Traditionally, technology leaders focus on a few variations of people, processes, and technology when considering how to solve a problem. Design Thinking can be another versatile tool in your toolkit and provide different perspectives.
The most interesting and challenging aspect of our work as technology leaders is solving complex problems. Sometimes these problems are purely technical in nature. For example, we may need to share data between two different systems, separated by thousands of kilometers, which use different technical architectures and perhaps even beyond our direct control, as is the case with cloud technologies.
More often than not, the problems we are tasked with solving are outside the purely technical realm . You've probably heard the exaggerated warning that we need to focus on PPT: people, processes and technology when considering a problem. And while it's a well-intentioned suggestion, it misses the point.
The problem with PPT is that it doesn't suggest a starting point, and as technology leaders who run teams of technicians, we often start with the technology, or perhaps the process, and consider the people as an afterthought.
Consider your average software implementation. We will generally start with developing requirements with some input from the end user and then embark on a software selection process. This selection focuses on the technical merits of the software considering items such as technical architecture, integration and platform, with perhaps one or two generic requirements around “usability”.
After we select the software, we will rework the processes we consider important and then ask users to “test” the system with the unwritten assumption that any human factors issues will be deprioritized or placed in the “parking lot” where requirements tend to be forgotten. or ignored.
Enterprise technology is not the only area where this phenomenon occurs. Consider the products that surround you in your home or office. Maybe your television has all the latest features and resolutions and superlative technical specifications. Still, no one can navigate its complicated menu structure or do much beyond turning it on and off. On the other hand, your coffee maker looks like it was designed by a mind reader who knew exactly where you'd want a button and made it so simple that you never deciphered the manual to figure out how to use and maintain the unit.
When to approach problems from a design perspective
Design thinking is the broad category of problem-solving approaches that start with the human element of a problem, trying to understand people and their motivations first and foremost. With this understanding, the team proposes, tests, refines and then delivers different solutions to the problem.
It is a relatively intuitive approach, but challenging to execute well, as it focuses on solving “unknowns” rather than executing tasks. Technological implementations often focus on the latter, deferring the unknown in favor of completing tasks with known approaches. This works great if you're integrating a newly acquired company and need to execute your well-honed “playbook,” but it tends to perform poorly if you're designing a new online shopping experience or employee directory.
When faced with a new problem, ask whether it is primarily an execution problem or a “solution to the unknown” problem. While almost all problems contain elements of both, generally speaking, if you are building something where the critical success criteria are whether or not users will adopt it, it is a design problem. If the main success criteria is completing a known set of steps in a specific time frame, it's probably more of an execution issue.
For design problems, it's imperative to focus your efforts on deeply understanding the users you're trying to serve or the problems they need you to solve. This can put technologists in the uncomfortable position of postponing or minimizing sophisticated technical decisions and spending hours considering and testing seemingly simple things like word choices on a marketing website.
For example, we were designing a new service and discovered that potential customers balked at the service being called a “subscription.” We went back to the drawing board and reworded what was the same service as “membership” and found significant interest just by changing one word. Upon further research, we discovered that this specific customer segment was suffering from “subscription fatigue” due to the overabundance of subscription products, but was interested in the perceived prestige of a membership program.
Anyone can be a designer
Many technical leaders downplay the power of design thinking, assuming that it is “fluff” or that they must be able to design products, draw perfect sketches, or have an advanced degree in a field like anthropology or psychology. These are undoubtedly useful tools for a professional designer, but most humans have an even more critical skill for successful design thinking: empathy.
Empathy is the simple ability to understand another person's feelings and needs. It is often confused with compassion and sympathy, which require a value judgment.
For example, suppose I need to design a user interface for a new digital office coffee maker, but I don't drink coffee. I may have little sympathy or compassion for coffee drinkers and focus on what kind of touchscreen would be appropriate or whether the machine needs WiFi or Bluetooth.
Suppose I exercise my empathy and imagine myself as a coffee drinker and perhaps observe and talk to coffee drinkers in the office. In this case, I may find that having a wide variety of coffee options is very important or that getting my coffee quickly is the priority. I can uncover the inherent conflict between these two priorities and determine whether I can design and execute an experiment that determines whether speed or choice is more important.
Just by trying to understand my end user and putting myself in their shoes, I was able to uncover an important set of conflicting needs that I will need to resolve to successfully design a coffee maker before I even begin to consider the technical nuances.
Therein lies the key to experimenting and using design thinking techniques. This simple shift in where you begin investigating a problem can reprioritize the parties to a situation you focus on and drastically change your chances of creating a solution to a problem that your end users embrace and adopt.
While there are certainly sophisticated techniques and entire fields dedicated to design and design thinking, just engaging your empathy muscle can go a long way toward incorporating design thinking techniques into your problem-solving repertoire for impressive, low-cost results.
