The famous “Design thinking” — a meaningful framework ( 2/2)

As the title stated, we are still focused on “Design thinking” framework connecting from the previous article where I provide the concept of first two stage; Empathize and Define. For this article, we will wrap up with the remaining 3 stages; Ideate, Prototype, and Test with an example of how to achieve it.

In the “Empathize stage”, you’ve conducted some research for deep understanding of your target customer, the pain, the ideal situation. After that, you continued on “Define stage” which is when you are able to specifically describe the precise problem statement of Who, What, and Why you are solving this problem by utilizing the concept of “How might we…”. Now let’s move to the next stage.

3. Ideate

To obtain a great idea, how should you proceed? As we able to decode the great quote from Steve jobs that

“People think focus means saying yes to the thing you’ve got to focus on. But that’s not what it means at all. It means saying no to the hundred other good ideas that there are. You have to pick carefully. I’m actually as proud of the things we haven’t done as the things I have done. Innovation is saying no to 1,000 things.”

It means before you are able to saying no to hundred ideas to select one or few ideas to focus on — you need to have several ideas in the basket beforehand.

To make it happen, you need to create an divergence atmosphere where you and team members able to brainstorm and come up with the idea under the umbrella of what you’ve defined “How might we…” problem statement.

1. Write it down. 1 idea/ 1 post-it. Visualize it.
2. Not judging the idea yet. Let it flow out of your head freely.
3. Give a specific time duration for brainstorming. ( Otherwise, it will go on forever. The deadline triggers people’s creativity. )
4. Grouping the similar concept together

As below diagram shows, the “How might we…” box in the center visualizes several post-it on the board. Every member can check the ideas contributed from other member. It widen the perspective beside your own — this is why #2.) Not judging is important. If you don’t prohibit that, it will interrupt the brainstorming process and people will become reluctant to share their idea, as a consequence, you might not be able to achieve idea and the creativity process is frozen.

The next step is moving from “divergence” to “convergence”.

The process of narrowing the idea, selecting the potential idea from the list.
In order to achieve this, you can introduce “voting” to the team e.g. select the best 3 ideas in your opinion. You may ask the member to stick the red dot sticker for better visualization of which idea is the most popular among all. At this point, you will reach the few potential idea to focus. This is the time when you begin to judge of potential idea about its feasibility, viability, or desirability.

Example:

How might we provide the working moms a variety of fresh ingredients on daily-basis with reasonable cost?

Ideate: (Divergence mode)
- Hire housemaid for helping the working mom to cook.
- Application with multiple recipes for family
- Frozen food delivery service
- Refrigerator with smart AI - providing recipe from your ingredients
- Subscription service for grocery to your home
- Personal catering at home
- Application alert for the supermarket provides low-cost items/ingredients
- Customized service deliver set of ingredients for specific menu with defined capacity of member
……
….
idea continues
….

Narrow down by voting: (Convergence mode) — Let say the voting derive below three ideas from the list.
⭐️ Customized service deliver set of ingredients for specific menu with defined capacity of member
➡️ Convenient for working mom — no need to spend time buying by herself ✅
➡️ Pricey — does not fit it for cost-saving ❌

⭐️ Subscription service for grocery to your home
➡️ Convenient for working mom — saves time with online grocery shopping ✅
➡️ Feasible to develop ✅
➡️ Reasonable price can be offered ✅

⭐️ Refrigerator with smart AI — providing recipe from your ingredients
➡️ Time-saving for working mom — no need to think of the menu ✅
➡️ Not convenient — still need to visit supermarket for grocery shopping ❌
➡️ Pricey — does not fit it for cost-saving ❌

From the example, after you began to carefully evaluate the idea, you will derive the one idea to focus, in this case it goes to “⭐️ Subscription service for grocery to your home”. Leading to the next stage, making a prototype of that selected idea.

4. Prototype

The definition of “prototype” is not to start building a perfect product. It refers to the stage where you try to create a mock-up version to test with target customer how they would response or measure their willingness to purchase.
At this stage, the team will start to build a prototype with core functions or only the simple user interface without well-designed back-end infrastructure. Normally, it should not consume over one month, around 2 weeks is the general period to achieve it. The merit of build only a prototype is you do not waste the resources (time, money, people ) compared to create a fully developed service. Noting that the process of prototype & test stage may take several loops.
To design a prototype, you should also define the metric to track how user interact with the prototype. e.g. frequency, impression, activeness , and such.

⭐️ Subscription service for grocery to your home
Prototype: User interface with bunch of item picture (vegetables, meats, etc.) + button for setting budget limitation , frequency of delivery, capacity of family members.

Metric: frequency, volume, impression (no. of incoming complaint )

5. Testing

When you finished create the prototype or mock-up, deliver to the perform testing with target customer to get the feedbacks, checking the metrics as well as conducting qualitative interview if possible.

It is the best if you have connection or an efficient way to reach to the group of test customer. Often times, if that’s not the case, the popular method for startup is to create a website showing the concept of prototype with the contact form for the target customer to register for the service. Although this method is easy for the startup to create, it depends on the type of service you provide. Sometimes it might be too slow to get feedback compared to reaching the target customer for interview with the prototype or observing how they interact with it.

That’s the wrap-up for applying “Design thinking” framework for early step of the innovation. The key-takeaway is to understand the pain and gain of the target customer, brainstorming the idea with divergence mode, select the potential idea with convergence mode, start build a prototype not a perfect product, and test it with the target customer to collect useful feedback. I hope it is useful for learning from the example I provided.

The next series, let’s focus on how to get “product-market-fit” (PMF). The famous jargon for creating a new innovation, yet a scary one that bunch of start ups are struggling to obtain.