- Lots of design practitioners,
including large universities and famous design agencies,
seem to think the end deliverable of design thinking
is a concept or a storyboard.
The idea is that after they've gathered
some initial data from customers,
the experts then create an interface, sketch it out,
and hand it over to developers in your company to build.
If you work in a company
and you're charged with delivering projects,
you know that's hardly sufficient.
You need an understanding of the interaction
and an implementation plan with deliverables and milestones.
The sketches don't give you an understanding
of the relative importance of each design element.
What's core to the interaction
and what's just nice to have?
Product development has moved on
from the old waterfall techniques
where someone would specify the whole design up front,
then hand it off to a technical team to implement.
Now, teams work in iterative cycles
and try to deliver business benefit as early as possible.
Without a roadmap,
a plan of what items depend on what other items,
and which are most important to build first,
the development team will struggle to move forward.
If an agency delivers a sexy presentation to executives,
those executives are going to turn around
and get you to build it.
If the design thinking process
doesn't help you with the development process,
it's a waste of time
because you'll never really be able to build
the concept in reality.
Those concepts might look great,
but how likely is it that the development team
will be able to understand,
let alone implement those sketches?
And what will happen if they do implement them?
How likely is it they'll work?
The other element missing from this celebrity version
of design thinking is a comprehensive way
of gathering fast, frequent customer feedback
on everything from early prototypes, through alpha builds
to the post-release version of the product.
If the team who'll be rolling up their sleeves
and delivering the product weren't involved
through the whole design thinking exercise,
and if the design thinking exercise
doesn't end up giving you a tested prototype design
and an implementation plan,
then it's nothing more than a set of unproven concepts.
That's why I always advocate involving representatives
from every discipline on the team
in the design thinking process.
There's a myth that only design agency staff
can do creative thinking,
so you need them in order to bring creativity
to your company.
The reality is they follow
the same techniques that you will.
Creativity really is the result of applying these techniques
in a way that opens you up to seeing the possibilities.
The more you practice this with your team,
the less likely it is you'll need
the mythical creative input from an external company.