The title caught my eye: "Design Thinking." Immediately, I realized that design thinking is exactly what my business unit needs from top to bottom, particularly as we dive into product re-invention. The good news is, without formalizing the process with a name, we've started Design Thinking already.
Last week, I was lucky enough to be named as a founding member of a new team focused on delivering high-end customer experience through any IP-enabled device. The team's mission goes miles beyond the Web 1.0 concept of web development. It drives to human interaction in general. We intend to provide the best human-web interactions in our industry. For me, Tim Brown's article arrived just in time, as it pulls together the concepts that my new team has been tossing around for months.
Previously, we treated design as something tacked on at the end of the process, much the way manfucturing treated quality prior to Deming's Total Quality revolution. Brown points out that tacking on design improves a product, but building it in makes a better product. I agree.
Implementing Design Thinking seems intuitive and easy according to Brown:
- Involve design thinkers at the very start of innovation, before any direction has been set
- Take a human-centered approach
- Try early and often through protyping (and read Brown's caveats about prototyping)
- Seek outside help from customers and consumers using Web 2.0 networks if necessary
- Blend big and small projects
- Budget to the pace of innovation
- Find talent any way you can
- Design for the cycle
We have design thinkers all over the place at my company, but we tend to call them in at the end, never the beginning. Beginning next week, though, I'm going to work this thinking into the very early stages of everything we do. As with quality, it makes sense to have design built in, not tacked on before the customer sees it.
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