1.

Introduction

Welcome to Design Thinking!

Thinking like a designer can transform the way organizations develop products, services, processes, and
strategy. Design Thinking allows managers to use creative tools to address a vast range of challenges.

Design Thinking brings together what is desirable from a human point of view with what is
technologically feasible and economically viable. It is a systematic, human-centered approach to solving
complex problems within all aspects of life. The approach goes far beyond traditional concerns such as
shape and layout. And unlike traditional scientific and engineering approaches, which address a task
from the view of technical solvability, user needs and requirements, as well as user-oriented invention,
are central to the process.

Design Thinkers step into the end-users’ shoes – not only interviewing them, but also carefully observing
their behaviors. Solutions and ideas are concretized and communicated in the form of prototypes as
early as possible so that potential users can test them and provide feedback – long before the
completion or launch. In this way, Design Thinking generates practical results.

Three important factors make Design Thinking successful:

 the collaborative interaction of multi-disciplinary and decision-capable teams,

 flexible workspace for collaborative work

 and a workflow that follows the Design Thinking process.

In this course, we provide an overview of design thinking and work with a five-step model and several
tools to help you understand design thinking as a problem-solving approach. We also look at a detailed
case study of an organization that used design thinking to uncover compelling solutions.
2. What is Design Thinking?

Design thinking in its most arbitrary form is the act of “thinking like a designer”. However, despite
extensive literature on the topic, there is no singular agreed-upon definition. In this chapter, we will
discuss four of the most popular definitions of design thinking.

Problem Solving

Every design starts with a problem at the very beginning: People needed to shelter from the rain and
sleep in the cave but it’s too humid, so here came with the house. They needed to cover their bodies, so
the clothes were designed. People needed to hunt and the stones were too sharp, so they had tools.
People need to drink water and it’s too far to the river, so cups were made.

Any design is a purposeful demand solution starting from the problem. Consider this: You work for an
organization in East Africa. The organization sells treadle pumps (used for farmland irrigation) to the
local farmers. After years of operation, you notice that in some regions the treadle pumps sell extremely
well, while in other regions they don’t sell at all. You’ve been tasked with generating sales of the pumps
in those weak-performing regions.

What do you do? We will get to the answer is just a minute.

Design Thinking is a problem-solving framework. Tim Brown, CEO of IDEO, defines design thinking like
this:

“The mission of design thinking is to translate observation into insights and insights into products and
services that will improve lives.”

The goal of improving lives is an important endpoint to the process of design thinking. In fact, it’s what
design thinking is all about: finding fresh, creative solutions to problems, but in a way that puts people
and their needs first.

So, what exactly is design thinking and how can you use and apply it to solve any problem? Comparing
traditional problem-solving techniques with design thinking can answer these questions:

 Traditional: Traditional problem-solving often takes a methodical, almost scientific form.

Pinpoint a problem, define the steps to take and tools to use to reach a solution, then stick to
the plan and hope for the desired result. It’s straightforward, but not always flexible, innovative
or effective. What if the issue identified isn’t the real source of the problem? What if the steps
don’t lead to the right solution?
  Design Thinking: Instead of starting with a problem, design thinking starts with observation. It’s
informed by an understanding of the culture and the context of a problem (what people need),
rather than the problem.

Design thinking came to the rescue for the organization selling treadle pumps in East Africa. They were
able to identify why their product wasn’t selling in some regions and they found a solution. The solution
didn’t surface after an analysis of the problem itself — low sales. It wasn’t found after an 8-hour
corporate brainstorm in a New York high-rise, with people in suits debating over charts and economic
forecasts. The solution was born from a deep level of observation of the people who weren’t buying the
pumps, and the cultures they were a part of.

Problem Reframing

Everything really comes down to solving problems. To be successful and a leader in your field, you not
only have to come up with good solutions; you need to be innovative. And that can feel like waiting for
lightning to strike.

Sometimes we need to reposition our own problems. People do not actually need mobile phones
(nouns). People only need to communicate (verbs). So the problem at the cell phone level may be
important. The important thing is how to make people communicate better and more conveniently.

Reframing a problem helps you see it as an opportunity. Tina Seelig, who has been teaching classes on
creativity and innovation at Stanford University School of Engineering for 16 years, offers three
techniques for finding innovative solutions:

1. Rethink the question:

Start by questioning the question you’re asking in the first place. Before you start brainstorming, Seelig
suggests you start “frame-storming”: brainstorming around the question you will pose to find solutions.
For example, if you’re asking, “How should we plan a birthday party for David?” you’re assuming it’s a
party. If you change your question to, “How can we make David’s day memorable?” or “How can we
make David’s day special?” you will find different sets of solutions.

Refocusing the question changes our lens: Memorable is different than special – memorable might
involve a prank, for example. Once you reframe the questions, you might decide to select the best or
address them all. Each new question opens up your ability to generate new ideas.

2. Brainstorm bad ideas:

When an individual or group is tasked with being creative, often there’s pressure to only come up with
good ideas. Seelig likes to challenge teams to only think of bad ideas.

“Stupid or ridiculous ideas open up the frame by allowing you to push past obvious solutions,” she says.
“There is no pressure to come up with ‘good’ ideas. Then, those terrible ideas can be re-evaluated, often
turning them into something unique and brilliant.”

Once you have a list of bad ideas, brainstorm how they can become good ideas. In one of Seelig’s
classes, a bad idea was selling bikinis in Antarctica. A group that was tasked with making this idea a good
one came up with the idea to take people who want to get into shape on a trip to Antarctica. By the end
of the hard journey, they would be able to fit into their bikinis. Their slogan was “Bikini or Die.”

“Selling bikinis in Antarctica sounds like a really bad idea. But within five seconds, when asked to look at
it differently, the team came up with a way to transform it into a really interesting idea,” she says.

3. Unpack your assumptions:

Another way to reframe a problem is to challenge its perceived limitations or rules. Ask, “What are all of
the assumptions of the industry?” Make a list and turn them upside down by thinking about what would
happen if you did the opposite.

Seelig says this is a hard exercise because a lot of our assumptions are deeply ingrained. “Cirque du
Soleil challenged assumptions about what a circus is. Instead of cheap entertainment for kids, they
turned it into a high-end event for adults that competes with the theatre or opera,” she says. “In
addition, Southwest challenged the assumption that airlines had to have fixed seat assignments. This
opened the possibility of having riders line up before each flight–a radically different approach to
seating.”

Focus on Extreme Users

Designing a solution that will work for everyone means talking to both extreme users and those squarely
in the middle of your target audience.

An idea that suits an extreme user will nearly certainly work for the majority of others. And without
understanding what people on the far reaches of your solution need, you’ll never arrive at solutions that
can work for everyone. More importantly, talking to Extreme users can spark your creativity by exposing
you to use cases, hacks, and design opportunities that you’d never have imagined.

You work on a solution with extreme users in mind by following three simple steps:
  Determine who is extreme: Determining who is an extreme user starts with considering what
aspect of your design challenge you want to explore to an extreme. List a number of facets to
explore within your design space. Then think of people who may be extreme in those facets. For
example, if you are redesigning the grocery store shopping experience you might consider the
following aspects: how groceries are gathered, how payment is made, how purchase choices are
made, how people get their groceries home, etc. Then to consider the aspect of gathering
groceries, for example, you might talk to professional shoppers, someone who uses a shopping
cart to gather recyclables (and thus overloads the cart), product pullers for online buyers,
people who bring their kids shopping with them, or someone who doesn’t go to grocery stores.

 Engage: Observe and interview your extreme user as you would other folks. Look for
workarounds (or other extreme behaviors) that can serve as an inspiration and uncover insights.

 Look at the extreme in all of us: Look to extreme users for inspiration and to spur wild ideas.
Then work to understand what resonates with the primary users you are designing for.

When you speak with and observe extreme users, their needs are amplified and their workarounds are
often more notable. This helps you pull out meaningful needs that may not pop when engaging with the
middle of the bell curve.

System Thinking

Design thinking is a process of integrating different things into a system. We must observe the entire
system that involves innovation. For example, when designing medical devices, we cannot consider the
needs of users individually.

The systems we need to consider will involve many elements: busy doctors, stressful work, patient’s
mood, hospital space, and the rest of the equipment. Equipment manufacturers, government medical
insurance, etc. are all within our scope of innovation.
That’s why systemic design thinking is a recent initiative that integrates system thinking and human-
centered design, with the intention of helping with complex projects. The recent challenges coming
from the increased complexity caused by globalization, migration or sustainability render traditional
design thinking methods insufficient.

Systemic design intends to develop methodologies and approaches that help to integrate systems
thinking with design thinking towards sustainability on an environmental, social, and economic level. It is
a pluralistic initiative where many different approaches are encouraged to thrive and where dialogue
and organic development of new practices play a major role.
3. Core Principles

The popularization of design thinking as a tool for innovation resulted in large global corporations
adopting design disciplines into their ways of working, for example, Google, Samsung, and IBM. While all
of these might differ in detail, they commonly share these four core principles:

 Always ask questions: The only way to get to answers is to simply ask questions, both to
yourself and your colleagues. The more questions they ask, the better the answer can be.

 Focus on people: Design thinking is a human-centered approach to innovation that draws from

the designer’s toolkit to integrate the needs of people, the possibilities of technology and the
requirements for project success. It’s not ‘us versus them’ or even ‘us on behalf of them.’ For a
design thinker, it has to be ‘us with them.’

 Collaborate: Using the full mental power of the people involved is key. Usually, companies don’t
do that because they’re stuck in old structures and linear processes with departments fighting
with each other, and large hierarchical systems.

 Build your process around possibility: Design is built on the possibility of the never-seen-before.
Design thinking starts with understanding, exploring and materializing a solution or a concept.
4. Five Stages of Design Thinking

The Hasso-Plattner Institute of Design at Stanford (d.school) is the leading university when it comes to
teaching Design Thinking. The five stages of Design Thinking, according to d.school, are as follows:
Empathise, Define (the problem), Ideate, Prototype, and Test.

Empathise

“Empathise” is the first stage of the Design Thinking process. In the empathise stage, your goal, as a
designer, is to gain an empathic understanding of the people you’re designing for and the problem you
are trying to solve. This process involves observing, engaging, and empathising with the people you are
designing for in order to understand their experiences and motivations, as well as immersing yourself in
their physical environment in order to have a deeper personal understanding of the issues, needs and
challenges involved.

Empathy is crucial to a human-centered design process such as Design Thinking, and empathy helps
design thinkers to set aside his or her own assumptions about the world in order to gain insight into
their users and their needs. Depending on your time constraints, you will want to gather a substantial
amount of information at this stage of the Design Thinking process.

In the Empathise stage of a Design Thinking process, you will develop the empathy, understandings,
experiences, insights, and observations on which you will use to build the rest of your design project.

The following are some of the most popular Empathise methods:

 Assume a beginner’s mindset

 Ask What-How-Why

 Conduct interviews

 Build empathy with analogies

 Use photo and video user-based studies

 Use personal photo and video journals

  Create journey maps

It is how important to develop the best possible understanding of your users, their needs, and the
problems that underlie the development of the particular product or service you are aiming to design.

Define the problem

During the Define stage, you put together the information you have created and gathered during the
Empathise stage. This is where you will analyze your observations and synthesize them in order to
define the core problems that you and your team have identified up to this point.

A problem statement is important to a Design Thinking project because it will guide you and your team
and provides a focus on the specific needs that you have uncovered. It also creates a sense of possibility
and optimism that allows team members to spark off ideas in the Ideation stage, which is the third and
following stage in the Design Thinking process. A good problem statement should thus have the
following traits. It should be:

 Human-centred: This requires you to frame your problem statement according to specific users,
their needs and the insights that your team has gained in the Empathise phase. The problem
statement should be about the people the team is trying to help, rather than focusing on
technology, monetary returns or product specifications.

 Broad enough for creative freedom: This means that the problem statement should not focus
too narrowly on a specific method regarding the implementation of the solution. The problem
statement should also not list technical requirements, as this would unnecessarily restrict the
team and prevent them from exploring areas that might bring unexpected value and insight to
the project.

 Narrow enough to make it manageable: On the other hand, a problem statement such as
“Improve the human condition,” is too broad and will likely cause team members to easily feel
daunted. Problem statements should have sufficient constraints to make the project
manageable.

To illustrate, instead of defining the problem as your own wish or a need of the company such as, “We
need to increase our food-product market share among young teenage girls by 5%,” a much better way
to define the problem would be, “Teenage girls need to eat nutritious food in order to thrive, be healthy
and grow.”

The Define stage will help the designers in your team gather great ideas to establish features, functions,
and any other elements that will allow them to solve the problems or, at the very least, allow users to
resolve issues themselves with the minimum of difficulty. In the Define stage, you will start to progress
to the third stage, Ideate, by asking questions which can help you look for ideas for solutions by asking:
“How might we… encourage teenage girls to perform an action that benefits them and also involves
your company’s food-product or service?”
Ideate

During the third stage of the Design Thinking process, you are ready to start generating ideas. You’ve
grown to understand your users and their needs in the Empathise stage, and you’ve analyzed and
synthesized your observations in the Define stage, and ended up with a human-centered problem
statement. With this solid background, you and your team members can start to “think outside the box”
to identify new solutions to the problem statement you’ve created, and you can start to look for
alternative ways of viewing the problem.

The main aim of the Ideation stage is to use creativity and innovation in order to develop solutions. By
expanding the solution space, the design team will be able to look beyond the usual methods of solving
problems in order to find better, more elegant, and satisfying solutions to problems that affect a user’s
experience of a product.

There are hundreds of Ideation techniques such as Brainstorming, Co-Creation Workshops,

Mindmapping, and Storyboards. It is important to get as many ideas or problem solutions as possible at
the beginning of the Ideation phase. 

Brainstorming is a great way to generate many ideas by leveraging the collective thinking of the group,
by engaging with each other, listening, and building on other ideas. This method involves focusing on
one problem or challenge at a time, while team members build on each other’s responses and ideas
with the aim of generating as many potential solutions as possible. These can then be refined and
narrowed down to the best solution(s). Participants must then select the best, the most practical, or the
most innovative ideas from the options they’ve come up with.

Here are a few guidelines that will help you in the Ideation stage:

 Set a time limit

 Start with a problem statement and stay focused on the topic: Identify the core subject or the
main aim of the exercise. Condense the main issue into a problem statement and condense it
into a short “How Might We” sentence. You may even be able to synthesize this into a single
word. Your ideas should always branch off from this central headline.

 Defer judgment or criticism, including non-verbal: The brainstorming environment is not the

time to argue or for question other members’ ideas.

 Encourage weird, wacky and wild ideas: Free thinking may produce some ideas that are wide
off the mark, but brainstorming is about drawing up as many ideas as possible which are then
whittled down until the best possible option remains.

 Aim for quantity: Brainstorming is effectively a creative exercise, in which design thinkers are
encouraged to let their imaginations run wild. The emphasis is on quantity, rather than quality
at this stage.
  Build on each others’ ideas: One idea typically leads on from another; by considering the
thoughts, opinions, and ideas of other team members during the brainstorming session, new
insights and perspectives can be achieved, which then inform one’s own ideas.

 Be visual: The physical act of writing something down or drawing an image in order to bring an
idea to life can help people think up new ideas or view the same ideas in a different way.

 One conversation at a time: Design thinkers (or brainstormers) should focus on one point or
conversation at a time so as not to muddy their thinking and lose sight of the thread or current
objective.

Prototype

The design team will now produce a number of inexpensive, scaled-down versions of the product or
specific features found within the product, so they can investigate the problem solutions generated in
the previous stage. Prototypes may be shared and tested within the team itself, in other departments,
or on a small group of people outside the design team. This is an experimental phase, and the aim is to
identify the best possible solution for each of the problems identified during the first three stages.

Prototypes are built so that designers can think about their solutions in a different way (tangible product
rather than abstract ideas), as well as to fail quickly and cheaply, so that less time and money is invested
in an idea that turns out to be a bad one.

The solutions are implemented within the prototypes, and, one by one, they are investigated and either
accepted, improved and re-examined or rejected on the basis of the users’ experiences. By the end of
this stage, the design team will have a better idea of the constraints inherent to the product and the
problems that are present, and have a clearer view of how real users would behave, think, and feel
when interacting with the end product.

For instance, when developing software, a design team may produce a number of paper prototypes,
which the user can gradually work through in order to demonstrate to the design team or evaluators
how they may tackle certain tasks or problems. When developing tangible devices, such as the computer
mouse, designers may use a number of different materials to enable them to test the basic technology
underlying the product. With advances in 3D printing technology, producing prototypes is now often a
more instant and low-cost process.

It is important to remember that prototypes are supposed to be quick and easy tests of design solutions.
Here are a few guidelines that will help you in the Prototyping stage:

 Just start building: Design Thinking has a bias towards action: that means if you have any
uncertainties about what you are trying to achieve, your best bet is to just make something.
Creating a prototype will help you to think about your idea in a concrete manner, and
potentially allow you to gain insights into ways you can improve your idea.
  Don’t spend too much time: Prototyping is all about speed; the longer you spend building your
prototype, the more emotionally attached you can get with your idea, thus hampering your
ability to objectively judge its merits.

 Remember what you’re testing for: All prototypes should have a central testing issue. Do not
lose sight of that issue, but at the same time, do not get so bound to it so as to lose sight of
other lessons you could learn from.

 Build with the user in mind: Test the prototype against your expected user behaviors and user
needs. Then, learn from the gaps in expectations and realities, and improve your ideas.

Test

Designers or evaluators rigorously test the complete product using the best solutions identified during
the prototyping phase. This is the final stage of the 5 stage-model, but in an iterative process, the results
generated during the testing phase are often used to redefine one or more problems and inform
the understanding of the users, the conditions of use, how people think, behave, and feel, and to
empathise. Even during this phase, alterations and refinements are made in order to rule out problem
solutions and derive as deep an understanding of the product and its users as possible.

When conducting a user test on your prototype, it is ideal to utilize a natural setting (i.e., the normal
environment in which your users would use the prototype). If testing in a natural setting proves difficult,
try to get users to perform a task, or play a role, when testing the prototype. The key is to get users to
be using the prototype as they would in real life, as much as possible.

Here are a few guidelines that will help you in the Testing stage:

 Let your users compare alternatives: Create multiple prototypes, each with a change in a
variable, so that your users can compare prototypes and tell you which they prefer (and which
they don’t). Users often find it easier to elucidate what they like and dislike about prototypes
when they can compare, rather than if there was only one to interact with.

 Show, don’t tell: let your users experience the prototype: Avoid over-explaining how your
prototype works, or how it is supposed to solve your user’s problems. Let the users’ experience
in using the prototype speak for itself, and observe their reactions.

 Ask users to talk through their experience: When users are exploring and using the prototype,
ask them to tell you what they’re thinking. This may take some getting used to for most users, so
it may be a good idea to chat about an unrelated topic, and then prompt them by asking them
questions such as, “What are you thinking right now as you are doing this?”
  Observe: Observe how your users use — either “correctly” or “incorrectly” — your prototype,
and try to resist the urge to correct them when they misinterpret how it’s supposed to be used.
User mistakes are valuable learning opportunities. Remember that you are testing the
prototype, not the user.

 Ask follow up questions: Always follow up with questions, even if you think you know what the
user means. Ask questions such as, “What do you mean when you say …?”, “How did that make
you feel?”, and most importantly, “Why?”

If users experience difficulties, the design team must revisit their list of potential solutions and strategies
in order to establish new ways to solve the same problems. Testing can also help identify previously
unconsidered problems. The users’ feedback is priceless; without an understanding of what users need
in order to carry out their activities and tasks, the iterative design process and solution will fail.

5. Other Design Thinking Models

The simplicity of the “Five Stages Model” is considered both an advantage and a disadvantage. That’s
why two newer models called ZURB and the Double-Diamond method expand the “Five Stages Model”
by introducing new important aspects.

ZURB

The ZURB Design Thinking Model shares the D.School’s simplicity but also considers important stages
such as building the final product and getting feedback. The ZURB model includes five stages; Define,
Ideate, Prototype, Build and Analyze. The last two stages represent the build of the final product and
analysis of the market impact and user feedback.
This model presents two types of the iteration cycles; the design iteration, and the product reset (pivot):

 The first type includes the iteration between the stages ideate, prototype, build and analyze. If
something wrong happens, the team can iterate between the four stages above to file problems
and improve the product.

 The second iteration process is a hard reset. If there is a major failure or the product does not
meet the requirements, the product resets and returns directly to the define stage to repeat the
process from scratch and define the problem again.

You have probably noticed that the “build” and “analyze” phases are two stages that we have not seen
so far:

 The build phase is where you take all the information and feedback gathered from prototyping
and you begin to build the product with design layouts and build upon your already established
front-end coding. Thus, resulting in your final iteration.

 Once your product has been made available for the world audience, you should dive right into
the analyze phase of the design process. In this phase, you will gain insight into your newly
published product. You attain these insights through product research and user feedback.

Double-Diamond

The Double Diamond Diagram was developed by the British Design Council as part of their in-house

research to identify how leading companies manage the design process. The Double-Diamond process
includes four main stages; Discover, Define, Design, and Deliver. The first two stages define the project
strategy, while the third and fourth represent the executive solution.

 
Using the double diamond, you approach problems and solutions by using two different types of
thinking: divergent and convergent:

 Divergent thinking :  think broadly, keep an open mind, consider anything and everything
(Discover and Design phases)

 Convergent thinking :  think narrowly, bring back focus and identify one or two key problems
and solutions (Define and Deliver phases)

The four main phases are as follows:

 Discover: The first quarter of the Double Diamond model covers the start of the project.
Designers try to look at the world in a fresh way, notice new things and gather insights.

 Define: The second quarter represents the definition stage, in which designers try to make sense
of all the possibilities identified in the Discover phase. Which matters most? Which should we
act on first? What is feasible? The goal here is to develop a clear creative brief that frames the
fundamental design challenge.

 Design: The third quarter marks a period of development where solutions or concepts are
created, prototyped, tested and iterated. This process of trial and error helps designers to
improve and refine their ideas.
  Deliver: The final quarter of the double diamond model is the delivery stage, where the
resulting project (a product, service or environment, for example) is finalized, produced, and
launched.

6. Benefits of Design Thinking

As a manager, you have a pivotal role to play in shaping the products and experiences that your
company puts to market. Integrating Design Thinking can add huge business value, ultimately ensuring
that your products are desirable for customers and viable in terms of company resources.

With that in mind, let’s consider some of the main benefits of using Design Thinking at work:

 Significantly reduces time-to-market: With its emphasis on problem-solving and finding viable

solutions, Design Thinking can significantly reduce the amount of time spent on design and
development—especially in combination with lean and agile.
  Cost savings and a great ROI: Getting successful products to market faster ultimately saves the
business money. Design Thinking has been proven to yield a significant return on investment;
teams that are applying IBM’s Design Thinking practices, for example, have calculated an ROI of
up to 300% as a result.

 Improves customer retention and loyalty: Design Thinking ensures a user-centric approach,

which ultimately boosts user engagement and customer retention in the long term.

 Fosters innovation: Design Thinking is all about challenging assumptions and established beliefs,
encouraging all stakeholders to think outside the box. This fosters a culture of innovation which
extends well beyond the design team.

 Can be applied company-wide: The great thing about Design Thinking is that it’s not just for
designers. It leverages group thinking and encourages cross-team collaboration. What’s more, it
can be applied to virtually any team in any industry.

Whether you’re establishing a Design Thinking culture on a company-wide scale, or simply trying to
improve your approach to user-centric design, Design Thinking will help you to innovate, focus on the
user, and ultimately design products that solve real user problems.

7. Lean & Agile Management

Now that we know what Design Thinking is, let’s consider how it fits into the overall
product management process. You may have heard terms like “lean” and “agile” in the work
environment already. It is important to understand what these two approaches are and how they
interact with Design Thinking.

Based on the principles of lean manufacturing, lean management focuses on streamlining the work

process as much as possible—minimizing waste and maximizing value. Some core tenets of lean
management are:

 Cross-functional collaboration between designers, engineers, and product managers.

 Gathering feedback quickly and continuously, ensuring that you’re constantly learning and
adapting as you go.

 Deciding as late as possible and delivering fast, with less focus on long-term deliverables.

 A strong emphasis on how the team operates as a whole.

Lean management is a technique that works in conjunction with agile development methods. Agile is a

software development process that works in iterative, incremental cycles known as sprints. Unlike
traditional development methods (such as the waterfall method), agile is flexible and adaptive. Based
on the Agile Development Manifesto, agile adheres to the following principles:

 Individuals and interactions over processes and tools.

 Working software over comprehensive documentation.

 Customer collaboration over contract negotiation.

 Responding to change over following a plan.

Design Thinking, lean, and agile are often seen as three separate approaches. Companies and teams will
ask themselves whether to use lean or agile or Design Thinking—but actually, they can (and should!) be
merged for optimal results.

Why? Because applying Design Thinking in a lean, agile environment helps to create a product
development process that is not only user-centric but also highly efficient from a business perspective.
While it’s true that each approach has its own modus operandi, there is also significant overlap.
Combining principles from each can be crucial in keeping cross-functional teams on the same page—
ensuring that designers, developers, product managers, and business stakeholders are all collaborating
on one common vision.

Design Thinking is how we explore and solve problems; Lean is our framework for testing our beliefs and
learning our way to the right outcomes; Agile is how we adapt to changing conditions with software.
As we’ve learned, Design Thinking is a solution-based approach to exploring and solving problems. It
focuses on generating ideas with a specific problem in mind, keeping the user at the heart of the process
throughout. Once you’ve established and designed a suitable solution, you’ll start to incorporate lean
principles—testing your ideas, gathering quick and ongoing feedback to see what works—with particular
emphasis on cross-team collaboration and overcoming departmental silos. Agile ties all of this into short
sprint cycles, allowing for adaptability in the face of change. In an agile environment, products are
improved and built upon incrementally. Again, cross-team collaboration plays a crucial role; agile is all
about delivering value that benefits both the end-user and the business as a whole.

Together, Design Thinking, lean, and agile cut out unnecessary processes and documentation, leveraging
the contributions of all key stakeholders for continuous delivery and improvement.

8. Case Study

You might be thinking by now: “This is great but how is this going to help to quickly make my product a
reality?” In order to make Design Thinking somewhat more tangible, we will discuss a detailed case
study in this last part of the course.

Case Study: Intro

Imagine that you found yourself at a meeting with an entrepreneur, a few managers, and many ideas
flying around the room. Your direct competitor had recently released a new application and the tension
was palpable. The company wanted to go out with something new on the market, to avoid losing ground
to your competitor.

They prepared a document with some requirements, a vague idea of what the product should look like,
and how much should it cost.

“We have to follow what others have done, with a lower price,” the Marketing Director said. “We have
to create a more usable system, which simplifies the user journey,” added another manager. “We have
to change the way we collect information, simplify it and integrate our processes with third parties,”
said another. “It will take us months,” the technical manager shook his head, who mentally translated all
those requests into hundreds of hours of code to be implemented.

The product in this case study concerns a so-called hub communication software. This piece of software
managed different channels (email to SMS, fax to VoIP) and it was created for the web and mobile
platforms. The product was originally created a few years before, but its usability was poor. At the time
of the launch, the competitor was far ahead in terms of user experience. Moreover, they had an
excellent mobile app, which was gaining ground in the mobile app store.

Company X was a traditional process-driven company, familiar with traditional projects. It was new to
the idea of creating a product with the help of Design Thinking. More notably, they feared the unknown.
What if the new product would have an undesirable or unpredictable effect on their customer user
base? This lack of control didn’t inspire confidence.

The meeting described above did not lead to a clear definition of what the product to be achieved
actually was. You only knew that you had to hit the target as soon as possible.

However, as the project progressed and a competitor was beginning to gain traction, consent from the
company was solidifying. Despite some initial perplexity and fear, this was an opportunity to learn what
would bring real value to their user base and potentially attract more users by making a streamlined
lightweight product.

This prompted the company to look for approaches that they haven’t tried before, in order to have a
complete product built on time even if it’s going to have only essential features at its launch. You
decided to use the Design Thinking process and focus on the things that would really bring value to the
end-user and thus, beat the competition by bringing only what’s necessary to the customer.

Case Study: Empathise

The goal of this phase is to understand your customer, by searching and gathering information about
their business. During this phase, we can use several different tools, such as interviews, focus groups,
observations, and surveys.

In the most literal sense, empathy is the ability to understand and share the emotions of others. In
design thinking, empathy is a “deep understanding of the problems and realities of the people you are
designing for.”

Your first step was to ensure that the Highest Paid Person’s Opinion (otherwise known as HiPPO) was
not ruling over everyone else’s. Therefore, together with managers and the founder, you have compiled
a list of possible stakeholders to be involved in the decision-making process.

In a day-long meeting, you compiled the first list of 30 names (between employees, functional
managers, and customers) that could be contacted directly and then you also picked a target audience
of 4000 customers (about 10% of their recurring customer user base).

You tried to “normalize” our target customer base as much as possible, by including diversity in terms of
gender distribution, industry, and other data points. To add an additional level of complexity, the
physical location of the sample to be interviewed were all divided into different cities and in some cases
countries. You now had points of contacts to carry out interviews and questionnaires.
The group was organized to carry out the interviews remotely, following a scripted set of questions and
some basic rules:

 Try to understand the main “What, How, Why” behind every behavior.

 Make sure the interviewee used a webcam and that there was sufficient distance from the
camera to be able to at least partially include the body language.

 Record all interviews, in case they need to be seen in the future.

You prepared your interview questions with the intention of understanding which main features should
be enhanced or eliminated, such that you could quickly build a new version that responded to the needs
of your users.

For the second group of users, you prepared a series of questions in a Google form. You opted for
multiple-choice questions, with some formulated open-ended questions to facilitate more interaction
from the users, including a question requiring the user to try the new version of the product just
available in closed beta.

The first results of the interviews were encouraging, as the interviewees were open to providing
feedback on the weaknesses and the strengths of the system.

Case Study: Define

In this phase, we collect and categorize information from the Empathize phase. It’s here where we
define User Personas and User Journeys.

The dictionary meaning of define is “to determine the identity and the essential qualities of a notion.” In
your case you want to define the following:

 your ideal customers

 their problems
  the solutions to their problems

 the needs and fears of your customers that you had to address

In the design thinking terms, the define phase is where you analyze your observations and synthesize
them into core problems that you have identified.

You had a sufficient database to understand what the real problems were. In addition to the feedback
received in the Empathize phase, it contained points that were highlighted by Company X employees but
had never been pointed out to management, as well as strengths, weaknesses, and other problems that
have never been taken into account.

The next action was to create your User Personas. During this brainstorming phase, you involved the
entire extended team. 

For each Persona, you identified their biography, their approach to technology, their use of social media,
preferred brands, their needs, and ideas and speculated on what would have been their Customer
Journey.

After this, you had selected the common client User Personas and had a finished set of data coming
from interviews and surveys. This was the right time to get your hands dirty.

During the definition phase, you tried to transform a generic definition of a problem like, “We need a
product that will increase our sales by 10%,” into a more specific solution like: “Men and adult women,
between 35 and 45 years that are working in an office need to receive communications that have a legal
validity to be sure that the sender is actually who they say they are.”

At this point in the project process, you had completed brainstorming sessions around our users,
hypothesized solutions, and kept an open mind to every possible innovation. “The only stupid idea is the
one never expressed” was the mantra.

In a short time, bearing in mind who your subjects were, you had a clear view of what was useful to our
users, along with what needs and fears you should address along the customer journey.
Case Study: Ideate

One step further from the definition is the Ideation phase, where the key is forming real concepts and
solution, not just abstract definitions.

In design thinking terms, ideation is “the process where you generate ideas and solutions through
sessions such as Sketching, Brainstorming, Mindmapping, Worst Possible Idea, and a wealth of other
ideation techniques.”

Your team decided to proceed to work in a Lean way when producing materials and reviewing them. For
example, designers and other members of the team have agreed that to be as fast as possible, the best
solution would be to start with drawings on paper and to share photos of them in the group. Only then
you would produce the most interesting designs on a computer.

For each sketch that was produced, you gathered information from users, you defined a set of solutions
and you came back to those users (whenever it was possible and as often as it was possible) to test with
them the process and the result.

Case Study: Prototype

During this phase, something tangible is created, that will allow you to verify your idea in real life. Don’t
overcomplicate and create this prototype as quickly as possible.

During the prototype phase, it was finally time to make your definitions and ideas come to life. A
prototype is the first, original model of a proposed product, and this is exactly what you set out to build.
By design thinking standards, the prototype stage is where you create inexpensive, scaled-down
versions of the real product to investigate solutions from the previous stages.

After almost ten days from the beginning of your journey, you arrived at the crucial moment, a meeting
with a developer team where you had a chance to check your assumptions and estimations. After a
session of consultation and definition with the team of developers, you weighed the stories and
understood that the major effort of the development work will be in the development of the back-end
system. Alongside this, you also realized that creating the front-end systems will be a much shorter
exercise. Thus, you decided to create a front-end prototype using the components which already existed
in the system to save time.

After three days you had your first version of the prototype ready. It had “fake” data which reflected the
behavior of the software you were aiming to create. Some accessory elements were missing, but the
software in that state visually represented a good percentage of total content planned.

At the end of two weeks of work, you had software that you could try and test with actual users. You
used user experience monitoring software to analyze how users were navigating your prototype.

Case Study: Test

Verify your idea in real life with actual users. Get feedback. Ask questions on how to improve it.
Translate this collected knowledge into a final product.

After the definition, ideation and prototype phases it was finally time to see if your product actually
worked in real life. In design thinking terms, testing means putting the complete product to trial using
the best solutions created in the prototyping phase.

In your case, the testing phase did not only take place at the end, but it was a constant loop of feedback
and iteration whenever it was possible. At the end of each accomplished step, you tried to get feedback
from users or customers, before convincing yourself to move on to the next phase.
Once the prototype was completed, it was time to test it with the widest possible audience and check
with them how effectively it met their needs, understand their perception, and understand if it
accomplished their goals.

The testing phase specifically included a walkthrough prototype where users were able to see the new
workflow and perform actions, along with a few sessions where the team directly observed users, while
tracking their responses. A simple questionnaire was used where users were asked to score the process
from 1-10.

The testing phase was later extended to the whole team and some individuals outside the organization
(customers and users) who during the earlier sessions, had willingly consented to give their feedback on
the implementation of the system.

The results of this testing were encouraging. The stakeholders of the Company X were able not only to
see the mockups but to try out and “touch” the product for the very first time. The extended team had
the opportunity to test and verify their assumptions and correct them over time within a period of two
weeks.

With the help of Design Thinking, you were able to collect data, ideas, personas, feedback and create
your first tangible prototype. It was then time to roll up your sleeves and start developing the final
product.

Instead of using more traditional approaches and producing things in sequential steps, you have chosen
to iterate through the five design thinking stages. Empathize. Define. Ideate. Prototype. Test. This
became your mantra and allowed you to produce a very well-received product.

Using Design Thinking has lead you to save time, and in turn, save costs spend on the project. You were
not working on millions of different features, but only on a few, well thought through actions that were
clear to everybody in the team. Most importantly, you were able to deliver the product and value that
users needed.
9. Conclusion

In this course, you learned that Design Thinking has a human-centered core. You now possess a deep
understanding of how it encourages organizations to focus on the people you are creating for, which
leads to better products, services, and internal processes.

In employing design thinking, you are pulling together what’s desirable from a human point of view with
what is technologically feasible and economically viable. It also allows those who are not trained as
designers to use creative tools to address a vast range of challenges. The process starts with taking
action and understanding the right questions. It’s about embracing simple mindset shifts and tackling
problems from a new direction.

Throughout this course, you saw that design thinking can…

 help you or your team spot unmet needs of the people you are creating for,

 reduce the risk associated with launching new ideas,

 generate solutions that are revolutionary, not just incremental, and

 help organizations learn faster.

Design Thinking has become more than just a creative process. What was originally intended as an
innovation method, has advanced to a completely new way of seeing people in relation to work, of
imagining the concept of work. The appeal of Design Thinking lies in its ability to inspire new and
surprising forms of creative teamwork. “We-intelligence” is the new catchword and collaboration the
foundation for a new work awareness.

Thank you for taking this course and good luck with the quiz!