Category: Design Thinking

Design thinking: a human-centered approach to transform work

The reality of modern business is one of ever-accelerating evolution and change.

New technologies can uproot and transform entire industries, from new service models to new devices to new ways of working. These realities put tremendous pressure on organizations to adapt quickly.

But evolving just to keep up can be messy and aimless. Rethinking your business, however, should be intentional — and that’s why we at SmallBox use the design thinking process.

Design thinking is a problem-solving methodology that puts people — specifically, your audiences — first. One of the benefits of this human-centered approach is that it’s empathy-heavy on the front end.

Design thinking prioritizes understanding audiences before jumping to solutions. For example, an association wouldn’t want to design a service or program without first understanding its members’ challenges, needs and goals.

In the same vein, evolving your business should not be tackled without first taking a look at the holistic experience — the experiences of your employees, your clients, your partners and your constituents. Each audience’s experiences and expectations are different: How do you even begin to tackle all of them?

Building transformational experiences

One of the first and hardest steps for businesses is to let go of control, to not jump in and start solving or building based on assumptions. Again, before an organization can meaningfully evolve, it must first seek to understand all of its audiences and their experiences.

That’s just part of why SmallBox deploys the design thinking process when working through these challenges with our clients. Design thinking begins with empathy — listening and learning from the people we are designing for.

A few things you’ll need to begin building transformational experiences: a toolkit of creative exercises, a methodology focused on human-centeredness (design thinking), a mindset tuned to embrace collaboration and sometimes fuzzy spaces, and an encouraging partner to guide and see you through.

SmallBox sees all projects with our partners as opportunities for learning and evolution — it’s a concept we call transformational learning experiences.

SmallBox uses these opportunities to help partners not only identify and solve complex challenges (which more often than not relate to member or constituent experience), but to also bolster the team’s internal processes and way of working (employee experience).

For example, while working with a university’s alumni association to improve its members’ experience, we facilitated a number of sessions with the team following the design thinking framework. Along the way, that team has learned how this methodology can be applied to their day-to-day work, helping to broaden their thinking and deepen their collaboration skills internally.

In this way, we strongly believe in teaching the way we do (one of our internal team mantras is “teach as we do”). This means we:

  • Help you find and seize opportunities to innovate your services, offerings and processes,
  • Work with you to build and sustain an environment where collaboration and creativity thrive,
  • Teach you human-centered methodologies, and
  • Provide you with tools to solve such challenges on your own

Sure, our projects often do result in a refreshed brand or a new website — but how we get there is just as important as these outputs. Our goal is to empower our partners to eventually solve these fuzzy challenges on their own.

What it looks like in action

Our process often begins with a workshop or Factory Day focused on introducing your team to the design- thinking methodology through the lens of a general challenge or one specific to your organization. Then, following the design thinking process, we’ll work through a series of sprints and collaborative sessions focused on empathy, framing, ideation, prototyping, and testing to solve the challenge.

Worth noting is that these steps don’t always occur linearly. Sometimes it’s necessary to go back a step, or to work on two concurrently. One thing that doesn’t change: we always start with empathy, learning as much as we can about audiences before jumping to solutions.

Here are some examples of recent SmallBox projects:

Want to learn more about design thinking? Join us for our next public workshop, A human-centered approach to problem solving, on Dec. 9. To register, visit our landing page.

Creating a Toolkit for Collaboration

Collaboration is on the rise in workplaces as businesses recognize it as one of the key components for increasing innovation and improving employee experience. Over the last few years, we’ve upped our collaboration game at SmallBox, in part, by listing it as one of our core values, and then bringing intention toward how we approach our work.

What once was a black box of strategy or design for a major project has now become a collaborative process between us and our clients. We bring our expertise in research, strategy and problem solving, clients bring expertise in their organization. Together, we go further than we could have separately.

To support a collaborative, human-centered process, we rely on a collection of methods – exercises and activities that allow us to diverge and converge around challenges and ideas. These methods help us collaborate in a variety of ways, from wireframing in a group, to researching and gathering organizational values, to understanding tone of voice, and beyond!

We create and test new methods (usually on ourselves first) on the regular, either by building on the ideas of others (such as those from resources like Universal Methods of Design and 101 Design Methods) or starting from scratch to craft something custom.

Experience mapping with a side of play. Game on.

A photo posted by SmallBox (@smallbox) on

 

As we’ve continued to build out our methods (we’ve got more than 50 at the moment!), we’ve corralled them into a repository that we like to call the SmallBox Collaborative Toolkit of Awesome™ (okay, okay, I just added the ‘of Awesome’ part). This repository helps us accomplish a few things: we can share methods with other teammates who may not be familiar, and we can easily keep track of all the methods that we have used and have at our disposal, and we can easily share them with our clients, should they want to lead the activity themselves in the future.

We’ve written the methods in our toolkit in a way that provides step-by-step directions, important considerations, challenges that might come up, and how to document any activity or outcomes for meaningful use. Here’s an example of a method, the 20-Second Test, from the Toolkit of Awesome:

›› Download a PDF of this bad boy here

Why bother with learning or designing new collaborative methods? It doesn’t make sense to simply throw people together into a room and have them figure things out as they go. We’ve all been in free-form brainstorm sessions where nothing really moves forward, or the same old ideas pop up. Using existing techniques, or creating your own, helps people know how to contribute. Bringing people together to solve with a shared framework sets us up to design the best possible outcomes.

Data Untangled

Have you ever found yourself in the middle of a complex challenge, swimming in data or research, and you’re just not sure what to make of it? Conducting all of the research in the world is only as useful as our ability to make sense of it. With an emphasis on sense-making, the design thinking process includes an intentional approach on framing research and defining a path forward. In some ways, you can think of it like a string of lights…

Part I: The Scenario

It’s the first day of December. You and your family just got back from the tree farm where you spent hours dissecting every tree from every angle to find the perfect one for the living room. You just finished tightening the screws in the tree stand while your loved ones guided you with “Left! A little to the right! Perfect!” Music is playing, the family is laughing—everything is going smoothly, until…

It’s time for those damn Christmas tree lights.

You know what I’m talking about, right? Every year and without fail, holiday lights wind up in a tangled, disheveled mess. Untangling them has become an even bigger tradition than hanging up the mistletoe—kiss your blood pressure goodbye as you attempt to make sense of the shambled strands!

Even though we all know we’re going to go through the hassle of sorting the lights every winter, it’s still a daunting task. Everyone has that one box of lights stored in the attic filled with every kind of string imaginable: multicolor bulbs and classic white, indoor and outdoor, twinkling and continuous, working and not working (because of course you intend to find and replace that one bulb that burnt out three years ago). Without fail, the lights end up in a tangled mess. With so many bulbs at your disposal, where do you begin? It can be a real holiday headache.

Part II: The Metaphor

Believe it or not, a string of lights and design research have a lot in common.

When it comes to lights, everyone takes a different approach. Some of you may go straight for the ends while others begin sifting from the middle of the cluster. Some may plug the lights in to help guide them while others prefer to keep them off. Some of you may even throw the lights out and opt to get a new, nicely packaged set at the store.

Similarly, when it comes to data, there are many approaches on how to make sense of it. Some data may be sorted mathematically while other data makes more sense to sort artistically. Some data may be organized into a timeline while other data on a matrix. Regardless of the approach, the ultimate goal is to untangle the research data in a way that uncovers the brightest opportunities.

Part III: The Stuff that Matters

Let’s take a step back for a minute. You’ve done your research—conducted interviews, observed your audience interacting with your product, and looked at similar models for inspiration. All the while, you’ve been recording notes, drawings, photos, and transcripts. The vast amount of empathic data is intimidating, but it’s a good problem to have. You say to  yourself, “This stuff is awesome. But what do I do now?”

The next step in the design thinking process is to make sense of the data and uncover new opportunities. We call this phase the Frame Phase.

While it’s tempting to begin solving immediately after conducting research, synthesizing research data during the Frame Phase will uncover richer, more meaningful opportunities while also creating shared understanding on the opportunity-at-hand. It may feel impossible, sticky, or daunting at times, but don’t give up! Here are a few tips to get you started:

Step One: Make your data physical.

The first step in the framing process to to externalize all of your data. Get your research in a physical space so you can mold it, play with it, and organize it quickly. This could be on sticky notes, index cards, whiteboards or giant butcher paper. Getting data onto the wall also allows for collaborative sense-making to take place.

Step Two: Sort your data until it makes the most sense.

Data lends itself to different methods of sorting, and we all may sort the same data in a different way. The challenging part about the Frame Phase is that there are no right or wrong answers.

Time-based data lends itself toward journey mapping—charting audience’s activities across the course of an hour, day, or year. Journey maps can include not only the audience’s actions, but also their feelings, thoughts, and pain points. This type of sense-making puts your audience at the center of the story, allowing the team to solve for his or her most important needs.

Relational data lends itself toward affinity and/or venn diagramming—grouping data points as they relate to each other. Similar data points may be grouped together while contrasting ones be separated. This type of sense-making helps explain connections between your research.

Through sense-making, you’re looking to identify trends in your research and come up with insights.

Step Three: Record opportunities that you’ve found.

The last step in the Frame Phase is to make your insights actionable. We’ve found that turning insights (or problem areas) into questions allows us to connect our research to our ideas. “How might we…” statements serve as a launchpad for our ideas. For example, “How might we increase collaboration in our organization during the holiday season?” frames the problem (lack of collaboration) as an opportunity. These “How might we…” statements serve as generative questions for a team to brainstorm solutions, as well as test their solutions against.

Part IV: Tying It All Together

The Frame Phase has often been called the most challenging part of the design thinking process—and for good reason. Data gets messy, tangled, and confusing. However, when we embrace this feeling of overwhelm and prepare for it, we’re able to take the information in our hands and untangle it one strand at a time. It may take patience, a lot of practice, and an entire team, but at the end we find ourselves in the midst of glowing opportunities we can take into the next phases: ideation, prototyping, and testing

What will you find when you untangle the lights?

Why Empathy?

For many years, SmallBox has started our major projects with what we’ve called a “Discovery” phase. This is an essential first step because we’ve learned from experience that our ideas, designs, and project outcomes are all stronger when we go through an intentional research process. To do our best work, we need to empathize before solving.

What is Empathy?

em·pa·thy
     Noun
     the ability to understand and share the feelings of another.

Sometimes called design research, or an empathy phase in a human-centered design process, this focus is all about understanding the experience, perspective and emotions of your audiences, then applying what you’ve learned to your services or products.

Here’s the design thinking process we use at SmallBox:

steps of the design thinking - empathize, frame, ideate, prototype and test

But in reality it looks more like this:

Nonlinear depiction of design thinking process

While the process is non-linear and can move back and forth from one phase to another, it always starts with empathy. And for good reason.

Why is empathy important?

Empathy leads to…

  • Greater understanding of the people you serve.
  • Dispelled assumptions and biases about how and why people interact with your service or product.
  • Creating more meaningful solutions that are more readily adopted.
  • Becoming more responsive to audience needs.
  • Operating your business in a human way.

Conducting design research to truly empathize with people may seem like it takes a lot of time, or slows down your process. It’s seductive to just jump in and start solving right away. However, the time spent up front can save a lot of time later. Without really understanding your audience needs, you could waste resources creating a new offering that doesn’t resonate or actually meet those needs.

Having your audiences take part in the process from start to finish fosters buy-in for both the cause and the solution. It allows for transparency that ultimately creates shared understanding and a wider variety of potential solutions.

Listening and observing can help you discover unmet needs and possibilities you never knew existed. You might miss a huge opportunity that someone else eventually spots and acts on.

How to get started

Here are some basic first steps to incorporating empathy into your work:

  • Identify groups of people who are critical to your success. This might be your team, your customers, or key partners. You may already have strong awareness of who your audiences are and know how to reach them – if so, you’ve got a head start!
  • Ask yourself what you don’t know know about the people you care about. Are you basing everything you know off of one thing one person said five years ago? Sometimes it is hard to be honest with ourselves. We have cognitive biases that help us confirm long held opinions. Step back, take a critical look at what you think you know about your audiences, and make note of any assumptions you are making.
  • You can start simply with listening. Interviewing is a foundational skill for empathy research. Use your assumptions list to create a bank of questions to prepare for interviewing your audiences. Make sure to approach these conversations with curiosity and a commitment to staying neutral (remember those cognitive biases we mentioned earlier?). What you can learn through a series of thoughtful, objective interviews can be eye opening.
  • Tap into the power of observation. If you have never watched people interact with your product or service, make a point to do so. Observation can paint a whole new picture – sometimes showing things we might never know to ask, or a person might not think to bring up in an interview.

While there are many advanced and creative empathy research methods – everything from contextual inquiry to diary studies – it’s okay to start with basics.

What does it look like?

illustration of ice cream scoops by sara mcguyer

In the book Creative Confidence, co-authors Tom and David Kelley mention a scenario of researching how to improve the ice cream scoop. Most people, when asked to talk through their process, shared the basics of how they used the scoop to get ice cream – get the scoop out of a drawer, warm it with water, start on one far side of the container and scoop toward the other, etc. But most people failed to mention that they licked the scoop before tossing it into the sink. It was either an unconscious thing, or they didn’t feel it was important enough to mention. By engaging in empathy research and observing people in action as they scooped ice cream, this detail emerged.

Having moving parts (as some scoops do) becomes a lot less desirable. Without empathy, they would have missed this detail all together, and maybe built the wrong kind of scoop. Getting to these details, as mentioned earlier, is why empathy is so important and useful.

The more I practice empathy research, the more I see it as a gift that keeps on giving. More depth in understanding about your audiences. Greater insights in how to serve them. A more informed, human-driven experience or product designed to elicit a positive response from the people who matter the most – your audiences, customers and employees!

What is Design Thinking?

If you frequent publications like Harvard Business Review and The Wall Street Journal for the latest business trends, you’ve probably read something about design thinking. Organizations like Ford, Walgreens, and Planned Parenthood have used this methodology to solve major challenges and design new products, services, and experiences. 

This process is increasingly adopted to solve a wider range of problems, and it can serve as a wonderful antidote to rampant silos and lack of collaboration plaguing modern organizations. I have a theory that on the other side of the silo trend we’ll see collaboration emerge as a permission-to-play value for businesses seeking to innovate, but I digress…

For those who haven’t tried it, the process can sound initimidating. People often ask: Do I need to be a graphic designer? Is this just another business buzz word? What is design thinking anyway?

Here’s our basic definition:

Design thinking is a creative, iterative approach to problem-solving that places humans at the center of the process.

The process is often broken down into distinct steps or phases. While different models have varying labels, they cover the same basics. Our approach looks like this:

Design thinking process by SmallBox

Empathy

The process starts with understanding. Empathy is all about tapping into the perspectives of the people you serve to get to the heart of the problem, which will ultimately inform more meaningful solutions.

Frame

This step is about clearly defining the opportunity to get everyone solving from a point of shared understanding. Through your empathy research, you will have uncovered a ton of data. Framing is essentially sense-making – finding themes and patterns from what you’ve collected.

Ideate

This phase is about exploring and thinking broadly about the challenge. The goal is to generate a wide range of potential solutions. Ideation often includes a combination of diverging and converging, or having people work independently, then together. In this way, people can build on one another’s ideas.

Protoype

Prototyping is about building out models of your ideas to see how those solutions work. You might have quick and simple models, or something more detailed and complex – sometimes referred to as low and high fidelity. The important this is getting something “real” enough to let people interact with the prototype.

Test
For this step, you ask people to experiment with your prototype to see how it actually works in real life. These interactions can illuminate areas for improvement and iteration. 

Keep in mind, these steps don’t always occur in a linear fashion – sometimes it is necessary to go back to a step, or to work on two concurrently. But it does always start with empathy.

To-may-toe / To-mah-toe

While some may say it’s just semantics, I actually prefer the term human-centered design over design thinking for a couple of reasons. One of the core tenets of this approach is to put people at the center of the process. Mentioning people in the name honors that important aspect. “Thinking” might also confuse people or misrepresent what really happens. The process isn’t about simply brainstorming or theorizing. It is very active, helping you bring ideas to life – not just dream them up.

No matter what you call it – human-centered design is a great process for breaking down and solving big, fuzzy challenges. Want to learn more? Join us for a human-centered design workshop!