Design thinking is a customer-centered development process, which can create an ideal product and achieve profitability and sustainable development in the product life cycle.
It transcends the concern about product features and functions in traditional planning. Instead, it emphasizes understanding the problem to be solved, the use environment of the solution, and the evolution of the solution.
Note: This paper mainly focuses on the tools and practices related to the realization of design ideas. It should be read together with the article "Customer-centric", which mainly introduces the customer-centric thinking mode and its influence.
The traditional waterfall product development method is carried out in sequence: first determine the demand, then design and build the solution, and finally deliver it to the market. These processes usually focus on the most obvious problems. Usually, success depends on whether a solution that meets the requirements rather than the user's needs is realized, which will lead to the unavailability or neglect of the functions of products and services, thus making users feel frustrated and unable to achieve the business objectives of the enterprise.
Design thinking (figure 1) represents a completely different product and solution development method. In this method, divergent and convergent techniques are used to understand the problem, design the solution and provide the solution to the market.
Design thinking has also inspired new methods to measure the success of work:
As shown in Figure 2, the continuous application of design thinking promotes the continuous progress of the solution in its natural market life cycle:
In figure 1, the core flow of design thinking is intuitively displayed as a "double diamond". This means focusing on thoroughly exploring the problem space before creating a solution. The activities related to the query are as follows:
With a clear understanding of the target market and the problems it faces, enterprises can start designing solutions, which is the second diamond of design thinking. Comprise that following step:
Note that each diamond focuses on divergent thinking (understanding and exploring options), followed by convergent thinking (evaluating options and making choices).
Customized solutions provide designers with the advantage of direct and frequent dialogue with a few target users, allowing them to participate in design meetings, PI planning, system demonstrations and other security activities. In some organizations, these target customers are regarded as part of a team, so it is usually not necessary to create a user portrait representing them, but when the organization is highly decentralized, a separate user portrait may also help.
In contrast, in common indirect customer market solutions such as B2C, product teams need a way to keep in touch with target customers. Therefore, they developed personas, that is, fictional consumers and/or users summarized from customer research. [2] They described different people who might use the product or solution in a similar way, thus gaining insight into how the actual users will use the solution. User portraits also enhance the ability to create products and solutions for people by providing specific design tools, thus strengthening the market segmentation strategy. User portraits promote product development and some safety practices, as shown in Figure 3:
In addition to user portraits, buyer portraits also extend design thinking to individuals and organizations that authorize purchase decisions. They help ensure that the design covers the entire product buying experience, including after-sales service, support and operation.
Customer-centered enterprises use empathy in the whole design process. Broadly speaking, empathetic design abandons preconceived ideas and provides information for the formulation of solutions from the perspective of customers.
Empathy map [1] is a design thinking tool, which promotes customer recognition by helping the team to form a deep understanding of others (Figure 4). They help the team imagine the thoughts, feelings, hearing and vision of a specific role when using the product. The higher the team's empathy for customers, the more likely the team is to design an ideal solution.
The customer journey map shows the user's experience when interacting with the company's operational value stream, products and services. As shown in Figure 5, the road map is a powerful design thinking tool for operating the value stream. They enable teams to determine how to improve the specific deliverables of one or more development value streams to create a better end-to-end experience.
The journey map captures the customer's advanced experience through the operational value stream, while the product function manages the specific deliverables that meet the needs of stakeholders. Functions are usually described by short phrases of function and benefit matrix, which provide the environment and benefits of user experience.
The practice of design thinking promotes the change of the order in which we consider the characteristics-benefit hypothesis elements. They help agile teams explore better and faster ways to deliver the expected benefits (Figure 6).
Features are realized through one or more stories. There are two types of stories in the safe:
Team Backlog contains user stories and activation stories from the program Backlog of the program, as well as stories from the team itself. Like all to-do lists, team to-do lists have priorities, and stories are realized in priority order.
The function of capturing workflow poses a unique challenge to agile teams: workflow is a series of steps that must be completed in order to achieve higher-level user goals. The linear order of the to-do list makes it difficult for agile teams to understand the relationship between steps. Usually, a given set of steps can be improved, but before improving this specific set of steps, the team must also balance the integrity of the whole product (all steps must be supported). When the divergent stage of developing a solution envisages improvement opportunities, while the convergent stage of design thinking focuses on the basic content of the next version, potential conflicts will arise.
The solution includes large and small workflows. Consider a small workflow in which a business person imports a credit card bill into an expense reporting system for processing. Users must:
As mentioned earlier, each of these stories can be reflected in the workflow. In addition, each step can be improved over time: for example, we can imagine a direct connection between banks and expense reporting systems, or an automated AI agent to manage the task of matching transactions.
Story map [3] captures the characteristics of workflow, which organizes a series of stories according to the tasks required by users to achieve their goals (Figure 7).
The story map enables the team to understand how the stories in the team to-do list support the user's goals (Figure 8).
Story diagram also illustrates the relationship between quality and value:
Prototype is the functional model of the function or product we want to build. It helps the design team to clarify their understanding of the problem and reduce the risk of developing solutions. Prototypes offer many benefits to product teams:
There are many prototypes, each optimized to provide different types of insights:
In order to help them get feasible feedback, the product team should strive to use the lowest cost and fastest prototype design form. Usually, paper prototype design is the best choice. [4][5]
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[2][ America] Allen Cooper/[America] Robert Lyman/[America] David Cronin/[America] Christopher Norrsell, About Face 4: The Essence of Interaction Design. Electronic Industry Press, 20 15.
[3] Jeff Patton, user story map. Tsinghua University Publishing House, 20 16.
[4] Caroline Snyder A quick and simple way to design and improve the user interface. Morgan Kaufman, 2003.
[5] Jeff Gothelf, Lean Design: How the design team can improve the user experience. People's Posts and Telecommunications Press, 20 13.