Design Thinking: is like Teenage Sex...

Escalator Acting As Stairs, (Devonian Gardens, Calgary AB) - Wayne Pau CC BY

Warning: I normally only write nice and polite blog posts. However this has been bugging me for quite sometime, therefore if I am offending anyone's sensibilities I apologize in advance. Hopefully I'm not starting the New Year on the wrong foot.

To bastardize a quote from one of my favourite authors Dan Ariely on Big Data:

"Design Thinking is like teenage sex: everyone talks about it, everyone thinks everyone else is doing it, so everyone claims they are doing it…” - Wayne Pau (2017)

The only big difference is that I think those who have been doing Design Thinking for a long time do know what it truly is (and what it is not). Unfortunately *not* being a typical formulaic step-by-step methodology and more a loosely knit tool-box and mantra, Design Thinking is vulnerable to many misconceptions and misunderstandings. Often small parts of a true process are used and labelled Design Thinking or people using similar methodologies and calling it Design Thinking.

Here are five reasons why I am sometimes forced into uncomfortable conversations which end with: "I'm really sorry Mr./Mrs./Miss/Ms. important person but you're not really doing Design Thinking..."

#1 - You didn't Interview any Real Users.

I've been at projects where they have advised that we skip the Empathy stage altogether since the senior people in the room know everything there is to know about the problem. A big reason to use something disruptive like Design Thinking is because you want to come up with something different and more than just additive innovation. 

You just don't know what you don't know.  You want to know why your team isn't getting any new and radical insights? Well quite simply start by going outside your organization and outside your team to the 'user'. If you haven't left the building yet, you aren't doing it right.

#2 - You started with with a Problem Statement.

Design Thinking has two whole stages before we even come up with the problem statement (aka the Point-of-View and How-Might-We Statements). By jumping into what you think the issue is, you skipped eliminated 2/5 or 40% of Design Thinking stages (Empathy, Define, Ideate, Prototype & Test). 

Many times by truly doing the Empathy and Define stages, you learned what the real underlying problem is and how you might go about rectifying the situation.

#3 - You didn't get a good Design Thinking Coach or Facilitator

It's easy right? Read a few blogs. Tried the Design Project Zero introduction. Baptism by fire right? (Ignore the fact that turn-key, all-inclusive, end-2-end project with IDEO or FROG could cost you $1M.) Running your first Design Thinking project isn't like taking the self-guided tour at the MoMA, where you can do a little research yourself and get by quite reasonably.

The real issue is that really no two Design Thinking projects are identical. The exact path or tools you used to attack on particular problem won't necessarily be the same way you tackle another problem. Good coaches and facilitators have been through a few projects and have a good idea of what to when things go south (because when things are going 'well', everything is 'easy'). Unless a group is well experienced with Design Thinking, you are going to need some level of guidance.

#4 - You didn't build and/or test anything.

"Build to Think. Test to Learn" - d.school Introduction to Design Thinking Process Guide

An idea is just an idea until you put it into life. While factories and roller-coasters today can be built virtually in 3D software, unfortunately the 'best' way we do this in Design Thinking is building some type of prototype and get people's feedback on it. 

Ideas are fuzzy and vulnerable to interpretation and misunderstanding. Prototypes are often tangible and interactive. In Design Thinking we actually go out of our way to make decision/stance on something and test it out in the prototype. This way we often a get clear positive feedback (in which case we can decide to amplify) or negative feedback (in which case we decide to remove or change it).

#5 - You didn't iterate on anything.

Basically you did the bare minimum and came up with a new wacky idea and put all your hopes on that one idea will change *EVERYTHING*. If you were honest, you probably just ran out of time, weren't that committed or didn't read that chapter on 'Failing-Faster to Succeed-Sooner."

How was your First Drawing you ever did? First Cake you baked? First Story your wrote? Design Thinking depends heavily on the power of iteration and that we might not get it right the first time, but we'll eventually get something amazing! One or two short brain-storming sessions does not make a Design Thinking project.

Curious Chameleon, Toronto Zoo - Wayne Pau CC BY

Design Thinking seems like all the rage today. That's great. The d.school, IDEO and others have really helped share this with the world. Yet like every other wave of innovation, those whose are actually implementing the methodology properly and not just sapping on the label of Design Thinking will be the ones reaping the rewards.

Hope that helps...
w.

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Wayne Pau is Development Architect at SAP working on creating a new breed of enterprise Internet of Things products. A graduate of University of Waterloo Systems Design Engineering, Wayne has taken pretty much every job there is in Software/Product Development. Feel free to connect/follow on LinkedIn, Twitter (@Wayne_Pau) or Blogger (http://waynepau.blogspot.ca/).

Note: All views are my own.

Design Thinking: User Needs vs. User Wants (What I love about my Aeron Chair...)

If you haven't sat on one of these chairs, I'd highly recommend it (you can always just go to your Local Herman Miller Show-case if your work or friends don't already own one). As a user it's pretty much the perfect chair. I don't think I've sat in a more comfortable chair (when fully configured properly), especially with the optional lumbar support at the back. 

(Not all companies are willing to invest in their employees, but it's definitely a luxury I've totally enjoy at my office.)

(My actual chair - a 10+ year old model)

Herman Miller has always been knowing for their high-end furniture, but when they invented the Aeron, it was a game-changer. I remember being in a fancy dot.com start-up and getting these chairs! It was all the rage, but it was a chair that cost many times more than it's traditional alternatives. (Today's Black-Friday sale @ HM had it at $577.15 from $679.00, but I distinctly remember it being closer to $1000 earlier on.)

This is what the HM sites says in it's description:

The Work Chair Redefined

Aeron changed the way everyone thought about office chairs—from its revolutionary look to its advanced ergonomics to the fact that it's 94 percent recyclable.

Instantly adaptable to all the motions you go through every day while seated, Aeron provides healthy comfort and balanced body support. Its innovative suspension and easy-to-use adjustment controls let the chair move effortlessly as your body moves.

(http://store.hermanmiller.com/Products/Aeron-Chair)

If you haven't already, I encourage you to look at the Design Story feature @ the HM site. 

(Prototype - http://store.hermanmiller.com/Products/Aeron-Chair#story)

(Above is a great example of a low-fi model. In the video, Stumpf talks about another prototype as "just ugly". A topic for another day, but prototypes are great! Sketches are great! Look at how many were created during the Aeron design! Think about the 50lbs of clay from the last blog.)

From the web site there are many quotes, but these are a brief splattering of the most "telling" ones:

"They threw out all preconceived notions of what a work chair should look like."

"Function Is Form"

"We wanted a totally new kind of chair.

"I want to sit on this really bad."

The chair we are looking at today, the first Aeron, over 20 years old (designed in 1992) was a disruptive innovative change. The chair won so many awards and it's crowning achievement is that it's part of the MoMA permanent collection. Yet how could a chair so beloved today actually almost not make it to market?

If you've read Malcolm Gladwell's Blink, it tells of the chair didn't do well.

• 4.5/10 for Comfort Scale
• 2-3/10 for  Aesthetics Scale

It actually didn't even meet min. score (7.5) that Herman Miller internally puts on Test Group ratings before product release. It was actually called "The Chair of Death" by in the 1st group. Yet luckily Max Depree the Chairman and CEO of Herman Miller at the time had the foresight to ship it regardless. This is his explanation:

“We are a research-driven product company. We are not a market-driven company. It means that we intend, through the honest examination of our environment and our work and our problems, to meet the unmet needs of our users with problem-solving design and development”

- Max Depree (Chairman and CEO of Herman Miller, Inc)

Notice that Depree clearly understood the role and limitation of Market Driven data. He had the courage to forge forward and now the chair he oversaw is now in the MoMA. Yet that wasn't blind-faith, it was because he knew his guys *knew* users. The product was too disruptive to get an accurate Market Target Group rating.

*****

So why did I write this post? Was it simply just because I wanted to talk about the amazing chair that I've sat on for far, far too long? No. I believe that today far too many people looking at Design Thinking confuse interviewing Users for their Insights with asking consumers their Opinions. In Design Thinking, especially at the Empathy stage, I would never give a survey on a final product and ask them to rate from 1 to 10 what they thought of Comfort, Aesthetics, Usability and then using some fancy math to determine how to optimize those parameters.

It sounds cliche but simply Users don't know what they want. As Design Thinkers if we get "Lazy" and try to get end-users to design products, we will never get Disruptive Innovation. At best all we can is slightly better, incremental development (ie a prettier iPhone, etc). At worse we get something totally unusable, like the Car built for Homer.

(http://onscreencars.com/tv/the-homer-the-car-built-for-homer/)

"A camel looks like a horse that was planned by a committee"

- Sir Alec Issigonis

Users are great at being Users, but usually are very poor Designers. That's why even in Usability Testing we *never* ask questions which lead a user to offer an alternative design. Questions like: "Oh, so you don't like that button? How would you like to see the button?", rather we're about the why: "Oh, so what makes that button difficult to use/hard-to-find/etc?".

So what are Users good for? Why are they SO vital to Design Thinking? They are vital because:

"It's the user's most primal needs that drive our insights which are the basis for our designs."

         User Need ==> Insights ==> Design Ideas

Users don't mean to, but often they aren't trained to separate 'actions' from 'intents', 'opinions and prejudices' from 'feelings and raw emotion'. When we do Design Thinking practically in our teams, we often are asking each other what is the "raw" feeling there, what is the underlying motivation. (Think: Toyota/Kaizen's 5 Why type of approach).

As Malcolm Gladwell put it in Blink:

“The participants in the early experiments weren't telling the testers how they really felt; they were telling them how they were prejudiced against something so different from their experience.”

- Malcom Gladwell (Blink - 2005) 

If you haven't done so already, I suggest looking at my previous blog on Levels of Insight. As we move up the hierarchy we need to become more and more empathetic, it's not up to the user, but the Design Thinker to be properly trained and educated in how to extract those insights. We need to asking the right questions and tune-out the noise.

To become a great Designer I believe you need to ensure that you are not falling in the trap of being caught up with lower insights, fraught with prejudice and fear, but are mining the more deep-seated core "needs" which will drive those monumental "insights". To be honest it's hard work...

    User Interviews != Market Research Panels

If you want to "do" Design Thinking correctly, spend the time upfront with doing single User Interviews that will drive your Empathy stage. Use those interviews to drive your ultimate single Character Composite and then create your Point-of-View and How-Might-We statements in your Define stage.

To end off off, if you also haven't seen the video from the late Bill Stumpf from the Herman Miller sit, it's just great. His best quote is:

"I enjoy myself.. and I do it through Design" -  Bill Stumpf (1936-2006)

(Not surprisingly the video doesn't mention any of the difficulties that Malcolm Gladwell outlined in Blink. It almost makes you think that users loved it on the 1st try! However we know that wasn't really the case. However history and the 'real' market have definitely vindicated Bill Stumpf,  Donald Chadwick and Max Depree.)

Let's get to "WOW". Hope that helps...

Wayne Pau

p.s. Besides reading, Blink and looking at the HM site, another great article on Aeron is on Barkham Office Furniture website here:

http://www.barkhamofficefurniture.co.uk/blog/why-we-love-herman-miller-aeron-chairs-585/

Design Thinking: Levels of Insights (Pau's Hierarchy of Empathy)

So... following up the Empathy video from the Cleveland Clinic in our last blog entry, I thought back to how we do User Interviews with Design Thinking and how we try to 'mine' core insights view User Empathy. As I was trying explain this, I came up with a quick and dirty "Hierarchy of Empathy" that I believe helps to explain the levels of empathy or insights we can get from interacting with users.

I largely based this on the Stanford d.School Bootleg Empathy Mapping tool. As I was trying to explain the Empathy Map, that got me thinking about framework to help explain to reach those special, deep, inferred "insights" during User Interviews.  We use this at SAP for Design Thinking User Interviews, as this helps to formulate the notes from User Interviews in a useful grouping. 

Empathy Map - Stanford d.Sdhool

It's a little like Maslow's Hierarchy, so I'm going to call it:

 Pau's Hierarchy of Empathy

(Pau's Hierarchy of Empathy)

The hierarchy has 5 levels, (0-4, I must be a programmer... *hehe*), where:

Level 0 - "IGNORE" - General Apathy

-------------------------------------------------------

Level 1 - "LISTEN" - What I am Saying...
Level 2 - "OBSERVE" - What I am Doing...
Level 3 - "READ" - What I am Thinking...
Level 4 - "EMOTE" - What I am Feeling...

Levels 1-4 match up directly to the 4 quadrants of the Empathy Map. On the left is the "Observed" or Level 1 & 2 insights and on the right is the "Inferred" or Level 3 & 4 insights.

So in more detail...

Level 0 - is happens when developers create apps without even considering or thinking about the user. This is the worse way to develop or design anything. By the very nature not knowing or not caring enough to find out about end-users, they almost guarantee they will have no meaningful insights.

(This mirrors most of the 7+ billion people in the world you've never met or know anything about. Someone once said that "Apathy" is worse than "Hate". At least with hate, you need to know what you hate. It's the "Takes ones to know one" thing... You don't even know who they are.) 

Note: I draw the line between level 0 and Level 1, because below this line, there is no real quality "user-driven insights". End-user need is not driving the project at this point.

Level 1 - is the first step to cater to the needs of users. The bare minimum is know your end-user enough to communicate to/with them. To have a "common" language when you can 'listen' (and not just hear), what the user is saying. The limitation here is that the Design Thinker still needs to interpret what is said within their own understanding or world-view. 

(This mirrors strangers who you may strike up a one-time conversation with. You have very little background or context, but at least you are able to talk to them. For example, travelling in a new country, while you might technically know the language you could be easily "confused" by an unfamiliar culturally based idiom that wasn't meant to be taken literally.)

Level 2 - is the second step to gather the true needs of users. Unfortunately as we discuss often in Design Thinking people sometimes say one thing and do another. Ethnography is basically a branch of research that involves just 'observing' subjects. Words can sometimes be misleading, but actions have an "honesty" to them. 

(This mirrors people you interact with for longer periods of time and know or judge/assess them by how they interact with you, not just what they say to you . You know their body-language and can read their gestures and actions. That mean-looking colleague just bought you a chocolate bar for no reason, shows maybe he/she doesn't hate you...)

Level 3 - is the start where the designer needs to intimately understand the user as they move away from "observed" insights and into "inferred" insights.  I used 'read' here as in somewhat like "mind-reading". As we all know, there are many things we as human think, but never act upon. There are also many things we want to do, but never actually get around to doing. 

(This mirrors people who can communicate non-verbally with you. Sometimes you can tell what is on their mind without them telling you verbally or non-verbally. When done correctly, there is less chance for being mislead or misinterpreting something as these are in fact the motivations or 'means reas'. If it were real, telepathy would be a great tool, but in its absence we use a combination of context, observations and conjecture to come up with our 'best-guesses'. )

Level 4 - is the highest level of empathy, where you can 'emote' with the subject. Feelings are like raw emotions and can be the core or root of some very powerful insights. Some of the best designs feed off of our very primal emotions, satisfying some of our very deep seated needs/wants. For Design Thinkers, this is the ultimate or root "Why?" 

(This mirrors the very small circle of intimate people in your life that you naturally feel for and over time become intuitively attuned to their state of mind and moods. You basically know them and can live in their "skin". You can literally "be" them for short periods of time.)

The reality is that as you move up the levels, it takes more much time, energy, training, determination and experience to reach the next level of empathy when interacting and interviewing with End-Users. On the flip side, the higher the level of empathy, the more core the insight. If you want to be a *great* Design Thinker, you want to be moving upwards in the hierarchy, to get those more deep-seated, core insights and drivers. 

Hope that helps...

Wayne Pau


p.s. When I tried to Google this and find something similar to this Hierarchy of Empathy (to ensure I did not copy from previous source), I could only find M.L. Hoffman's "Four Levels of Empathy" (below), which was similar, but different. However the list itself does help to re-enforce that as 'children', we start move up a hierarchy of "Understanding" those around us.

1. Global empathy
2. Egocentric empathy
3. Empathy for another's feelings
4. Empathy for another's life condition 

My source for this was: https://www.msu.edu/~mandrews/mary/empathy.htm

There are a lot of parallel's with Hoffman's 4 levels and my Hierarchy of Empathy. However I've made my divisions much more aligned with the Empathy Map of Stanford d.school's Design Thinking process. 

I apologize in advance to anyone else who might have come with a similar pyramid before mine. It wasn't meant to be radical, just a vehicle for visualizing something I wanted to explain as part of User Interviews.

Top iOS Apps (Weather Channel #2 iPad 'free' app)

(Morning Rain drops on Day Lilies)

If you haven't seen is already Apple has released it's list of top iPad and iPhone apps (both free and paid). Here is a link to TUAW version:

Apple discloses top iPhone and iPad apps of all time

I love stats.  For Design Thinking we often get our best "Insights" from User Interviews at at a person-by-person/micro-level but sometimes I just like looking at macro-level info like download statistics.

So what stands out? The Weather Channel is #2 on iPad (free) and #7 on the iPhone (free). It's only behind Skype on the iPad. There are 10 million downloads for the iPad App since 2010!

10m Downloads for The Weather Channel's iPad App

I was a little shocked at first. However afterwards I realized how many times when I wake up I check the weather (especially when I need to know how to dress my 2.5 year-old for daycare). Checking the weather forecast (regardless of how accurate) is so natural, it's like checking the calendar or the time/clock. People *need* weather info.

Amazingly if you search weather on iTunes you will get tons of apps. It seems that this *particular* app is heads and shoulders above the rest in downloads. When compared to other apps in general, it's surprisingly even more popular than Netflix and YouTube, which I thoughts were mainstays for Mobile Devices. (However I have this eerie feeling that Google Maps, when it comes out on iPad might eclipse them all shortly... see Google Shows Off Upcoming Map Changes, Announces iPad App)

Here is a screen-shot off the iPad and it's honestly not that complex. It's fairly "plain-Jane" simple with what seems like a download bar for % chance of rain. (FYI - I keep expecting the blue bars to finishing download something... but it *never* does...that would be my first feedback to Weather Channel if they reading...my mind has a totally different expectation for this control). It is technically free *but*  it does come with built-in ads (which I initially thought would drive users to other apps...). The ads are fairly large @ the bottom of the app. Honestly it's not that different from The Weather Network's app or others I've seen or used.

So....

Bottom Line: Mix a Maslow's like need with decent execution you get a great success story! Maybe that's the "Insight". Primal need trumps slick design, neat-UX and eye-candy every time.

p.s. If you haven't seen this already, when talking about weather sites/apps, I thought his was very novel from a UX point-of-view:

Umbrella Today

It's like original Google site for weather. It doesn't have barometric pressure or wind speed, etc. It's just displays YES or NO answer. If you are asking: "for the record" as novel as the idea behind Umbrella Today is... unfortunately isn't my go-to site.