- Think about how you felt when you first held,
looked at, or used an iPhone.
Or, what was it like when you first walked
into an Apple Store?
Was it utterly different?
Very intuitive?
Pleasing to the eye?
Did the experience touch your brain as well as your heart?
Welcome to the concept of design thinking.
Design thinking is a process
to come up with creative solutions
to problems as diverse as designing a course in math,
a voting machine, or even a city.
Design thinking puts the user at the center.
The core idea is to aim for zero distance
between the product, the service,
or the experience, and the user.
Distance refers to the not just physical distance.
It's also other dimensions such as economic distance,
cognitive distance, behavioral distance,
and emotional distance.
The idea of zero distance is not as simple
as it may sound.
Take Amazon.
It would be easy to assume
that there's not much the company could do
to reduce the physical distance between you and the company.
You have to go to your computer,
log into the Amazon website, decide what you want to buy,
place the order, and then wait for things to arrive,
but, consider the stream of innovations
that Amazon has been dreaming up.
The company introduced one-click checkout
to dramatically reduce the steps and time needed
to complete the process.
More recently, Amazon launched an always on
and always connected smart speaker, the Echo,
that interacts with users via voice commands.
Amazon keeps trying to eliminate distance,
not just on the front end, but also the back end.
Does it really have to take several days
for you to get product after placing an order?
What about two days through Amazon Prime?
Better still, how about one day?
Or in fact, how about one hour?
Economic distance refers to the gap
between what the company wants to charge
and what you think the product or service is worth.
As with Apple's iPhones, the goal is not to drive
the price down to the lowest level.
Rather, it's to ensure that what you are asking
the customer to pay for is in line
with what they think it's worth.
Cognitive distance is the gap between your idea
and the customer's idea about the problem
that the product or service is trying to solve.
Before Starbucks, cafe owners assumed
that what the customer wanted was just a beverage
and maybe a pastry to go with it.
Starbucks figured out that what the customer really wanted
was a place to hang out, chat with friends, do some work,
the result, an entirely different store design.
Behavioral distance refers to the gap
between your assumptions about how the customer will behave
versus how the customer actually behaves.
If you're designing the dashboard of a car,
are the buttons and the screens placed
where the user would automatically expect them to be?
Or, will the user need to spend a few hours
reading the manual?
Finally, there is emotional distance.
This refers to whether or not the product or service
is pleasing to the eye and touches the user's heart.
Steve Jobs was obsessive about this aspect of design,
that's why Apple's products achieved a cult status.
They were not just highly functional computers,
they were cool objects of desire.
Since design thinking puts the user at the center,
the starting point of the process must be
a deep understanding of the user,
not just what the user says,
but how he or she thinks, behaves, and feels.
This requires immersion in the user's world.
It's critical to iterate
with various design prototypes repeatedly
until your solution can get as close to the users world
as possible given today's technologies,
and, even Steve Jobs, the magician, kept tinkering
with Apple products and the retail store
until the very last minute.