- The design thinking process
is a fun fast moving set of activities
that take you from problem definition
through to implementation planning.
It all starts with in-person research
to find out where your customer's issues lie.
In Lean terminology,
this is the get out of the building phase.
Now, customers can't do your design for you,
but they can show you the problems they have.
Recognizing and solving these problems
is likely to be delightful for customers,
which translates into business value for you.
You are not your users.
Watching true customers performing their real tasks,
then talking with them about their experiences
gives you insights you can't get from sitting
around a conference room table making assumptions
or looking at a set of statistics or questionnaire results,
which tell you what is going on but not why.
Once you have insights from your customer observations,
you can turn these pain points
into a prioritized list of goals
for what your new product should achieve.
Even at this early stage,
you can set some metrics,
so you know when you meet those goals.
Many development projects just aren't measured
or we know they're failing but we release them anyway.
Setting measurable goals helps you ensure
that you really are delivering business benefit.
You can measure early and often
as you go through the intuitive design thinking process.