Cheat Sheet: Design thinking

Want to create slick, customer-friendly apps and websites? Steve Cassidy explores an approach that puts the user first

Want to create slick apps and websites? We explore an approach that puts the user first.

Is this about taking a course at MIT in order to understand how our own business works?

From the question, I can tell which Google links you’ve been clicking on. MIT’s Sloan School of Management does offer courses in design thinking, but they’re talking about big-picture business processes. When we techies talk about design thinking, it’s more about the particular operation of websites, apps or other lumps of technology.

So in the context of IT development, how does design thinking differ from just… design?

Design thinking focuses on understanding how (and why) users want to interact with a product. It isn’t about making sure your compiler doesn’t run out of stack space. You may recognise this distinction from earlier discourse about the user experience (UX); in a sense, design thinking merely expands the list of best practices, and indeed the list of stakeholders.

What do you mean by stakeholders? I’m the one paying the bill, so I’m the only one who needs to approve the design.

This is where design thinking can help, albeit in a way that might be a little hard to swallow. From the driest academic study to the cheesiest self-help book, when people explore the reasons for the failure of a given project, it’s hardly ever down to the technology. Projects fail because people are fallible, and one of the worst types of fallibility is the idea that being the boss makes you infallible. I’ve seen this myself in multiple projects: some people seem to consider that, as the buck stops with them, their own whims and preferences are all that matters. That’s not a model for success.

How does design thinking change that?

Design thinking is about putting the user first, effectively treating them, rather than you, as the primary stakeholder. This can mean turning the traditional development process almost on its head.

Rather than trying to perfect the product to your own internal standards before you present it to the public, you might offer a prototype to potential customers at the earliest possible juncture. No matter how much internal planning and testing you’ve done, users with no personal investment in the project, or its technical underpinnings, are often the ones who generate the most useful feedback. This approach gives you an opportunity to identify and remedy missteps that a top-down approach would miss – until the site went live.

So design thinking really means design by opinion poll?

Some issues are subjective, such as whether your shopping basket button ought to be square or rounded. In other areas, there’s not much room for debate: does the button actually work? You may choose to disregard some feedback, but the key is making informed decisions. If you have to compare the design thinking proposal with an old-school concept, it’s like a checklist of milestones on the way to project completion ( see “The five steps of design thinking” below).

This is going to add to our project costs – can we be sure it will benefit the bottom line overall?

That’s an understandable concern. But perhaps there’s a nagging voice in your subconscious that knows you have been counting too many beans, and have lost track of some subtle aspects of being human, such as being elegant, engaging or helpful. Design thinking helps you direct your resources towards what’s really important, and that surely will contribute to the bottom line. The effect might be indirect, but watch other indicators to see the benefit of a more correct, more user-focused design process.

“When people explore the reasons for the failure of a given project, it’s hardly ever down to the technology”