User-Centered Innovation: The Value of Thinking like a Designer
When trying to create a new product, people want to innovate and come up with fresh and unique ideas. But what matters more than how special and one-of-a-kind something is is how well it fills a need or solves a problem. Design thinking helps that happen.
What is “Design Thinking”?
Design thinking is a methodology for creating valuable and effective results. It does so by centering user perspective in the design process to best meet user needs.
“Balancing desirability, with technical feasibility, and economic viability”
Thinking like a designer means understanding how to bring various aspects of a project together while achieving this goal. In his 2009 TED Talk, former IDEO CEO Tim Brown says, “Design thinking begins with what Roger Martin […] calls integrative thinking. And that’s the ability to exploit opposing ideas and opposing constraints to create new solutions. In the case of design, that means balancing desirability, what humans need, with technical feasibility, and economic viability” (Brown 3:46).
Design Thinking Process
Design thinking can be broken into specific sections that guide designers through the process. The number and name of steps may vary, but in general they follow a pattern of:
Empathizing with the user
Defining the problem to be solved
Ideating potential solutions
Prototyping the best idea
Testing the prototype for feedback
This process is iterative meaning that although they are steps, you may have to return to previous sections multiple times as you develop the best outcome. Maybe the definition has to be adjusted, or an idea reworked. Maybe the initial empathy missed something.
Overall, the method starts with the user and returns to the user.
Why Use Design Thinking?
Design thinking is an idea, a method, meaning it is not limited to those specifically called “designers.” By taking time to understand what people actually want and need, anyone using design thinking can create better products that solve problems and endure change. CEOs and business people in many disparate fields can find value in design thinking and uncover benefits for themselves and their users.
“Instead of thinking about what to build, building in order to think”
Design thinking also focuses on creating tangible prototypes. Rather than describing abstract ideas, seeing an actual object, website, or app allows everyone to fully grasp the concept and effectively discuss its validity.
Tim Brown says, “Instead of thinking about what to build, building in order to think. Prototypes speed up the process of innovation because it’s only when we put our ideas out into the world that we really start to understand their strengths and weaknesses. And the faster we do that, the faster our ideas evolve” (Brown 7:00).
At its core, design thinking is about ideas that address human needs and wants. It is about making functional prototypes quickly to understand how well they are fulfilling these desires.
It is a perspective from which to view the process of innovation and creation. When you think like a designer, you find the clearest and best answers. When you think like a designer, you make things worth designing.
