Module 10•Unit 2 of 7•10 min

Design Thinking & HCD

Design Thinking, and its close cousin Human-Centred Design (HCD), is the method of choice whenever a system is being designed that people will interact with. It puts deep empathy for the user at the centre of the process, ensuring solutions are desirable to real humans - not just technically feasible or commercially viable. (Module 12 covers Design Thinking in full; here we place it among the methods.)

Desirable

People want it (HCD)

Feasible

We can build it

Viable

It sustains a business

Design Thinking finds the sweet spot where desirable, feasible, and viable overlap - starting from desirability.

When to use it

Use Design Thinking / HCD any time a system is involved in which people will interact with the designed thing - a product, service, experience, interface, or process. Wherever there are "cognizant users", the empathy-driven practices of Design Thinking make the solution dramatically more likely to succeed.

A key caution: Design Thinking does not belong inside a routine, tightly-scheduled New Product Development (NPD) project. Its design challenges should be solved before the NPD project starts, because Design Thinking takes time that fixed ship-date schedules can't absorb. What should flow through every NPD effort is the "Design Thinking way of thinking" - the habit of seeing through customers' eyes - as an undergirding theme.

Discuss

Where in your work would starting from user empathy (Design Thinking) change the outcome? And where might you be wrongly trying to squeeze it into a fixed-schedule delivery project?

Try this at work this week

For your next initiative involving real users, do one hour of genuine empathy work - observe or talk to users about their experience - before writing any requirements. Notice how much it reshapes what you build.

Sources

Brown, T., Change by Design, 2009 (Design Thinking / IDEO).
Global Innovation Institute (GInI), Foundations of Innovation body of knowledge.
Norman, D., The Design of Everyday Things, 2013 (HCD).

Needfinding, DDI & ODI

TRIZ & ARIZ