“But how do we make goodness attractive? By doing whatever we can do to bring courage to those whose lives move near our own. By treating our ‘neighbor’ at least as well as we treat ourselves — and allowing that to inform everything that we produce.”
– Mr. Rogers
I love Mr. Rogers. He was a design thinker without even knowing it. This quote proves that anyone, anywhere can be a design thinker. I also love that it makes me question, what does ‘good’ and ‘goodness’ even mean? We’re all striving for some version of ‘good’ when we produce solutions, even in complex enterprise environments. Employees like to feel like they’re adding value. Customers perceive value in relationship to their own needs and their own definition of ‘good.’
Design thinking is a tool that allows us to simplify the innovation process, containing it and putting the people affected by the solution at its center. It isn’t a new concept: The core pieces of design thinking methodology date back to the 1960s. And as Mr. Rogers demonstrates, people have been embracing its core concepts even longer than that. However, more traditional business and enterprise environments have begun adopting design thinking only recently.
Historically, most enterprise companies have focused on their business perspective first. This feels natural because the people in the system understand the most about its capabilities. But a business’s priorities can often be very different from that of an end-user.
For example, if I asked you to pick the ‘best’ chair from the two below, which would you pick?
You’re probably thinking: “These are two totally different chairs! What do you mean by ‘best?’” I bet you had a lot of follow-on questions. They may have looked something like this:
Who will use it?
How long will they sit on it?
What will they do in it?
Where will it be placed?
How much does it cost?
How long will it last?
This is how we begin to solve a problem.
If I asked you to choose the best chair for yourself, you’d probably be able to narrow those questions easily because you have a context you understand:
How would those questions change if I told you that someone else in your organization was going to choose the best chair for you? Something like this has probably happened to you in the past, perhaps when you were provided a new tool or piece of equipment. Did anyone come to you beforehand to ask what you needed to be successful? Typically, the person making this choice would ask questions based on the expectations and context set by their role. Their questions might look very different:
Do you think you’d be happy with a chair selected from the latter criteria? Probably not. But does your company have the resources to ask the same questions you would ask when picking a chair for yourself, for each individual employee? Probably not.
The truth is, for large companies, the best solution probably lies somewhere in the middle. If you treat design thinking as a precious process that only focuses on the needs of the user without any associated business goals or constraints, the right solution is less likely come to fruition. However, if you only focus on business goals and constraints, you’re likely to develop an outcome that nobody will want to adopt. And if you force users into it, your brand perception will decrease.
At Ogilvy, we’ve modified the design thinking process slightly to account for some of the realities of business. By embracing these small changes, design thinking shifts from a buzzword to a powerful tool that helps large companies innovate more effectively.
This is the typical design thinking process. Most of you have probably seen this somewhere before:
And here is our modified version that we believe works better for our partners:
Let’s take a closer look at the differences.
Empathy
In traditional design thinking, the empathy portion typically involves watching end-users struggling with a problem. That might be customers or employees struggling with existing solutions, or no solution at all. It’s about watching, learning and putting yourself in the users’ shoes.
While we agree that those are valuable activities, large companies can extend that process by reviewing quantitative data that you already have about your audience. This will better help you understand not only what they’re doing, but the frequency and volume of those actions — providing greater clarity as to what the real problems are from the audience’s perspective. You can answer questions like:
Where are they spending time?
Where are they getting stuck?
What seems to be working that we don’t want to break?
Once you know this, the other activities associated with empathy, like observation and qualitative research, can be much more targeted toward an outcome that will drive the most value for your business.
Define
This is where you will construct a point of view on the problem you’re trying to solve and the types solutions that may work for your audience.
When defining a problem statement, you’ll likely be working in a team with representatives from many parts of your business, from product owners to technology. It’s important that you use the information you gained in the empathy phase to pressure-test suggestions to ensure that you’re solving the right problem. If someone in the room wants to build a mobile app just because competitors have apps, but your audience is performing the tasks on their work computers, you’ll know that an app isn’t a viable solution.
Ideate
In the ideate phase, your only goal is to design out your best idea (or few ideas) so that you can prototype and test them later.
However, in an enterprise environment, this shouldn’t be a “blue sky” exercise. If your solution isn’t feasible, there’s no point in putting it through the prototype and test phases. Ensure feasibility by involving the right technology and business partners, asking questions like “Can this design be built?” or “Do we have the budget for it?” before proceeding.
Sometimes, design thinking traditionalists will get stuck here. They feel that if you’re asking questions like that, you’re not pushing the boundaries of what’s possible enough, and there is danger of that happening. Often it helps to brainstorm constraints at the beginning and discuss as a team whether those constraints are inflexible or flexible. When you talk about this together, you’re likely to uncover solutions or options that you didn’t know were possible. Alternatively, you can discover blockers that you didn’t know existed. Nobody knows your business better than you.
Prototype
Don’t be precious about this step. The goal here is to get something tangible into the world as quickly as possible. Even if that’s just paper sketches, that’s okay. If you spend too much time making your prototype, you’ll have less time to make it better through iteration.
Test
Traditionally, this step focused on gaining qualitative feedback from your audience. By putting the prototype in front of as many people as you can find, you can answer questions like:
Can people use it?
Does it solve the problem it was intended for?
However, we recommend taking this a step further and creating KPIs associated with your business and audience goals, turning them into standard questions that you ask for every iteration of your prototype. Asking these questions continually will help ensure that you’re truly solving the problem that you’ve identified, and that each iteration is an improvement on the one before.
Iterate
Execute the ideate/prototype/test loop as many times as you can with the resources you have. The more times you can do it, the closer you will move to a viable solution for your business. Don’t worry about making it perfect, though. The goal of this process isn’t perfection — it’s improvement. Once you’re confident that you can move the needle enough for your audience and your business, move forward! Make the business case. Build the product. Do whatever you need to do to make your ideas a reality.
Whatever problems you are struggling to solve, design thinking may be able to help. To learn more about how Ogilvy can help solve complex digital challenges for your business, get in touch.
Author: Amanda Gagliardi, Vice President of Experience Design
As Vice President of Design, Amanda leads Effective’s New York City office and provides design oversight to clients. She specializes in solving problems at the intersection between customer experience and process improvement for digital and physical customer touchpoints. She’s particularly passionate about making better experiences for Effective’s clients. She loves working with teams to work through the best way to deliver to their particular client. “If our clients don’t have a good experience with us, why would they trust us to build an experience for their audience?”
