In your professional daily routine, you have to make decisions every day—whether you are a manager or not. Sometimes the right solution is clearly in front of you without requiring much thought. However, far-reaching decisions with consequences for customers and colleagues often take a long time. This is also because we tend to initially ignore our gut feeling or the obvious solution and immediately dive into analyzing target groups, markets, and stakeholders. Numbers, facts, and polished charts give us the feeling of making a well-founded decision. That can work.
But your initial gut feeling can just as easily lead you down the right path. The Design Thinking method embraces this fundamental idea by giving intuitive approaches to problems the same importance as analytical thinking. In the Design Thinking process, you consciously alternate between phases of discovery and experimentation and phases of analysis and evaluation. What also characterizes the method is that it consistently places the user’s needs at the center—just like in classic product design. Hence the name.
How Does Design Thinking Work?
Design Thinking works best in teams. The more diverse the experiences and professional backgrounds of the team members, the better. The ideal case: representatives from different departments represent the three perspectives that are crucial for decision-making:
- the user’s perspective
- the perspective of technical feasibility
- the perspective of economic viability.
The heart of Design Thinking is the iterative process—testing ideas. To do this, the team continuously develops prototypes and immediately subjects them to practical testing. This sounds terribly technical, but it is quite simple. With a few chairs and tables, the planned customer center can be visualized in no time. Team members slip into the roles of customers and advisors—and the prototype is ready.
It is not about perfection, but about trying.
What works well? Where do we need to improve? What makes no sense at all? What is missing? After each test, results are evaluated and adjustments are made.
The Six Steps
Design Thinking can, but does not have to, lead to the final solution to your problem. The method primarily gets your brain working, encourages you to consider unconventional approaches, and gives your creative thinking process a structure—and that includes six steps.
- Understand: Here is the solution! – What was the problem again? Sometimes we lose sight of the essentials amid all the analyses and target group definitions. The one question that matters. Find it as a team and write it down where everyone can see it. The rule here is: Keep it simple! Example: How can we improve employee satisfaction in the Berlin customer centers?
- Observe: Get to know the user! Instead of googling Sinus milieus online, go out and talk to the people you want to reach. Ask what they need or observe them in situations relevant to your problem-solving. Also ask people from the target group’s environment.
- Point-of-View: Exchange your observations within the team. Tell stories about the users and piece them together into an overall picture. This reveals your prototypical user with their specific needs. Now you can formulate your question even more precisely. How can we support Steffen, who has been working at the customer center in Berlin Mitte for 7 years, loves variety, and often does not have time to familiarize himself with the latest technical data he is supposed to convey to customers, so that he goes to work with joy again?
- Ideate: Brainstorming begins. Capture all thoughts on Post-its, cards, or on the flipchart. Other creativity techniques are also possible. The goal is to produce as many ideas as possible. After sorting, the group decides which ideas to pursue further.
- Prototype: Now it is time to try out the best ideas. As a team, you develop simple prototypes for this. It can be a storyboard, a paper model, or a role-play, as long as it helps to understand the idea, develop it further—or discard it. Storyboard example: Steffen rotates and works in other customer centers three times a month. This gives him the variety he desires, and he can exchange information with colleagues about new devices.
- Test: As the idea takes concrete shape, involve the target group. Talk to Steffen and use the feedback to refine the idea further—or to look for an alternative (see point 4).
Design Thinking also wants to tap into the crazy ideas and the seemingly mundane ones. Into head and gut! This works best when the team moves away from their usual desks and spaces. Flexible furniture, mobile partitions, and boards with plenty of space for notes, as well as sufficient working materials like Post-its and markers, help make thought processes visible.
At a Glance
- Design Thinking comprises 6 steps: Understand, Observe, Point-of-View, Ideate, Prototype, and Test.
- A simply formulated question that describes the core of the problem is the starting point.
- The possible solution is tested using a prototypical user. Ideas are immediately tested with simple means within the team, and later with the involvement of the target group.
[mc4wp_form id=”10811″]
