8a. Using Design Thinking to Discover Needs

We’ve covered the basics about the voice of the customer, discovery, and other terms relating to understanding customer needs. Let’s keep it moving.

This week we’re going to touch on how design thinking approaches learning about customer needs. This approach will range from things like observation and empathy to role-playing. Then we’ll keep going and cover jobs to be done, outcomes, and some other PD methods in the “lean” school of thought.

As you can tell, there is a shit-ton to talk about when it comes to product development and customer needs.

Design Thinking

Let’s do a quick primer on Design Thinking. Here is how the author Tim Brown of IDEO defines Design Thinking:

“Design thinking can be described as a discipline that uses the designer’s sensibility and methods to match people’s needs with what is technologically feasible and what a viable business strategy can convert into customer value and market opportunity.”

And here’s another good one from Brown:

“The evolution from design to design thinking is the story of the evolution from the creation of products to the analysis of the relationship between people and products, and from there to the relationship between people and people.”

Design thinking is about gaining a deep understanding of the problem space facing a human being and then designing solutions to solve their needs and wants.

Good design thinking depends upon the ability to gain insights into human behavior. It involves overlapping and iterative loops of diverging and converging thinking (we’ll talk more about this later). It’s infused with creativity.

The Key Values of Design Thinking:

• Be human-centric.
• Find opportunities to add value using empathy. Understand the consumer.
• Identify solutions. Be creative.
• Test your solutions. Refine them. Iterate constantly.
• Implement and continue learning

More on specific methods for learning about the customer to come.

8b. Get Out of the Building! Run For Your Lives!

Something you will see in nearly every book on design thinking and the Lean Startup Method is that you have to get out of the building. This is slang for “go talk to your customers.”

I really like the way that stick-figure came out . . . just the right vibe of caution . . . 

In Four Steps to the Epiphany, Steve Blank talks about getting out of the building on pretty much every page. He describes finding early-evangelists — your ideal first customers. They are people who have the problem you’re trying to solve and want a solution so badly that they’ve tried to implement their own homegrown solution — which probably turned out badly. Find these people and talk with them.

You’ll hear even more about this concept in design thinking writing. All design thinking books talk about the importance of observation in the real world. Watch people waiting in line, watch people at the airport, watch them in their homes (with their permission).

Did you know that when people shower in the morning, they have their eyes closed for more than half of the shower?

I didn’t know that until I read about it in a book about Design Thinking. I have no idea how the data was gathered, but damn if that isn’t the most amazing example of getting out of your building and learning about your customer.

Next time you think you can’t get close to the customer and learn about his or her needs, just think about whoever had to study people in the shower.

And while watching other people is great, design thinking advocates getting out and experiencing the world as your customers would. If you’re designing a shopping cart, go shopping. (IDEO designs a shopping cart)

There is a Japanese term for this process of “getting out and seeing for yourself.” It’s called “Genchi Genbutsu.”

In order to design a better minivan, Toyota engineers took a gigantic road-trip around America. Not only did they learn a lot about their customers and how to design a better product, but more importantly, they learned about themselves and the meaning of friendship. Not really, but maybe.

“There are no facts inside of your building, just opinions.” — Steve Blank

8c. Some Jargon and Key Terms from Design Thinking

Let’s just do an easy one here and list some key terms from design thinking — especially some that relate to identifying customer needs.

Some of these have been covered before, but repetition is good for learning!

Design Thinking — A design philosophy that is user-centric more than anything, and a design process that emphasizes deep understanding of consumer behavior and ideation-prototyping loops.

Anthropology — The study of people; a mindset taken in Design Thinking where you observe people’s behavior with an inquisitive or beginner’s mind.

Empathy — Describes putting yourself in another’s shoes, particularly to gain a deep understanding of the consumer or user’s needs and experience.

Observation — Watching what someone does; people will often unintentionally explain their behavior in a way that contradicts what they actually do, so surveying them can produce inaccurate results.

Get Out of the Building — Exactly what it means; get out and see what’s happening with your consumers, your market, and the way consumers are interacting with products; “there are no facts inside the building, only opinions.” Gemba mindset means being at the actual place where things are happening.

Beginner’s Mind — The mental state of being new to something; used to describe the state of being keenly aware of everything, seeing as though for the first time.

Consumer Needs — Usually fairly narrow term for what the consumer wants or needs, but also a broad concept ranging across the hierarchy of human needs.

Needfinding — The art of talking to consumers and discovering their needs.

Articulated Need — A need that a consumer can articulate or explain.

Unarticulated Need — A need that a consumer cannot articulate or explain, but exists nonetheless.

Core Human Values / Maslow’s Hierarchy — A theory that humans share core needs, each need being only possible to address when the more fundamental need beneath it has been met: Physiological, Safety, Love/Belonging, Esteem, Self-Actualization. (The 30 Things Customers Really Value — HBR, expanding on the hierarchy of needs)

Desire — This is something that a person wants, which is different than what a person needs, but products can address needs and/or desires; you can get semantic and talk about how our desires are really needs, but let’s not get philosophical up in this bitch.

Implicit Requirement — Something the consumer expects in a product without having to articulate or explicitly ask for it; a product characteristic that goes without saying.

Problem Space — Relating to the fundamental issue or challenge to be solved, or the value meant to be delivered; where the customer’s needs “live”; (Good book: The Lean Product Playbook; Product Talk www.producttalk.org)

Solution Space — The realm of possible solutions or products which can address the problem space; (Good book: The Lean Product Playbook; Product Talk www.producttalk.org)

Product-Market Fit — “The degree to which a product satisfies a strong market demand” — Marc Andreessen; “Product/market fit means being in a good market with a product that can satisfy that market” — Andreessen. (See also Sean Ellis; Steve Blank — The Four Steps to the Epiphany); P-M-F is a journey.

Product Discovery — The process of determining what to build; finding opportunities to deliver value. “The Cycles of the Discovery phase are all about talking to your users to reveal real use cases and goals and then translating those into product requirements. Elements that we use in these Cycles include user research, building user scenarios through story mapping, and developing personas based user interviews.” Source “Where product delivery is about creating the product we are confident in shipping, product discovery generates the insights that inform what that delivered product should be.” SVPG*

*Source:I don’t think I’ve mentioned Marty Cagan’s Silicon Valley Product Group. If you like the Distillery, you’ll like SVPG. Lot’s of resources on how great products are built.

8d. Observation and Empathy

Chapter 2 of Change By Design is called “Converting Need into Demand, or Putting People First.”

“The mission of design thinking is to translate observations into insights and insights into products and services that will improve lives.” — Tim Brown, Change By Design

Uncovering Needs

Human beings are extremely adaptable. As Brown observes, “They sit on their seat belts, write their PINS on their hands, hang their jackets on doorknobs, and chain their bicycles to park benches.”

Because they’re so adaptable, people often don’t even recognize their needs. We’re so accustomed to adapting, we can’t imagine a better solution might exist.

This being the case, the Design Thinker’s challenge is “helping people to articulate the latent needs they may not even know they have.”

How do you get people to identify and articulate latent needs? Observation, Empathy, and Insight.

Observation

We talked about getting out of the building and engaging with the world your customers inhabit. Observation is obviously one of the key things you should be doing once you have gotten out of the said building.

Observation is very, very different from talking to your customer. With observation, you stay the hell out of the equation. Don’t interfere with your test subjects. Be a scientist observing animals in their natural habitat.

Some people might call it spying. Design Thinkers call it Observation.

Watch what people do and what they don’t do. What they say and what they don’t say.

Watch people who are not your target market. IDEO was designing cookware for everyday people, so they went and watched children cook. They also watched professional chefs. Neither group was the target market, but observing both led to applicable insights.

Focus on noticing, not thinking, and analyzing; insight comes later.

Empathy

Empathy describes a “first-hand” feel for the problem space. Empathy is about walking in the shoes of your consumer.

As one IDEO employee experienced, it is about going through the hospital with a camera in hand to capture first-hand that “patient journey.” (This was probably much more badass before smartphones had cameras; I’m picturing someone with a gigantic handheld camcorder.)

Empathy, as portrayed by a stick-figure and a metaphor that is quite lame

Empathy is definitely much more related to this concept of “experience” than it is to observe. It describes when a design thinker feels the need herself and is thus able to draw from her skillset the necessary solution to address “her” need.

Insight and Synthesis

Design is a process that creates something that did not exist before.

Contrast that with solving for X in a mathematical equation. With Design Thinking, it’s not a matter of uncovering a previously hidden solution, but rather identifying the problem itself and inventing a solution that never existed before.

This approach requires great creativity, and it often requires drawing upon information and insight from a variety of sources (field observations, knowledge of technology, human psychology, etc.)

Synthesis is the art of pulling all of these various inputs together into an elegant solution. Here is a picture of Synthesis in action:

Synthesis, by It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia

Long post today! Damn. Nice work. We’ll wrap up Design Thinking in the next section.

Source: Change By Design, by Tim Brown

8e. Design Thinking Recap

How did we get to Design Thinking?

Recall our discussion about Product-Market Fit. Recall the need to really understand the problem space and customer needs in order to design products that provide maximum value.

One of the primary principles of Design Thinking is an intense focus on the customer and his or her problem space. Design Thinking is “human-centered design.”

It’s a topic that should naturally arise when thinking about discovering and defining human needs.

We’ve only really started to scratch the surface of the topic. Design Thinking employs many tools for learning about the problem space, but it equally provides many tools for exploring the solution space — tools like brainstorming and prototyping. We’ll talk more about these topics in future posts…don’t you worry.

Design Thinking Principles — Learn About the Problem Space

Get out of the building and learn.

Observe your customer like a scientist or anthropologist.

Experience his or her journeys using empathy. Put yourself in his or her shoes, figuratively and literally (as in, have the same experiences, don’t literally put their shoes on, unless you are researching  shoes).

Resources

Here are some cool links relating to Design Thinking.

IDEOU — IDEO offers online courses and good content on Design Thinking. They are kind of the experts on the topic.

Change By Design, by Tim Brown. Start here. An eto read book and it covers the topic well. Tim Brown works for IDEO.

IDEO founder David Kelley talking “human-centered design” at TED. Link.

Example of Design Thinking — This is a good article written by a student; it has some nice visuals and covers the topic in 15 minutes.

SVPG – Marty Cagen’s Silicon Valley Product Group. Great resources mostly focused on tech products.