Design Thinking for Action

Taken from  : 

Design for Action

Tim BrownRoger L. Martin
FROM THE SEPTEMBER 2015 ISSUE

The New Challenge

The launch of a new product that resembles a company’s other offerings—say, a hybrid version of an existing car model—is typically seen as a positive thing. It produces new revenue and few perceived downsides for the organization. Of course, introducing something new is always worrisome. 

The more complex and less tangible the designed artifact is, though, the less feasible it is for the designer to ignore its potential ripple effects. The business model itself may even need to be changed. That means the introduction of the new artifact requires design attention as well.

Designing the Intervention

Intervention design grew organically out of the iterative prototyping that was introduced to the design process as a way to better understand and predict customers’ reactions to a new artifact. In the traditional approach, product developers began by studying the user and creating a product brief. Then they worked hard to create a fabulous design, which the firm launched in the market. In the design-oriented approach popularized by IDEO, the work to understand users was deeper and more ethnographic than quantitative and statistical. 

Iterative rapid-cycle prototyping didn’t just improve the artifact. It turned out to be a highly effective way to obtain the funding and organizational commitment to bring the new artifact to market. Often, fear of the unknown kills the new idea. With rapid prototyping, however, a team can be more confident of market success. This effect turns out to be even more important with complex, intangible designs. 

In corporate strategy making, for example, a traditional approach is to have the strategist—whether in-house or a consultant—define the problem, devise the solution, and present it to the executive in charge. Often that executive has one of the following reactions: 

(1) This doesn’t address the problems I think are critical. 

(2) These aren’t the possibilities I would have considered. 

(3) These aren’t the things I would have studied. 

(4) This isn’t an answer that’s compelling to me. 

As a consequence, winning commitment to the strategy tends to be the exception rather than the rule, especially when the strategy represents a meaningful deviation from the status quo. 

The answer is iterative interaction with the decision maker. This means going to the responsible executive early on and saying, 

“We think this is the problem we need to solve; to what extent does that match your view?” 

Soon thereafter the strategy designers go back again and say, 

“Here are the possibilities we want to explore, given the problem definition we agreed on; to what extent are they the possibilities you imagine? Are we missing some, and are any we’re considering nonstarters for you?” 

Later the designers return one more time to say, 

“We plan to do these analyses on the possibilities that we’ve agreed are worth exploring; to what extent are they analyses that you would want done, and are we missing any?”

The Launch Is Just One Step in the Process

In his book Sketching User Experiences, user interface pioneer Bill Buxton describes the Apple iPod as the “overnight success” that took three years to happen. He documents the many design changes to the device that took place after its launch—and were essential to its eventual success.

As this story illustrates, a sophisticated designer recognizes that the task is first to build user acceptance of a new platform and later to add new features. When Jeff Hawkins developed the PalmPilot, the world’s first successful personal digital assistant, he insisted that it focus on only three things—a calendar, contacts, and notes—because he felt users initially could not handle complexity greater than that. Over time the PalmPilot evolved to include many more functions, but by then the core market understood the experience. The initial pitch for the iPod was an extremely simple “1,000 songs in your pocket.” The iTunes store, photos, games, and apps came along later, as users adopted the platform and welcomed more complexity.

As strategies and large systems become the focus of design thinking, imagining the launch as just one of many steps in introducing a new concept will become even more important. Before the launch, designers will confront increasing complexity in early dialogues with both the artifact’s intended users and the decision maker responsible for the design effort. A solution with purposely lower complexity will be introduced, but it will be designed to evolve as users respond. Iteration and an explicit role for users will be a key part of any intervention design.

New information and computing technologies will make it far easier to create and share early prototypes, even if they are complex systems, and gain feedback from a more diverse population of users. In this new world, the launch of a new design ceases to be the focus. Rather, it is just one step somewhere in the middle of a carefully designed intervention.

—Tim Brown