they are really the same thing,” she says. Both leverage aspects of anthropology, sociology and psychology to meet consumer desires.
The design thinking approach
Design thinking represents a departure from the more traditional approach in which design is driven top-down. In this scenario, management facilitates the creation of digital products, brings them to market and explains how they solve problems, says John Morley, a business design strategist at Hitachi Vantara, who worked on design thinking in prior roles at AppDynamics, Symantec and EMC.
Design thinking, on the other hand, is a bottom-up approach, with employees throughout all layers of an organization influencing and refining product development. Morley says it’s common for junior-level employees to ferry feedback to those in power as they tend to be closer to customers. An outcome-based mindset is essential.
“An organization has to commit to opening up and having a feedback loop around ideation,” Morley says. “People have to not be focused on their role in the org chart but how their skills can support a desired outcome.”
There’s a trick to effective design thinking: If it doesn’t become embedded throughout the organization’s culture, it will fail, Morley says. “The perspective of the organization should be customer-centric,” he adds.
Design thinking principles
Perhaps you’ve heard the expression “starting with the customer and working backwards.” This is the ethos from which design thinking springs. And while it may seem like common sense, enterprises have long taken the build-it-and-they-will-come tack.
Prior to design thinking, user-friendliness was an afterthought. IT departments would take specifications and then spend months building technology solutions. But in the consumerization era, in which employees and consumers use their preferred devices and applications, user-friendliness is a requirement not a perk, putting increased pressure on IT to design its solutions with users in mind, says Evenson.
Evenson, who also worked in design roles at Facebook and Microsoft before joining Fjord, says design thinking represents a cultural shift in peoples’ “liquid expectations,” which emphasizes the fluidity of expectations around technical solutions. Consider the revolution Apple ignited with its iPhone and subsequent App Store launch a decade ago, which drove people to expect great mobile applications from their favorite brands. Since then, many quick-service chains have added ordering and payment capabilities to their mobile apps. Such moves have been propelled by liquid expectations.
But as technology is increasingly woven into the matrix of a business, even traditional companies are considering user experience as a key factor in solutions both for employees and customers. A big part of Evenson’s job involves speaking with CIOs and other business leaders about how to build software and services akin to Amazon.com, Airbnb and other services that consumers feel were designed for them personally. “You can’t have a corporate service that isn’t considering usability, desirability and putting people first rather than what we can do technically or what makes sense to get what they need,” Evenson says.
The shift to design thinking typically involves ditching the classic cubicle farm for open, collaborative workspaces where product managers, designers and software engineers sit and huddle over new solutions. In such environments, it’s not uncommon for CIOs to walk into the workspace and not know exactly who reports to them.
Design thinking best practices
Design thinking requires a culture change. But for many firms undertaking digital initiatives to transform their businesses, design thinking is increasingly becoming part of corporate strategic agendas, says Chris Pacione, co-founder and CEO of LUMA Institute, which teaches people how to do human-centered design. Design thinking, Pacione says, can help foster innovation as companies seek to “renew” themselves frequently to keep up with the pace of change.
Pacione’s approach to design thinking blends product design and systems engineering with anthropology and ethnographic approaches. Design thinking, Pacione says, can help organizations avoid common pitfalls that keep projects from succeeding. Those include:
- Problem framing: Well-intentioned teams often rush to fix a problem without fixing its root cause. They don’t capture the scope of the issue plaguing their organization. Pacione recommends firms “question the question” by exploring new ways of framing the problem accurately and ensuring teams are on the same page. “Teams that understand the real opportunity in the first place have a chance of success,” he says.
- Empathy: Another big reason projects fail is the lack of understanding and empathy for stakeholders the initiatives intend to serve. Capturing empathy isn’t easy, as end users don’t share a hive mind. Moreover, enterprises must design solutions with a mind for those who install, repair or maintain them. This is where contextual inquiry and other ethnographic and participatory design techniques come in handy.
- Iteration:Corporate governance, which is linear-minded, tends to crimp innovation, which requires iterative approaches. Organizations must allow for the multiple failures associated with great or novel ideas, Pacone says. This requires sketching, storyboarding and prototyping solutions based on stakeholder feedback. “Really innovative solutions that have impact are the result of numerous innovation and a continuous flow of assumption testing and improvement. The faster time to market maxim is irrelevant in this day and age. Organizations that iterate the fastest and do it well will win.”
- Project failure points: Identify areas that aren’t working and fix them. That’s one of the advantages of iteration; designers and engineers can fix bugs and user design quirks on a rolling basis, from inception of minimally viable products to fully-baked commercial solutions.
- Collaboration: Organizations living under threat of disruption have to come up with good ideas and collaborate with other departments and with clients to get them implemented. They must also help to impart ways of working that are more visually imaginative and creative.
Pacione says the impetus for driving design-thinking into an organization tends to come from organizations looking to improve customer experiences. “The impetus is on the outside because it’s affecting bottom and top-lines sooner,” Pacione says.
But CIOs may also be pressured to adopt design thinking to ensure they can recruit the talent they desire. Millennial employees, which already comprise more than half the workforce, will pass on employers they view as having technologies and practices from the digital Dark Ages, Evenson says.
One way corporations can avoid the “digital Dark Ages” is to create a “design culture” that involves hiring more designers and prototyping new solutions. “They see the pressure of the liquid expectations both in delivering their services and in keeping their organization growing and thriving,” Evenson says.
Design thinking pitfalls
Technology is rarely the stumbling block for adopting design thinking. Rather, organizations trip over their own feet by being too hung on practices that require rigorous documentation and testing, which can make it very difficult to build anything iterative, says Evenson.
“Most people like the certainty of requirements,” which they falsely believe gives them an idea of what the outcome will be, Evenson says.
While requirements provide the illusion of safety, most organizations lack the muscle memory or the skills and competencies required to adopt and adapt to more iterative development. “What’s lacking in most organizations is imagination and creativity — the ability to do things differently,” Evenson says. “It can make it challenging to create.”
Another hurdle lurks on the horizon in the form of designing so-called “ethical AI,” or creating artificial intelligence agents that are largely free from bias to prevent them from augmenting outcomes and experiences indiscriminately. For example, New York City is struggling to weed out bias along race, gender and class lines as it applies AI to solve crime, among other social issues.
“We need to take empathy a step further and understand the combination of people and systems,” Evenson says. “It’s important to think about ethics and responsibility in design.”
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