From the course: Design Thinking: Understanding the Process

Celebrity design thinking vs. real design thinking

From the course: Design Thinking: Understanding the Process

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Celebrity design thinking vs. real design thinking

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- Lots of design practitioners, including large universities and famous design agencies, seem to think the end deliverable of design thinking is a concept or a storyboard. The idea is that after they've gathered some initial data from customers, the experts then create an interface, sketch it out, and hand it over to developers in your company to build. If you work in a company and you're charged with delivering projects, you know that's hardly sufficient. You need an understanding of the interaction and an implementation plan with deliverables and milestones. The sketches don't give you an understanding of the relative importance of each design element. What's core to the interaction and what's just nice to have? Product development has moved on from the old waterfall techniques where someone would specify the whole design up front, then hand it off to a technical team to implement. Now, teams work in iterative cycles and try to deliver business benefit as early as possible. Without a roadmap, a plan of what items depend on what other items, and which are most important to build first, the development team will struggle to move forward. If an agency delivers a sexy presentation to executives, those executives are going to turn around and get you to build it. If the design thinking process doesn't help you with the development process, it's a waste of time because you'll never really be able to build the concept in reality. Those concepts might look great, but how likely is it that the development team will be able to understand, let alone implement those sketches? And what will happen if they do implement them? How likely is it they'll work? The other element missing from this celebrity version of design thinking is a comprehensive way of gathering fast, frequent customer feedback on everything from early prototypes, through alpha builds to the post-release version of the product. If the team who'll be rolling up their sleeves and delivering the product weren't involved through the whole design thinking exercise, and if the design thinking exercise doesn't end up giving you a tested prototype design and an implementation plan, then it's nothing more than a set of unproven concepts. That's why I always advocate involving representatives from every discipline on the team in the design thinking process. There's a myth that only design agency staff can do creative thinking, so you need them in order to bring creativity to your company. The reality is they follow the same techniques that you will. Creativity really is the result of applying these techniques in a way that opens you up to seeing the possibilities. The more you practice this with your team, the less likely it is you'll need the mythical creative input from an external company.

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