Published on | Prototyping: From UX to Front End — Medium Alexandra Valdivieso

Understanding the problem that we are trying to solve should always be the first step when we face a Design process. That’s not new, but it’s key if we want: first, find the solution that makes our product successful, and second, to choose the right tools and techniques that allow us to do it in the most efficient and effective way possible.

There are hundreds of methodologies, techniques and and ways to face it. In this article I would like to write about the two that I consider most common today and which are, also, radically opposite, to propose a third intermediate approach oriented to break with the traditional processes and question to follow any methodology to the letter.

Photo by Geoff Scott on Unsplash

Traditional Business Thinking

The most traditional approach when we are trying to understand the problem is basically a man with a tie, sited behind a big oak table looking at you, looking at your snickers and your excited face, and saying: “Forget the research, interviews and everything else because I already know what the problem is. I’ve been on this all my life, more than 20 years, and believe me: I know it”. “Moreover, I even know what’s the solution. That’s what we have to do”.

Luckily, it happen less and less today. It’s no necessary to say that it’s an obsolete process and the risk to iteration or failure in this situations is really high. But there are two true things in that cases:

First, you don’t always have to discard it. If you face a simple problem, easy to solve, or it’s true that it has already happened other times,… don’t discard it. If the table is lame, maybe making a research to understand why, interviewing some users or planning a safari in IKEA will only useful to give the 100-page report to the man sitting behind the oak table and see how he uses it to fix the limping leg.

Second, and even more important: this process is very very fast. And time, as we’ll see later, is one of the most important handicaps in this game.

Design Thinking

Design Thinking is at the other extreme. We all know pretty well what it is about, but to simplify it in a common context, I would say that it’s something like: a deep research oriented to empathize with the user in a human way, interviews, observations and field work,… transforming all the info in abstract concepts (possible needs or problems to solve), co-creation sessions to find solutions, to validate it, to gain more insights, until we can make a prototype or something tangible to test with users again.

I wouldn’t like someone reading this article think that I’m criticizing Design Thinking. I’m aware that all designers owe a lot to this discipline and that it’s one of the biggest responsible for the seat that we currently have at the table. It’s just that, in my opinion, Design Thinking is facing 4 major issues today:

1. It’s degraded. I’ve seen free Design Thinking sessions offered by large companies and facilitated by a salesman reading a little guide and saying something like “ok, now that you’ve reflected about users’ needs and problems, how might we solve them with one of the wonderful solutions of my company portfolio?”. Sad. This kind of things has made many people believe that a Design Thinking process is basically one morning sticking Post-its on a wall and returning to their tables empty-handed, with anything to evolve, strengthening their conviction that traditional methods are better.

2. It’s not new anymore. I love the quote “If you want something new, you have to stop doing something old”. Luckily, Design Thinking is more and more widespread but, at the same time, the fact that all companies follow very similar processes industrializes it and making the different is more and more difficult.

“If you want something new, you have to stop doing something old” ― Peter F. Drucker

I mean, figure out two companies who offer the same service and have the same target. Both of them start a Design Thinking project at the same time, asking people about their expectations, pain points, needs, etc. How do they make the difference? They’ll obtain very similar insights so, how to design a really innovative solution? I have two possible answers to these questions: execution quality (always fundamental) and the invested time (issue #4).

3. Sometimes, it’s too abstract. In some cases, a huge divergence phase results in high problems and solutions, so abstract or so idealistic. This makes very difficult to turn all the information to something tangible, to a real product and, often, it stops or slows down the project (issue #4 again).

4. The time. When we want to start a Design Thinking process we should know that doing it well will take us a long time. Sometimes, it’s not easy to explain it to your boss or your client, and it provokes that we make some mistakes that contribute to issue #1. But, for me, the main problem with the time is that if we are in a very competitive market and trying to innovate, we should be the first. Nowadays, everything is going so fast and changing at such speed, that Design processes that last for months can mean our position in the market.

Here you are a true story:

Two years ago I faced the great challenge of designing new innovative services that would transform the banking sector in some way. I was new in banking and I didn’t have so much knowledge about it, so my first proposal was to start a very specific research project, to know the main people needs and problems related with banks, understand the relationship between people and money and discover what do they expect from the bank of the future.

It was more than 5 months since I proposed the project until we were able to start. 5 months that the team and I spent reading about banking, papers, posts, studies, in direct contact with customer data, analytics, and looking everything related to money and people around me. So when the Design Thinking project started, we already had some product ideas that we thought could work and make us feel pretty confident.

At this point, I could have decided to start working on these ideas but I didn’t. We hired a Design Consultancy to have objectivity and fresh minds in the project. I decided to follow the process to the letter, don’t make assumptions and wait for the results to start to create. I was wrong.

We began a deep and meticulously Design Thinking process that gave us almost nothing. I expected to find the key, the ‘aha moment’ to create a real innovative service, but it didn’t happen. We obtained few new insights, very abstract and superficial information, few value. After some weeks of diving into the data and many co-creation sessions we were able to conceptualize some ideas and validate it with business stakeholders. The most valued ideas were the same or very similar to the ideas we already had before starting the project. It’s just that we had already invested 8 weeks of work to reach the same point.

We dedicated the last weeks to create high fidelity prototypes with the most valued idea, and organized a couple of Focus Group to validate it with users. They really liked it, and the feedback we got from those sessions was much richer than most insights we had during the research phase.

So I always wonder: “What if we had started there? What if we had prototyped the ideas that we had in our minds and then we had tested it with users?”. And I decided to sketch a third approach.

Bold Thinking

If you’ve read the previous story, it’s easy to guess what this is about.

It’s an approach oriented to that moment when the traditional approach wants you to research best practices, but you want to find fresh inspirations — disrupting the way things might be done. You want to explore your promising ideas — gaining insight that can be obtained only through making.

The essence of this perspective is closely connected with my free interpretation of some ideas from “Think Wrong” by John Bielenberg, Mike Burn y Greg Galle. As a process, it would be more similar to Jake Knapp’s Design Sprint.

Almost quoting “Think Wrong”, I would say that the most interesting part of this approach is that it supports the “Dream” moment. It should help you frame the challenge you want to address and define the biggest difference you might make. That’s the key.

“Dreamers are mocked as impractical. The truth is they are the most practical, as their innovations lead to progress and a better way of life for all of us.” ― Robin S. Sharma

But most of the time, bold ideas scare people. So a deep research and more traditional process gives us something like a safety net.

To find a balance and reduce risk, we must choose properly the data sources that we are going to use to design our product. It’s amazing the amount of information, statistics or reports we can get today just with one click. And I’m not talking only about the online data but also the information that you can find in your company: analytics, quality reports, customer service records,…

Distill and use this information to be more accurate. Share it with the team, talk about it with experts and don’t dedicate more than one or two weeks to this. Your goal is to support and validate your concepts and make your ideas reality as soon as possible.

To do it, you should select the core features of your product, where the true value is, the one that solves the problem, and it’s now when I would involve the users, making tests and gaining a specific feedback that allows us to iterate over our product in a agile and effective way.

“Innovation is not about saying yes to everything. It’s about saying NO to all but the most crucial features.” — Steve Jobs

As you see, the phases of the process are not so different, it’s more about changing the order a bit and reducing the time invested. As I said before, time, specially if we are trying to innovate, is one of the key factors. Obviously, our product’s value is equally — if not more — important: nobody buys anything that is bad just because it arrives the first. Or maybe he does. But I think the idea is easy to understand.

We are creative people, boasting of designing creative solutions to problems. So be bold and trust in your ideas, in the things that we believe are right, I think is a good way to start. Honestly, I believe that a good product design department, constantly in touch with valuable information, should be able to generate great ideas for themselves. Differential ideas. If not, maybe they aren’t in the right place.

Conclusion: Common Sense

Anyway, it’s not about choosing one methodology or another. It’s always about knowledge and commons sense. Processes and methodologies are nothing more than tool sets available to those who know how to use them, and combining them is only a matter of common sense. So:

If you are facing a simple project, probably you shouldn’t dedicate more than a few hours to solve it.

If you are starting in a totally unknown field, a very complex problem or your solution requires a huge effort to comprehend and explore, it’s probable that you should follow a Design Thinking process to the letter. Download the Human Centered Design guide from IDEO, cross your fingers and get started.

And if you are looking for an innovative idea, make the difference and still improving quickly into that concept until find the key, I recommend you to be brave and creative, build your rocket and launch it. We will see what happens.

Hey! Before you go, please let me know what you think below. If you find this post useful, please share or clap so it can reach others as well.

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Designing better products just using common sense

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