The famous “Design thinking” — a meaningful framework ( 1/2)
In this generation, no one wouldn’t say they haven’t heard of the buzzword “Design Thinking”. Several organizations hire the consultant to do workshop about design thinking for their employees. But what is it and how can you apply to your ideation stage. From the last article, I’ve provided the list of questions to define about the selected pain you want to solve. In this article, I would like to provide the connection of how the “Design Thinking” framework can be useful when you want to innovate new thing.
What is Design Thinking?
Design Thinking framework consists 5 stages; Empathize, Define, Ideate, Prototype, & Test. The framework is resonate with customer-centric aspect.
Instead of focusing on the profit and revenue projection as the starting point like traditional way the organizations usually did, it shifts the mindset to drill down what it really matters to the customer. If you put that as top priority and able to deliver the way to eliminate your customer’s pain ( deliver value of your service/product which differentiates from existing competitors), the revenue will comes automatically.
1. Empathize
Now, as the ideation stage is to select the right aspect of the pain — problem of your target customer. The “Empathize” is the first step to do. In this step, there’s several methods you can look into such as observing, interviewing, or being them, like an example of the 3 british dads try to wear 33lb-empathy-bellies to feel how the pregnant woman (their wife) feels. Try to put yourself into their shoe. 👶🍼
From my experience, what I often run is interviewing method. You select few target group (around 3-4 peoples is suggested) to interview from your defined user persona & demographic and then shaping the input into the Empathy map. It includes 4 sections; Think — Do — Feel — Say. The empathy map is useful to structure the input you obtain ( Do & Say ) from the interviewee and to extract what’s the hidden pain/opportunity and goal ( Think & Feel ) which the interviewee may not realize or express it in an obvious way.
If you don’t want to spend time using the empathy map, you can get the insights and clarifying the pain from interviewee by simply checking
{ Expectations | Behavior | Needs | Motivation } ➡️ Insights
- What kind of person? (User persona)
- What is the pain user has?
- What is the goal or needs the user aims to achieve
- If the pain get solved last time the user encountered, how did the user solved and how satisfy?
At this point, you will be able to clarify the pain as well as checking the ideal situation the user is looking to achieve, which lead to the next step.
2. Define
As you collects and obtains the insights from the first step, the “Define” step is when you illustrate the sharp problem statement of what is the focused problem, whom is you try to solve for, and what is the value you will deliver.
The above diagram presents 2 box with the red arrows which is the gap between “User’s pain/needs” and “Ideal situation if you solved user’s pain”.
For example;
User Pain:
- The working moms would like to cook for their family but does not have enough time to do grocery on daily basis.
- They want fresh ingredients while having limited of refrigerator size to store it.
- They doesn’t have enough knowledge to come up with new recipe.
Ideal situation:
- They want to cook variety dishes for the family, so the kids and husband will not get bored with.
- Responsible for household expense. Doesn’t want to spend on pricey.
To define the specific problem statement using “How might we….” concept
How might we provide the working moms a variety of fresh ingredients on daily-basis with reasonable cost?
It has to be clear and concise enough for you to generate the tons of ideas from that statement. That leads to the next step, “Ideate”.
Key takeaways of the first 2 steps of “Design Thinking” is to start doing the customer-centric with empathy. You can achieve it through observation, interview, or experiment it by yourself. After that, the next step is to define a specific problem statement form the obtained insights which you can apply “How might we concept”.
Next, let’s continue to understand the remaining steps; Ideation, Protype, and Test.
