This CX Mini Masterclass provides an overview of design thinking and how this methodology can be used to craft new experiences, refine journeys or build solutions around the needs of other stakeholders. Show host and customer experience expert, Julia Ahlfeldt, explains the 5 key phases of the design thinking approach and how CX professionals can incorporate this into their repertoire. If you want to learn about the relationship between design thinking and CX management, then this episode is for you.
Not just another business buzzword
You’ve probably heard the term “design thinking” before. Unlike “customer experience” or “user experience” (UX was the subject of episode 56), the concept of design thinking has been around for a bit longer. It also has a much less nebulous definition.
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 of IDEO
The origins of design thinking start in the late 1950s and early 1960s as creativity techniques for designers and engineers. Through the 1960s and 1970s design thinking methods and theories began to take hold in the fields of industrial design, architecture and product design. By the 1980s and 1990s people began talking about this in terms of human-centered design. During this time, design thinking firms such as IDEO came into being and the most innovative and forward-thinking organizations started to embed design-centered business management. From 2000 onward, we’ve seen the steady rise of design thinking as a proper business discipline that can be applied by organizations to many different contexts.
The 5-step methodology
Design thinking aims to solve problems at the intersection of three things: desirability, viability and feasibility. Design thinking methodologies push teams to balance these competing forces. Unlike CX, which doesn’t have a set approach or methodology, classic design thinking has an adaptable 5-step approach. This is often represented as a double diamond.
If a team comes out of testing and goes back to square one, that’s still a win because at least they didn’t launch something that was going to be a total flop with their audience. Design thinking encourages teams to go through this process quickly with several iterations so that the investment of time doesn’t tempt teams to become attached to an idea that might not strike the magic balance of desirability, feasibility and viability.
Design thinking and CX
Design thinking has some obvious and not so obvious applications in the world of customer experience. It’s easy to see how this could be a powerful approach for innovating journey improvements or defining new products and services.
Beyond the obvious applications within customer experience innovation, design thinking can help teams bolster the organizational ecosystems that help journeys happen. How many of us have had an employee onboarding experience or a vendor management experience that was user unfriendly to the extreme? Not only are these experiences super annoying for the end user, but they also throw noise into the system that slows things down. Design thinking can be used in the context of employee experience, organizational alignment or stakeholder management.
Because of it’s emphasis on empathy and framing the user’s point of view, design thinking is an inherently outside-in way of looking at things, so it’s a great approach for CX professionals to use. If the 5-step methodology seems overwhelming, don’t worry. It’s also OK to leverage components of the approach as and when appropriate.
Regardless of whether or not you use the 5-steps in a structured approach or integrate bits and pieces into your daily work, it will make a difference and complement your efforts to instill customer-centricity.
Transcript
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Welcome to Decoding the Customer, a podcast about customer experience and how to realize customer-centric change in today’s dynamic business world. I’m Julia Ahlfeldt, certified customer experience professional, business advisor, and host of this program. Thanks so much for tuning in. If you’re new to the show, welcome.
If you’re a returning listener, thanks, and it’s great to have you back. This episode is part of my CX Mini Masterclass series here on Decoding the Customer. These weekly episodes are published each Thursday and designed to be punchy, bite-size overviews of key customer experience concepts and ideas for how you can help your organization thrive through customer centricity. Whether you’re new to the field of customer experience, are preparing for the CCXP exam, or are a seasoned professional looking to brush up on a few basics, this series will help you improve your knowledge, skills, and performance to stand out as a CX professional.
This is episode 57, the second episode for the month of October, a month I’ve dedicated to exploring topics that are a buzz in the CX professional community. I’d like to unpack these and explore how they relate to the work that many of us are doing in the field of customer experience. Today, I’m covering design thinking.
It’s another term that gets bandied about in the business world. Design thinking courses have been all the rage in the world’s top business schools. I should know, I’ve been teaching an executive education course at the University of Cape Town on design thinking and customer experience. The emphasis on design thinking comes with good reason.
Design thinking is central to the success of many of today’s leading brands, such as Apple, Airbnb, Tesla, just to name a few. As CX professionals, design thinking can be a powerful methodology for crafting new experiences, refining journeys, or building solutions around the needs of other stakeholders, such as employees. It’s an important approach we should all understand and be able to incorporate into our repertoire as CX professionals. So, if you’ve been keen to learn a little bit more about design thinking and see how this can be used to enhance customer experience, then stay tuned.
As always, if you’re out for a crisp fall walk in the northern hemisphere or busy doing a bit of spring cleaning in the southern hemisphere, and here’s something that you’d like to remember later, don’t worry about writing it down. You can find an overview of the key concepts we’ve covered today in the show notes for this episode, which are on my website, juliaahlfeldt.com or decodingthecustomer.com. Let’s start with the definition and quick overview of design thinking. Like the topic of user experience, which I covered last week in episode 56, design thinking does not have a singular definition.
But I think that one of the clearest explanations comes from Tim Brown, the executive chair of IDEO. He defines design thinking as 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. Within this definition, we can regard design thinking as a process for creative problem-solving, one that can be applied to nearly any problem, customer journey, or otherwise. Even though design thinking is still somewhat new for the business community, it’s been around for some time.
The origins of design thinking start in the late 1950s and early 60s as a creative technique for designers and engineers. Through the 1960s and 70s, design thinking methods and theories began to take hold in the fields of industrial design, architecture, and product design. By the 1980s and 90s, people began talking about this in terms of human-centered design, and the most innovative and forward thinking organizations out there started to integrate design-centered business management into their way of doing business. From 2000 onward, we’ve seen the steady rise of design thinking as a proper business discipline, one that can be applied by organizations to many different contexts.
So why is design thinking so special? What’s the secret sauce? Design thinking aims to solve problems at the intersection of three things, desirability, viability, and feasibility. Design thinking methodologies push teams to balance these competing forces.
The classic approach for design thinking incorporates five stages, which are often represented as a double diamond. If you’re having trouble visualizing this, don’t worry. I’ll include a few images and some helpful links in the show notes. The five stages of design thinking are empathize, define, ideation, prototype, and test.
Let’s go through them one by one. First we have empathize. This is arguably the most important phase of the process. This is all about understanding the user, their needs, their feelings, and their perspective.
When we talk about putting ourselves in someone else’s shoes, we’re essentially talking about establishing empathy. And we do this by researching, understanding, and observing the user. After all, how can we build something for someone if we don’t understand who they are? Next we have define.
This is arguably the step that most organizations neglect. Once we understand the user through empathizing, we need to leverage that information to establish their point of view and to express the problem that we want to solve. The more specific we can make that problem, the better. In design thinking, the problem is often posed as a how might we statement.
It’s a statement that gives clues about the user and their needs and the task at hand. An example problem statement might sound something like, how might we provide quick and healthy meal options to the busy working mom on the go? This problem statement could go through several variations of what we call reframing to make it more and more specific. The more we learn about the user.
Einstein once said that if he had an hour to solve a problem, he’d spend 55 minutes thinking about the problem and five minutes thinking about the solution. I think Einstein was on to something. Next, we have ideation. This is what people often think about when they envision design thinking.
They imagine word clouds and post-it notes and all kinds of creative ideas flying around. The stages up until now have been all about honing in on the challenge and the user. But ideation is where teams want to go wide again. Imagine the possibilities and generate lots of possible ideas.
Ideation is wonderful. It’s creative, exploratory, and it can be a lot of fun. After ideation, it’s time to prototype. Of the volumes of ideas generated during ideation, teams now need to pick one to carry over from idea into something tangible.
Prototyping can take a lot of different forms. Perhaps, it’s storytelling or storyboarding. Sometimes, it’s building a prototype with legos or crafting a small 3D model. But the important thing is to make the idea real so that the user can begin to interact with it, which takes us to step five of design thinking, testing.
This is where teams share their prototype with the user and get feedback. This is the opportunity to gain more perspective about the end user. Feedback may help teams realize that they need to go back and learn more about their user, reframe the question, pick another idea to prototype, or maybe they just need to make refinements to their existing prototype. All of these outcomes are okay.
If a team comes out of testing and goes back to square one, then that’s still a win. Because at least they didn’t launch something that was going to be a total flop with their audience. Design thinking encourages teams to go through this process quickly with several iterations, so that the investment of time doesn’t tempt teams to become attached to an idea that might not strike the magic balance of desirability, feasibility, and viability. Design thinking has some obvious and not so obvious applications in the world of customer experience.
It’s easy to see how this could be a powerful approach for innovating journey improvements, or defining new products and services. Because of its emphasis on empathy and framing the user’s point of view, design thinking is an inherently outside in way of looking at things. So it’s a great approach for customer experience professionals to use. Beyond the obvious applications of customer experience innovation, design thinking can also be used in the context of employee experience, organizational alignment, or stakeholder management.
How many of us have had an employee onboarding experience or a vendor management experience that was user unfriendly to the extreme? Not only are these things super annoying for the end user, but they also throw noise into the system that slows things down. Design thinking can help teams bolster the organizational ecosystem that helps journeys happen. If design thinking sounds like common sense, then good.
It should. When I first learned the five-step approach, it seemed so logical to me, yet also very different from the way that I had seen most teams go about solving problems. How many of us have been in a brainstorming session where teams jump straight into solution mode without even clarifying the task at hand? How many of us have seen a product or experience get hurled into the customer journey without any testing?
How many of us have been a part of teams that just didn’t want to let go of an idea even though all the signs were telling them to turn back and go another way? I think the honest answer here is that we’ve all been in these situations. In design thinking methodology, regardless of whether or not you use the five steps in a structured approach, or just integrate bits and pieces into your daily work, will help make a difference and complement your efforts to instill customer centricity. If you’re looking for help applying design thinking in your organization, I’m just an e-mail away.
I’d be happy to explore how I could help. Thanks so much for listening today. If you’re enjoying the show, please share the program with others who might be interested or head on over to iTunes and rate the podcast. This helps others find the show.
I’ll be back next Thursday with another Mini Masterclass. Be sure to tune in then or subscribe for updates when new episodes go live. See you next Thursday. If you’d like to get in touch in the meantime, you can send me an email, tweet, or LinkedIn message. My handle is at Julia Ahlfeldt and my full contact details are listed on my website, juliaahlfeldt.com or decodingthecustomer.com.
Want to keep learning about CX?
If you’d like to checkout more of these CX Mini Masterclasses or listen to my longer format CX expert interviews, check out the full listing of episodes for this CX podcast.
Decoding the Customer is a series of customer experience podcasts created and produced by Julia Ahlfeldt, CCXP. Julia is a customer experience strategist, speaker and business advisor. She is a Certified Customer Experience Professional and one of the top experts in customer experience management. To find out more about how Julia can help your business achieve its CX goals, check out her customer experience advisory consulting services (including B2B CX strategy) or get in touch via email.
