Design Thinking’s Bad Reputation

For while there, design thinking was all the rage. After Tim Brown’s book “Change By Design” and Eric Ries “The Lean Startup” were published in 2010, it was a wild ride. Yet, Design Thinking has its origins from Academia in Stanford. How is it that it gets such a bad rep today?

Well, first of all there’s many consultants that adhere to the whim of focus group think phenomena and rather be a people pleaser in terms of telling clients what they want to hear rather than what they need to see objectively.

There was no real litmus test for Design Thinkers, you could just call yourself one, and with enough networking and political sway you could weasel your way into a contract. This has the unintended consequence of alienating bystanders who effectively observed design theatre.

Design Thinking is intended as a bottom up roots user-centered innovation process. It’s more an approach to every situation rather than a step by step guide. However, when push comes to shove, many would rather build what their boss tells them to rather than question authority. This has been drilled into us since elementary school.

You see, schools are designed to create factory workers and militants that obey orders. Therefore, those who get above average grades all through high school and college and on, tend to enforce the rules at company organizations. Although, this does bear its own merit, it’s not conducive to innovation nor design thinking. Design thinking questions the very under pinnings of the paradigm brought to its kitchen table.

It is said that design thinking starts with

1. Empathy
2. Definition
3. Ideation
4. Prototyping
5. Testing

This is all well and good. The trouble is whenever one joins an existing team who has history, it’s hard to say where the team is exactly at in this or other processes. These teams like to dub theirselves “Agile” in spirit of the “Agile Manifesto” but rarely are they agile enough to start from scratch with new recruits. Often the burden is thrown on the rookie to the group to play catch up, rather than the team playing with their weakest link as it should be.

Nevertheless, the experienced consultant is able to come in and seek to bridge the gap between decisions and empathy for the end-user. Often B2B teams so deprioritize the end-user, because it’s often their client’s user, and not their direct user. Think “white label” anyone? Their shear number of user personas brought on by teams can number in the dozens. Does anyone really think we’d be able to cater to this many characters in a story? I think not. And even if so, that’d be the highest EQ team ever, and would take 5 years to come to market, so think again.

This is one of the reasons I began writing a book called “Design For One” that outlines exactly why every project, product, or feature should have one persona, one problem, and one question answered. This way we don’t overwhelm our team, and thus tamper with our own potential.

D2C has a much better time providing UX because there’s less middlemen. Yet, this is a slower way to revenue. So, startups are better off focusing on B2B than D2C. I would recommend aiming for 3 personas for a multi-sided marketplace.

1. End User Persona: has the money to afford product/service but little time to DIY
2. Service Worker: Performs the labor / service in the end users stead
3. Anti/Negative Persona: Haters gonna hate

Now, there can be more but i think this is enough for now. You see we added the negative or anti-persona edge case for the devil’s advocate on our team. Every team should and does have one.

This is yet another reason design thinking gets a bad reputation. When our team is seeking favor from mainstream popularity, but we’re working on innovation, we’re disobeying Geoffrey Moore’s book “The Chasm.”

With innovation we’re focused on innovators and early-adopters, NOT the mainstream. Many people skip this step to their detriment because of a misunderstanding of business, marketing, and design thinking. When we’re focused on innovation and one persona, there’s an itch in some of our most vain colleagues thay we’re not targeting the right persona. “How can one person be representative of everyone? Shouldn’t we target everyone?” Which really means “anyone.” Sounds desperate doesn’t it?

And we are desperate. Desperate for a promotion. Desperate to be seen as successful. Victims of hurry sickness. On and on the cycle goes that we’ve been groomed to feel due to the educational industrial complex that shills out obedience. Design Thinking gets a bad reputation because it empathizes with individuals rather than cater to the masses.

“As power and wealth ascend empathy wains.” — Goleman Focus 2013

Some people feel that empathy is being weaponized, and so the solution is to actually have compassion for others. Moreover, there’s a movement to be more inclusive, but because of polarizing politics “inclusive” has somehow turned into an “affirmative action” -esque objective which defeats its purpose.

“Judged by the content of their character not the color of our skin.” — MLK JR

Instead our teams sometimes fall prey to this guilt that we should have every race, identity, and gender represented on these teams and/or as customers. Yet, that’s not what inclusive means.

Inclusive means that we include those who we are catering to in the design process. Rather than keep things secret until we launch. Rather than assume we know that they’ll want what we have to offer. People want to be given a chance to design because of the merit of their ideas, or just out of the kindness of your heart, NOT because they’re black, white, male, or female. Those that do feel that way have often been propogandized to the extent they feel entitled to accelerants that put them over others. This has the unfortunate consequence of negating the overarching vision of equality. Perhaps Equity vs Equality is another blog article to come. I digress.

Design thinking gets a bad reputation when people are walked over, and passed over for the loudest speaker in the room. Much like Focus Groups succumb to the same effects, so too do design thinking workshops run the risk. In order to mitigate this risk, there needs to be anonymous quiet time on Zoom calls where each individual can fully express their ideas, and present them anonymous in a virtual “hat” so that their idea can stand on its own merit. Bringing the end user and outside experts into the fray broadens the divergent thinking on the team and welcomes counterculture rather cultural assimilation. This is a feature NOT a bug, but all too often design thinking is seen through the lens of going against one’s ideas, rather than an exercise to allow the best brain power to come together. When ego is involved Design Thinking goes south.

When defining the problem, the second phase of design thinking, yet again this is where teams go arye and design thinking takes the blame. You see, we often think the problem is something that’s symptomatic not the core problem. This is known as “Solutioneering” the act of working up a solution prior to fully defining the problem. Using the 5 Whys we can help a little but it truly takes an expert in design thinking to help teams make the paradigm leap. And it is a paradigm change! The truth hurts, and that’s why design thinking gets a bad reputation. You see, some people, don’t want to hear the truth when it goes against their deeply held beliefs or if they have cognitive avoidance. Being open minded is crucial of design thinking, and when it’s thrown on narrow minded people the rumors start to go around.

Sometimes problems get defined that are too big and grandiose to seem impractical if one was going to try to solve it. It seems out of scope, and something that’s not achievable by the end of the project. This is the difference between vision and tactic. Many people on our team who haven’t done design thinking before consider a project to have some measurable outcome. Rarely do they see that as their own learning objective. They feel like, “I’m at the pentacle of my career, what more do I have to learn?” Again, the ego sneaking back into the lime light. Yet, we always have room to learn and grow, and even if a scientific experiment has proven something in the past, doesn’t mean it’s not worthy of being held up to scrutiny today. Therefore, I would argue that design thinkers make the objective claim early on in the meet n greet of the workshop and project so that we can hold the team accountable for acknowledging the end goal of the project is not a product, but our own learning outcome, so that we can continue this new paradigm change into the future, and may return to design thinking once more. It’s not a one and done deal. It’s a continuation. Design is never done.

Which brings me to ideation. I believe ideation often falls on the lap of the designer. Ideas are a dime a dozen, but clients often rather us tell them our ideas, so they can swat them down like flies until the butterfly emerges from its cocoon. Yet, everyone on the team has ideas, and with the proper problem definition there’s 9 ways ’til Sunday to solve a problem. This is where we can get really speculative and there’s no wrong answer. Yet, the practical pragmatists on the team might fret over the impracticality of our imaginative mythical ideas. That’s ok. Ideation is about breadth not depth.

Prototyping is often over done. When we enter the 4th step of the approach, design thinking, we often feel the urge to use real code, real data, and fancy effects, yet that would mean we’re really entering development where mistakes get expensive. Instead, this is truly design theatre. It’s important to enforce the idea that renacting the customer interaction with a prototype is key to finding the three most important usability metrics.

1. Efficacy: Can they complete the task or not?
2. Efficiency: How long does it take to complete the task?
3. Satisfaction: On a scale of 1-5 (one being disatisfied) What would you rank the experience?

It’s these metrics that we’re using to test the usability. We’re not doing a “proof of concept.” We’re not doing a “MVP.” We’re not even doing a fully featured rich prototype experience with everything clickable! No. We’re testing tasks. I would recommend 3 max. Having this constraint helps refurbish design thinking’s reputation because our team can see the value in the test we run. They can see the results. Did we answer our questions or not? Did they complete the task or not? When we try to build out everything, we end up testing for nothing. Users go off the rails, and we didn’t need to spend countless design hours to learn that. We can merely do a “first click test” to understand where people go to complete said task.

“If a user test session goes right, you did it wrong.” — Jakob Nielsen

Finally, when it comes to testing, as designers we have too much skin in the game. One would have to truly be reserved, quiet, and maintain a high EQ to moderate a usability test session. This is because we cannot teach, guide, or speak. We can only ask the task oriented question in an unbiased way, and watch what happens. We shouldn’t even analyze and synthesize our report until the team has watched the recording too. Only then can we use cross-discipline qualitative data amongst our team to get a holistic picture of user behavior. All too often I see teams fall victim to anecdotal attitudinal subjective things people “say out loud” rather than focusing on the objective, “where did they click?” “did they complete the task?” Behavior vs Attitude is worth it’s own blog article, yet to come.

Design Thinking gets a bad reputation because the facilitator often doesn’t spend enough time building relationships 1:1 with the participants before jumping in. Moreover, there’s a lot of education to be done during the sales and onboarding of the team members before the workshop commences over several days or weeks. Being inclusive means including disciplines, outsiders, counterculture, and people from lower income brackets to the table. Until we understand Noam Chomsky’s Manufacture Consent only then can we rise above and help bring the best innovations to light through Design Thinking. Otherwise, it’ll be seen as a theatrical display of design or innovation theatre that leads to no measurable outcome. Well, now you know, make sure we set expectations early in the cycle, and narrow the focus to answer a few questions in relation to usability. Cheers!