If it is good enough for Airbnb, it’s good enough for me!
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 business success.
Tim Brown — Executive Chair IDEO
All right start-up community, if you are anything like me you are riding on passion, have not slept for two days, and just about running out of coffee. Okay, let’s pause for a moment and review the to-do list. Adding coffee refill to the list and take on website wireframe as our next action task.
Thankfully the universe favors the non-sleepers and has gifted me with a solution on how to take on the website wireframe task, it is a framework developed by IDEO called Design Thinking, which I have just learned in my Digital Marketing course at Macleay College in Sydney. Talk about perfect timing!
What is Design Thinking?
Design Thinking is a process for creative problem solving, done with a team or group of contributors, it is a customer-centric framework that begins with the customer need. The process of design thinking can be applied to many types of simple or complex problems we face in our daily lives. We will use this framework to start the UX design process for our website. “In employing design thinking, you’re pulling together what’s desirable from a human point of view with what is technologically feasible and economically viable.” (IDEO 2020).
The process of design thinking encompasses both convergent and divergent thinking and follows a series of 5 steps:
Empathize
The first stage of the design thinking process is to empathize with our end-users and to gain a clear understanding of the problem we are trying to solve, looking at the situation from our customer's mind so to speak. Identify their needs and wants and points of friction. Immersing ourselves in our customer’s environments, feeling the driving factors that truly add value to our customer's lives is the ultimate goal. To understand the problem, we have decided to arrange interviews with our target customers in their shopping environments.
Note to the team, it is important for observers to put aside their own judgments or assumptions, as we do not want to influence the purity of our customer research.
Define
The next stage is to define the problem, defining a meaningful and actionable problem statement. A good problem statement is human-centered, broad enough to encourage creative freedom, and narrow enough to make it manageable. Some of the sample questions that help define the problem statement are:
- What problem are we trying to solve?
- How do we know this is a real problem?
- Why is it important to solve?
- Who are our users? What are their goals and motivations?
- How will we know if we’ve solved the problem?
Ideate
The whole purpose of the ideation stage is to generate ideas and encourage out-of-the-box thinking as wide as possible. This is typically a brainstorming session to throw down as many ideas on the table and together evaluate what are the most important and actionable ideas for our business.
Note to the calendar, pencil in a group session end of the month, and book a facilitator to conduct the session.
Prototype
Prototyping is creating the simplest form of a viable product that can be tested to validate ideas, design assumptions, and iterate possible changes in direction. Our website is a Shopify template site, with a little bit of coding we will be able to develop a skeleton version for testing user journey and conduct any iterations in-house.
Test
The final stage of the design thinking process is user testing, the user’s feedback is priceless and we need to ensure that we conduct testing using actual customers and under a normal environment where our customers would use our e-commerce store. Testing should provide new insights to help us define or redefine the various problems that the users might face. This process gives us the ability to capture any changes before the final build of the website and minimize any unnecessary losses.
The beauty of the Design Thinking process is that it is not a linear process and there is no order to how we conduct the process, teams can work in parallel or in sequence and it is possible to iterate throughout the whole process and redefine the final product at a low cost to the business. There is also a complete buy-in from various departments during the ideation process and hence a sense of ownership in the final product.
The Airbnb Story
In 2009, Airbnb was close to going bust, with revenue flatlined at $200 per week, and one afternoon the team was looking over their search results for New York City listings, trying to figure out what wasn’t working and why there was no growth. After spending time on the site, they realized that there was something common with all the listings which were that they had bad photos. People were using phone cameras and not all rooms were displayed, and customers could not clearly see what they were paying for.
So the founders rented a camera and spent time with customers, listing their products with quality photos and a week later they doubled their revenue to $400 per week. This was the turning point for the company. Joe Gebbia, one of the founders, shared that the team initially believed that everything they did had to be ‘scalable’, a typical mindset of new start-ups on first-round funding, we are all guilty of this sin. It was only when they gave themselves permission to experiment with non-scalable changes to the business that they climbed out of what they called the ‘trough of sorrow.’
In this example of Airbnb, we can see the use of design thinking principles of empathizing with the customer and meeting customers in the real world to create solutions, to identify that bad photos was the reason shows a good understanding of their customer base and the ideation of the founders to derive a solution of renting a camera and updating the photos.
The overall design thinking outcome is that Airbnb changed its process of addressing issues, Joe Gebbia notes, “Anytime somebody comes to me with something, my first instinct when I look at it is to think bigger.”
Although Airbnb has improved its internal process of thinking bigger and wider, it still could adapt the other elements of the design thinking process and work from the bottom up, keeping the customer at the starting point of the thought process. Empathizing more with customers and spending more time in customer environments will certainly create stronger and lasting solutions and inturn drive revenues.
Design thinking is a fairly new concept in our business, and we are already seeing the value of what it brings to the table, have you used this method before do you have any great insights that you would like to share with other startups, if so please leave your comments below.
Now that the hard work is done! Let’s go get that coffee!
References:
Dam, R.F. & Siang, T.Y. (2020), Stage 3 in the Design Thinking Process: Ideate, Interaction Design Foundation, viewed 14 March 2021, <https://www.interaction-design.org/literature/article/stage-3-in-the-design-thinking-process-ideate>
IDEO (2021), Design Thinking Defined, viewed 14 March 2021, <https://designthinking.ideo.com/>
Lee, G.B. (2017), Designer’s indispensable skill: the ability to write and present a solid problem statement, UX Planet, viewed 16th March 2021, <https://uxplanet.org/designers-indispensable-skill-the-ability-to-write-and-present-a-solid-problem-statement-56a8b4b8060>
Liedtka, J. (2018), Why design thinking works, Harvard Business Review, viewed 16th March 2021, <https://hbr.org/2018/09/why-design-thinking-works>
