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[av_heading heading=’Design thinking’ tag=’h3′ style=’blockquote modern-quote modern-centered’ size=’89’ subheading_active=” subheading_size=’15’ margin=” margin_sync=’true’ padding=’10’ color=’custom-color-heading’ custom_font=’#ffffff’ av-medium-font-size-title=’55’ av-small-font-size-title=’34’ av-mini-font-size-title=’21’ av-medium-font-size=” av-small-font-size=” av-mini-font-size=” av_uid=’av-jj5j5vgm’ admin_preview_bg=’rgb(255, 255, 255)’][/av_heading]
[av_heading heading=’How stepping into users’ shoes lets you come up with the best ideas to solve their problems – Alek Rychwalski’ tag=’h3′ style=’blockquote modern-quote modern-centered’ size=” subheading_active=” subheading_size=’15’ margin=” margin_sync=’true’ padding=’10’ color=’custom-color-heading’ custom_font=’#ffffff’ av-medium-font-size-title=’55’ av-small-font-size-title=’34’ av-mini-font-size-title=’21’ av-medium-font-size=” av-small-font-size=” av-mini-font-size=” av_uid=’av-jj5j61m4′ admin_preview_bg=’rgb(255, 255, 255)’][/av_heading]
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Many companies fall into the trap of creating products that are great, but only from their own perspective. But no-one has ever checked what the users actually need. What are their pain points? What fears do they face? Why do they choose one course of action over another? Nobody has ever taken the trouble to step into their shoes. And the result is plenty of money spent creating solutions that no-one actually wants.
Stepping into your audience’s shoes is the first phase of the 5-stage process called Design Thinking. In this approach, the design team focuses on the end users in order to thoroughly learn about their conscious and subconscious needs and then, on this basis, come up with solutions. Responsible for the task is a multidisciplinary team, able to look at things from many different perspectives.
Airbnb is an interesting case in point. The founders of the site followed the Design Thinking principles without actually knowing they were using the method.
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Before Airbnb, the short-time rental online service, whose market value is estimated today to be 32 billion dollars, joined business unicorns to become the hotel industry’s most disruptive brand, it was facing numerous problems. With the company’s weekly income at only 200 dollars, its owners had to resort to their savings to make up for the losses.
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Empathise
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The Design Thinking process starts with an empathetic understanding of the problems future users may be facing. The design team’s task is to step into future users’ shoes to gain a deep insight into their situation and to discover the hidden factors that trigger their choices. In the first stage of the process, members of the team not only talk to their audience but also observe them in their physical environment.
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Airbnb’s three founders, Joe Gebbia, Brian Chesky and Nathan Blecharczyk, decided to take a closer look at the company’s New York offerings to find out why customers were unwilling to rent apartments and rooms. Quite quickly, they noticed the main drawback.
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Define
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In the Define stage that follows the initial phase of the Design Thinking process, based on the data gathered, the team defines the very problem that users face. It’s important to go beyond your own mental limitations and look at the problems from the user’s perspective, not from your own.
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It turned out that poor-quality photos were the weak point of the New York listings. Owners were using their smartphones to take them and didn’t show all the rooms in the apartment. Customers couldn’t see the entire place they were going to rent. The conclusion was simple: people don’t rent a place they haven’t seen. They want to know what they are paying for. The three founders had to face that challenge and find a working solution.
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Ideate
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Once the problem has been defined, it’s time to find ways to solve it. At this stage, the team focuses on generating as many ideas as possible. Different ideation techniques are used here, including the classic brainstorm. No concept is rejected and even the strangest ideas are accepted so as to gather as many varied options as possible and then to select the best – those that are doable, that answer the users’ defined needs.
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No technical, scalable or automated solution could have been used to deal with the photo problem. There was no algorithm able to solve it. That is why the Airbnb founders decided to take a step that most start uppers would not have understood at that time. They flew to New York, hired photographic equipment worth 5 thousand dollars, visited apartment owners and held a professional photoshoot for free.
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Prototype
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During the fourth stage of the process, the team creates prototypes. The solution selected in the previous phase is visualised and presented to the end users to learn whether or not the team has made the proper assumptions. Depending on what kind of solution the team is working on, the prototype can a tangible object, build from simple materials, even from paper. It can be a sketch, a storyboard or a piece of a drawing.
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Joe, Brian and Nathan implemented their idea without any prior research, simply trusting their gut feeling. The professional photos taken during the NY photoshoot were added to the rental ads on the website.
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Test
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What if you let the audience use the solution you have come up with? Will your assumptions prove right? Has the team managed to create a product or service users expected? The final testing stage of the Design Thinking process is the time to check all and redefine the solution, if needed.
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A week after the Airbnb founders returned from New York and the new photos were presented to the audience, the company doubled its turnover. It was a clear sign they were heading in the right direction.
Soon, Joe Gebbia learned that the approach they had taken was in line with Design Thinking principles – a process that focuses on understanding future users’ needs. Gebbia left his office and applied for a Design Thinking course.
To foster the innovative power of the approach, the founders decided to introduce a new task for every person joining the team. During their first week with Airbnb, they had to travel to selected destinations available on the service and prepare documentation on their visit. Their task is to talk to users and ask them questions to discover and understand their problems and eventually, to come up with a solution.
Meeting real users of the service was a turning point in the company’s development. Learning the actual context and users’ perspectives was the best way to find intelligent, working solutions they had not previously been able to find.
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Design.
It’s about making things useful, not only pretty
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When Airbnb started to expand, its owners needed investors, however, many venture capitalists shut the door on them. One such investor was Fred Wilson of Union Square Ventures. Years later, Wilson admitted that he couldn’t trust a start-up whose founders, or at least two of them, were designers. Indeed, Gebbia and Chesky, who had graduated from the Rhode Island School of Design, realized that it would be hard to challenge the popular stereotype of design as a way of just making things look pretty.
In today’s IT, however, design has little to do with making interfaces look nice. The designer’s role is to adopt the user’s perspective on the solution or product being developed. It is the design team that studies and analyses current and potential users’ behaviours and needs, prototyping features that have not yet been created, in order to validate whether or not they should be introduced. Based on that, members of design teams gather feedback in order to dig deeper into the problem and understand the unique value their solution provides.
It’s no coincidence that there are designers behind many of the success stories in the start-up and IT sector, for instance, Stewart Butterfield, whose first business was Flickr, an image hosting site. Soon, Buttetfield doubled the success of his business ventures with a revolutionary, though ridiculously easy office communicator called Slack. What do those two solutions have in common, apart from having been invented by a designer? The fact that, for Butterfield, both projects were a kind of experiment with real users and that the majority of the knowledge he gained was the result of testing and rejecting his own hypotheses.
Flickr was supposed to be an online game. The development costs were high, and the competition strong, so the future of the project was easily predictable. Fortunately, Butterfield realized that users appreciated the photo-sharing feature available to beta testers much more than the ability to play the game.
He came to a similar conclusion when developing a music site. He faced communication problems within the project team and having analysed his teammates’ behaviour, he was able to understand the mechanisms people working in the office environment are driven by. Butterfield didn’t invent Slack as a tool to foster effectiveness. Instead, he re-invented it so that users really want to use it.
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Alek Rychwalski
Once I realized that everything needs to be designed before it comes into existence, I knew I’d be a designer one day. Years ago, the frustration caused by bad user experiences drove me towards getting involved in User Experience Design, both online and offline. My passion for designing solutions that match the needs of their users has resulted in over 50 projects in which I played a variety of roles ranging from Product Owner to Interaction Designer.
With a key belief in simplicity and lean development, I aim to support organizations in prioritizing and validating features to avoid building something that might not be needed.
I love traveling, photography and electronic music. In my free time, I design and build custom urban bicycles. In my personal life, I am the father of the world’s most wonderful almost-6-year-old princess.
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