What Is Design Thinking?

In this video, Stoked co-founders Anna Love and Parker Gates explain design thinking by walking through the most common 5-modes and providing real-world scenarios where a popular organization used this mode/method to achieve something big! Empathy example is Drybar. Define example is Nintendo Wii. The example for prototyping is Zappos. Lastly, the Test example is Angies List.

Transcript

PARKER: So we get this question all the time: What is design thinking?

ANNA: At its core, design thinking, or human-centered design is--

--a creative way of coming up with radically new solutions to complex challenges.

PARKER: And so this takes lots of different forms, but we're going to explain it to you in the easiest way that we know how. Which basically starts with five modes.

And so the first mode that we want to talk about is empathy. Empathy is this idea of like, going out and like, really understanding the person that you're designing for.

Not asking them what the problem is, and how it can be better, but really trying to understand about their experience, and kind of the emotional underpinnings of that experience, so that we can create something amazing for them in the end. Alright, so here's a great example:

ANNA: DryBar, a company that was started by Alli Webb. They now have I think 70 locations around the world, is a great example of fantastic empathy.

Alli Webb was a hairdresser and she started just doing her friend's hair because they asked for it. She started to do it more and more often,

and started to go into people's houses to do their hair, and realized that there was a market. There were a lot of women out there who wanted to just have their hair blow-dried.

She learned this by just having one-on-one conversations with first, her friends, then her network. 

PARKER: A couple of ways to gain empathy are that we teach a lot this idea of like, immerse yourself, observe and, engage.

ANNA: Immerse means to actually put yourself in the situation to learn about what it feels like from the end user's perspective.

PARKER: Observation is exactly what it sounds like: it's kind of sitting back and watching a person go through an experience, or engage in a problem, and kind of understanding what it looks like from the outside.

ANNA: And engage is sitting down and having a conversation with the person that you're designing for, to understand their unique needs, and the emotions underlying those needs.

The next mode in a design cycle is define. And define consists of really clearly articulating the characteristics of your user, and the need that you've uncovered that you want to design for.

It usually takes the form of a point-of-view statement, which is a concise statement that becomes your guiding light for the rest of the project.

PARKER: A really cool example of a define moment, or reframing the problem, showed up when Nintendo built the Wii.

So, at a time when Sony and Microsoft were building hardware that was really aimed at the hardcore gamer market, Nintendo built this thing with like, these handheld movement, right, and the neat thing about that was that it tested really well with elderly and with tiny children, not the hardcore gamer market.

So they ended up going after these big market segments and ended up having a huge hit as a result. The next mode that we want to talk about is ideation.

Ideate is basically a different word for brainstorming, which a lot of you are probably familiar with. In design thinking, we've gone out, we've gained empathy for somebody that we really want to solve a problem for,

we've clearly articulated or reframed that problem during our define phase, and now it's time to brainstorm some really wild solutions as a means of finding something that fits this user really, really well.

ANNA: Sometimes you can do an introvert brainstorm, all by yourself.

Sometimes you do it with a big group of people. Other times you might look at analogous industries and see what you can learn from them to apply to your challenge at hand.

As Parker said, the goal is to come up with as many possible ideas as you can, so that you're more likely to find one good one when you've had many. 

PARKER: The one tip that we would give, no matter what kind of brainstorm you hold, is that you really focus on desirability here.

This is the point where you don't want to yet bring in feasibility and viability, you want to make sure you come up with something really truly amazing before you start applying those constraints. 

ANNA: Prototyping is one of the most important parts of the design cycle. Most ideas get stuck in just that: as an idea, and they don't go any further.

The best way to bring an idea to life is to create a physical representation of that idea, and sometimes it takes the form of cardboard, and toothpicks, and sometimes it's a higher resolution, and you're actually creating wireframes, or an early build out of an idea. 

PARKER: One of the stories that we love that like, really illustrates low resolution prototyping, is Zappos.

They had this interesting idea about selling shoes online, but nobody had ever done it before. So what they did is they created a website and started selling shoes online, but they didn't actually stock any inventory.

Every time somebody would order a pair of shoes, they would run down to the shoe store, buy those shoes, come back, and then ship it out, as a means of better understanding how this would work, and if this was like a viable product.

The final mode that we want to discuss here is testing. And so basically testing is testing your prototype.

So we talked about building low resolution prototypes, now we want to test them with real live people. It's not enough to think that our idea is good, and we built this thing, and now we're just going to like, launch into the market.

We want to actually go out and basically understand how this is going to work, where it's going to work, what people's reaction to it is.

ANNA: I love the example of Angie's List. So Angie Hicks was one of the founders of Angie's List, and when she first got started, she was trying to play matchmaker between service providers and people that needed the service.

And the way that she did it was by having a 100 square foot office and she sat on the floor with the telephone and her subscribers would call and ask for a repairman.

And she would look through her list and give them a recommendation. And if she didn't have a name to recommend, she'd start dialing and find a name.

Talk about a low-res test, but what she learned was invaluable in coming up with what is now today Angie's List.

PARKER: So, we talked about like these five modes, so we talked about going out and gaining empathy, clearly articulating your problem and define, ideating radical new solutions, building low-res prototypes, and then testing those low-res prototypes. 

ANNA: Together those tools and behaviors allow a team to reliably come up with new solutions that have never been designed before.

PARKER: Design thinking is a bit of a misnomer, "It's really more about doing. Stop talking about it. Stop thinking about it. Stop writing about it. 

ANNA: Go out and do it.

PARKER: And go do it.