Slides used in a webinar given on January 19 2016 for Medallia. Learn what design thinking is, how to do it, and hear many examples from different fields.
8. DESIGN THINKING
“Design thinking is an approach to innovation
that draws from the designer's toolkit, taking a
human-centered approach to enable the
cultivation and development of ideas into tangible
strategies and offerings. It accelerates innovation
to help create better solutions for the challenges
facing business and society.”
8
DESIGN THINKING DEFINED BY IDEO
9. DESIGN THINKING
“Design thinking is an approach to innovation
that draws from the designer's toolkit, taking a
human-centered approach to enable the
cultivation and development of ideas into tangible
strategies and offerings. It accelerates innovation
to help create better solutions for the challenges
facing business and society.”
9
DESIGN THINKING DEFINED BY IDEO
I’d imagine you are watching this webinar today because you are passionate about creating great customer experiences. So am I. That gives us something in common.
Of course, we love our customers, so we want them to have great experiences… but we also know that great experiences generate word of mouth.
And word of mouth drives growth.
Since I’m not able to meet with you in person, I thought I’d take a moment to introduce myself and explain why I believe that using design thinking can result in dramatically improved customer experiences.
My name is Wendy Castleman. This is me… taken in Maui 2 weeks ago, while in the middle of a lovely vacation experience. Sometimes experiences just happen, magically and beautifully… but most of the time, the experiences that I (and you have) have are DESIGNED. Someone else makes choices and that creates the experience that I end up having.
Today, I want to share an approach to designing great experiences that you can apply to your customers, your company and your life. The approach is called “Design Thinking”.
The first principle is Deep Customer Empathy. We define it as knowing your customer better than they know themselves. This means going beyond expectations to delight…. How can you exceed a customer’s expectations and delight them if you don’t know them this well?
At Intuit, many of us work in a very corporate environment. The thing is, (Read the slide)
The key to getting that recognition and understanding is to be able to relate to their world, their reality. To do that, you need to connect with where they are coming from: their environment, their expectations, their constraints. Unless you are solving for someone else who sits in a cube in a large corporation, or is exactly like you, you probably can’t fully recognize your customer’s perspective until you experience it for yourself first-hand.
The best way to understand a customer is to try to be that customer. Walk in their shoes. If you are designing for a visually impaired user, we can provide you with foggy goggles to distort your vision… then, you will have empathy for what your customer’s experience really is. If you are designing for a small business that sells shoes, try working in their shoe store for a few days and understand what it’s like for them. NOTHING can replace the experience of being the customer. But, this gets close.
Going out and watching the customer working in their own environment is a common method we use at Intuit, and is pretty easy to do no matter who your customer is. The inspiration from observation is profound.
Having customers sit down and talk about themselves can give your team an intimacy with customers that they may not get frequently. With some teams, their interaction with customers is mostly very focused or one-directional conversations (sometimes, just us doing all the talking). So, giving them an opportunity to just sit down and have a conversation, to get to know a specific customer as a person, instead of a “generalized customer”, can give them new eyes to understanding.
Curiosity is critical.
As kids, we all used to be curious, creative ... I'd notice things and play with them to see what I could and couldn't do...
But I grew up the same way we all did, learning that there is a right answer, a way you are supposed to do things, stuff you should just know.
You need to embrace that inner kid to tap into your curiosity. Be curious about your customers…
Here is the classic example of design thinking, and especially the importance of being curious to gain empathy. (Embrace story)
Once you look at the world through different eyes, once you change your perspective, you can reframe the challenge and that is critical if you are going to innovate… it was critical for us so we could….
See the customer from a different perspective
To look deeper and be curious and find out what really matters and why
Serves as the foundation for figuring out how to make something so profound that they would never go back to the old way…
Finding a problem that no one really saw required looking from different perspectives.
The next principle is Go Broad to Go Narrow, which is that to get to one great idea, you need lots of ideas…
The reality is that most ideas fail. So, you need to focus on increasing the number of ideas.
Basically, we want to create choices before we make decisions.
To go broad, you need to use your imagination. To come up with ideas that don’t yet exist. To come up with ideas that can be BIGGER and smaller than the ones that currently exist. You need to be able to envision a world that does not yet exist… we need to do that in order to
Create options before making choices
Explicit criteria = better choices
The foundation for innovating new ways of doing things
The third principle of D4D is Rapid Experiments with Customers. (Read the slide)
So, what does this mean?
Constantly get feedback from customers
Using lightweight prototypes to learn fast
Trying many different ideas
Digging deep into what your customers really need
[read slide] –can we actually get the behaviors that we think we can?
This is an example of a storyboard, which is one way that you can get feedback on an idea without having to build anything.
We also might (read slide)
Storyboards are a pretty quick way to lay out a scenario to test with customers.
(read slide)
And, whenever possible, we like to Launch and learn. With this experiment, the team built a working platform to allow customers to enter real data. It was tedious and awful to use, but allowed the team to see what TYPE of data people tracked, which allowed them to hone in on the To-Do’s, which are the basis of their new app, Weave.
The key to rapid experimentation with customers is trying things out as soon as possible (read the slide)
Ultimately, this is about exploration. Curiosity, Perspective and Imagination can get you to ideas, but exploration will get you moving towards reality. You can’t know what you don’t know. We learn best through experience, so exploration is key.
[read slide] –can we actually get the behaviors that we think we can?
So… [what are the parts of your life that could be improved, that could use some innovation? – ask the crowd]
Curiosity can help you find problems worth solving.
What can CURIOSITY do to help you innovate your life?…
Ask Questions and wonder - Why does it have to be this way? How does it work? What other ways can you do it? …
Broaden your perspective. Looking outside of your normal view can help you find problems you weren’t looking at before.
Check it out from others point of view, Not just your normal view
Embrace your imagination: Think about Alternatives that don’t yet exist, or how you wish it could be
Explore and Try it out and see what you learn
The first tool has to do with empathy and understanding what that customer experience really is.
The next principle is Go Broad to Go Narrow, which is that to get to one great idea, you need lots of ideas…
The third principle of D4D is Rapid Experiments with Customers. (Read the slide)
So, what does this mean?
Constantly get feedback from customers
Using lightweight prototypes to learn fast
Running experiments to test your assumptions
Lean Startup informed our thinking here…
Trying many different ideas
Digging deep into what your customers really need
Storyboarding is a tool that allows you to express the idea and get feedback on changes to your customer experience, before even building out that experience to try. Yes, you should do that TOO, but this tool helps kickstart your process and gives you the confidence you and your org need to proceed to the next step.