In 1958, 4 months after Sputnik launched and President Eisenhower created NASA, a Stanford engineering professor named John Arnold proposed that design engineering should be human-centered.
This was a strange thing for Arnold to introduce. It was an era in which engineers were largely focused on twin Cold War driven goals: the space race and the optimization of the hydrogen bomb.
Inspired by Arnold’s work, engineering professor Bob McKim, with the help of art professor Matt Kahn, created an engineering program called Product Design. Within this program, McKim and others helped create a design thinking process that became the foundation for Stanford’s d.school, as well as the guiding framework for design-driven companies like IDEO.
Design thinking is a human-centered approach to innovation that draws from the designer’s toolkit to integrate the needs of people, the possibilities of technology, and the requirements for business success.
Tim Brown
IDEO
“Design thinking is a human-centered approach to innovation…” @tceb62 @IDEO
Why has design thinking been embraced not only by forward-thinking innovators like IDEO but large enterprises like IBM? For one, it brings everyone into the process, not just designers; using the design process helps companies solve wicked problems with clear eyes.
Design thinking also helps scale the design process through large organizations. Business leaders who use the shared vocabulary and toolset of design thinking can confidently create better, human-centered user experiences and disruptive products.
Finally, design thinking helps to instill a bias towards action, balanced with a user-centered perspective that guides the team towards the right outcome.
The design thinking process is not necessarily linear, nor is there one canonical way to approach it; it is an iterative system with many variations. However, Stanford’s d.school teaches a framework that can help jump-start the process for almost any problem:
Stanford d.school’s design thinking framework.
We’ll walk you through the 5 steps of this design thinking framework, which will provide a toolkit for design challenges large and small in your organization.
The core of the design thinking approach is a focus on empathy, or using a beginner’s mindset and immersing yourself in the user’s experience to uncover deep needs and insights.
Defining the problem with a point of view (POV) is a key part of the process: who is your user (with as many specific details as possible); what is their deep, unmet need; why is this insightful (what insights did you glean from your empathetic needfinding process?). Often, reframing the problem using a unique POV will lead to more innovative solution spaces.
The design thinking process goes through a cycle of generative flaring and selective focusing. In the definition phase, we narrowed down to a specific Point of View; now, in the ideation phase, we flare out and generate as many ideas as possible.
For many designers, prototyping is where the fun begins. Sometimes the key to good empathy is sharing or co-creating a prototype with your users and getting feedback. Prototyping helps us learn, solve disagreements, and test hypotheses quickly and with minimal repercussions.
By testing our prototypes with real users and getting feedback, we can refine our POV, learn more about our users, and make the next iteration of the product that much better. As they say at Stanford’s d.school: “Prototype as if you know you’re right, but test as if you know you’re wrong.”
These steps should be considered a way to get started with design thinking. Over time, you will adapt them to your working style and make them your own. With this flexible toolkit, you’ll be prepared to tackle any project, from a new app to—perhaps—new NASA moonshots. With thanks to Bill Burnett, executive director of the Design Program at Stanford, for giving the lecture that inspired this introduction.
Imagine that you live in a remote village in Nepal. It’s winter and freezing sleet pounds the nearby roads, making them nearly impassable. You’ve just had your first baby, a little girl, and she’s premature and severely underweight. The room that you’re in, while warm to you, feels like an ice-bath to the baby. Without help soon, she will almost certainly die from hypothermia. What do you do?
Worldwide, about 15 million premature babies are born every year and the most common preventable cause of infant mortality is hypothermia. As designers, we solve the problems of others, and solving the problem of infant mortality due to hypothermia seems like an extremely worthy design challenge. This is exactly what a team from Stanford’s d.school set out to accomplish as a project for the class Design for Extreme Affordability (often known just as “Extreme”).
The team ended up with a novel, innovative solution—but they never would’ve arrived there if they remained within the bubble of Stanford’s campus. They needed empathy to see the problem clearly from the perspective of hospital staff, doctors, and most importantly, parents of the child in danger.
Initially, the design team thought redesigning existing hospital incubators to be simpler and more cost effective would be the easiest solution. But when team member Linus Liang toured a hospital in Nepal, he noticed something strange—the incubators were sitting empty. After interviewing a doctor about this, he learned that many homes where these babies were born were 30 or more miles away on rough rural roads, and that the parents faced the fight for their babies’ lives at home, without much hope of making it to a hospital.
The Extreme team used this insight to inform their decisions about the product’s direction. Instead of a cheaper incubator (the initial concept, but likely ineffective given the evidence) they decided to design something to help babies at home: a portable incubator, much like a tiny, heated sleeping bag, which they named Embrace.
Empathy is at the heart of design. Without the understanding of what others see, feel, and experience, design is a pointless task.
Tim Brown
IDEO
“Empathy is the heart of design.” @tceb62 @IDEO
While prototyping the Embrace, the team interviewed many moms, healthcare workers, and shopkeepers who helped them iterate on solutions. By showing prototypes, they learned about critical barriers to adoption:
In a village in India, a mother explained they believe Western medicines are very powerful, so villagers often halve doses. The warmer on the Embrace had a temperature indicator, and this mother indicated that other mothers would only heat it halfway to the ideal temperature. This information led the team to iterate on the design, removing the temperature strip and changing the design to showcase an “OK” indicator.
The team also learned that in many communities, electricity is unavailable or unreliable. So they designed a version of the warmer that could be heated using hot water.
Figure 1: The Embrace infant warmer.
With these insights, the team was able to create a product that was easy to use correctly in the locations it was designed for. They formed a company based on this product, grew it to 90 people, and have helped over 3,000 babies.
By using empathy and focusing on the people who would use the product—in this team’s case, a literal journey that exposed them to the feelings and challenges of their users—the Embrace team came up with a product that saves lives.
Empathy is the foundation of the whole design thinking process. Using a beginner’s mindset and immersing yourself in the user’s experience is a great way to uncover deep needs and insights. It also ties directly to the Guess less principle of product design. In this Empathize section of our course, we’ll dive into a case study where empathy helped create an innovative product for Bank of America. We’ll then walk through some exercises you can employ to gain more empathy for, and insights from, your own users.
How can empathy help us design better products? To find out, try this exercise, adapted from the Wallet Project exercise taught at Stanford’s d.school. It should only take about 15 minutes. (Go ahead, we’ll wait for you.)
Case study:IDEO and Bank of America’s Keep the Change program
Ultimately, people want to feel that they are in control … managing money is not generally something people like to deal with … [this project] was about helping people build better habits, but also relate to their money in more positive ways.
Christian Marc Schmidt
Interaction at IDEO during the Keep the Change project
“Ultimately, people want to feel that they are in control … managing money is not something people like to deal with.” @cms_
Let’s try a thought experiment. Put yourself in the state of mind of someone living paycheck to paycheck. For some of us who as designers spent time freelancing and waiting … and waiting … to get paid by clients, this might not be a hard thing to imagine.
What are some of your biggest fears? Getting your water or heat shut off because you can’t pay bills on time? Maybe things are bad enough that you worry you won’t make rent and could get evicted.
You probably don’t have time (or the means) to worry about setting up a savings plan. A 2013 study at Princeton showed that being in this state of mind actually impairs the brainpower needed to navigate other areas of life.
So how do you go about designing a banking product for someone stuck in this vicious cycle? In 2004, the design firm IDEO tackled exactly this challenge for Bank of America. Their target users were not restricted to people in this demographic, but the insights that lead to Bank of America’s innovative “Keep the Change” program came in part from extreme users.
Such users had unconventional ways of solving banking problems, which gave the IDEO team ideas for a banking service that would help address the needs of people having a difficult time achieving a sense of control over their finances.
There was an almost unexpected and very emotional effect from this new service … people who previously never had savings suddenly did … and it wasn’t the amount that mattered; even a small amount of money in their savings account gave them a sense of power and control over their finances.
Faith Tucker
Senior Vice President & Product Developer at Bank of America during the Keep the Change Project
“There was an unexpected and very emotional effect from this new service…” Faith Tucker @BankofAmerica
IDEO was given the challenge by Bank of America to find novel ways to entice people to open accounts. The bank was hoping that IDEO’s human-centered, ethnographic-based approach to design would bring innovation to an industry that’s typically very conservative and reluctant to change.
To accomplish this, IDEO embedded themselves into the Bank of America team and conducted observations in several cities across America. They spoke to families and individuals, learning about spending and banking habits. As IDEO synthesized their observations, they began to notice some interesting patterns.
Often, mothers were in charge of the finances. This was during the early 2000s, before online banking and mobile devices had more or less replaced the idea of a balanced checkbook. Some moms had a practice of rounding up the number in their checkbooks; this made addition easier, but it also gave a small buffer in spending.
Armed with this insight and the knowledge that many of these families had difficulty saving what money they had, IDEO came up with a service idea. People could enroll in a savings account that would round up purchases made with debit cards. Then, the overage would be transferred to a savings account automatically. In addition, the bank would match the money transferred to savings to a certain dollar amount.
As you might imagine, this program became very popular—and not only with people who had trouble saving money. Ever since the program launched in September of 2005, more than 12.3 million customers have enrolled, saving a total of more than 2 billion dollars. Of all new customers, 60% enroll in the program.
When we interviewed Faith Tucker, the former Senior Vice President & Product Developer at Bank of America, she was clearly proud of the emotional impact this service had on people who found saving money difficult. The amount was largely inconsequential—it was more about the change in mental state and feeling of empowerment that these customers gained.
To a certain degree, it removed the feeling of shame that came along with being unable to save money, which was replaced with pride at taking more control over finances.
It’s painful, and it helps us understand where the shortcomings in our product are…
Julie Zhuo
Facebook, featured in the documentary Design Disruptors
In the film DESIGN DISRUPTORS, Julia Zhou (VP Product Design, Facebook) and Mia Blume (Product Design Manager, Pinterest), talk about the importance of having empathy for your user.
Product teams need to move fast, and they’re often working on a strict timeline. It can be hard to convince stakeholders that user research—in the form of an ethnography—can be completed quickly and still have an impact.
However, there are some great techniques available to do exactly that. If you’re highly constrained on time and budget, try a Minimum Viable Ethnography, pioneered by user research expert Erika Hall of Mule Design.
A camera study can be a great substitute for rapid empathy work, but getting buy-in from the participants is an essential, and not always easy piece.
Bobby Hughes
Aardvark Design Labs
“A camera study can be a great substitute for rapid empathy work…” -Bobby Hughes, Aardvark Design Labs
If you have a little more time, try a user camera study. The advantage of this approach is that you get a semi-unfiltered view into the day-to-day environment of your users and you gain insights that may not be available via a phone or video interview.
Empathy is a journey into the feelings of others. Sometimes it’s a physical journey, like the one the Embrace team took to Nepal. Other times, it’s a virtual journey, where users share their screens with you or collect pictures of their environment in a camera study. Whatever your methods include, a good empathy study will give you new perspectives on the lives of your users—including the challenges they face, the things that keep them up at night, and the moments that delight them. Having this empathy can give you the insights you need to solve hard, worthwhile problems.
Without empathy, IDEO would not have been able to help Bank of America create a product that helped their financially strained customers feel empowered about saving money. Embrace wouldn’t have been able to create a product that’s saved the lives of thousands of premature babies. Empathy connects designers to the people who will use our products, empowering us to create products that ultimately meet real human needs.
As humans, we evolved to have a powerful sense of empathy. The primatologist Frans de Waal writes that the power of empathy to help people collaborate is one of the reasons we became so successful as a species. Wield this power as a designer and you’ll have the foundation, and the heart, to create great products for humans everywhere.
Eli is the Director of Design Education at InVision. His design career spans both physical and digital products, and he has worked with companies ranging from startups (his own and others) to Fortune 500 companies.
In addition to his background in product and industrial design, he has been a professional photographer and filmmaker. He teaches the senior capstone class Implementation to undergraduate Product Designers at Stanford University. You can find Eli on Twitter and Medium.
Currently listening to: audio book version of Zen in the Art of Writing by Ray Bradbury
Currently giving me inspiration: MasterClass series from folks like Neil Gaiman and Aaron Sorkin
Cultural thing I’m loving: Nerding out on the last season of Game of Thrones
