Applying Design Thinking to Software Development (Part 1 of a Series)

I recently attended an executive education program at the Stanford d.school called “design thinking boot camp.”  If you’re not familiar with the term, design thinking is a continuous process rooted in deep customer empathy, interdisciplinary ideation, rapid prototyping, and frequent user testing.  While these things aren’t entirely new concepts in software (especially SAAS), there were some nuggets that caused me to think about how I’ve shipped product in the past.  

Before we dive in, here are three caveats.  (1) This stuff may not be appropriate for every software development effort.  (2) I have imparted my own interpretation of “design thinking” and do not purport to be an expert, just an informed observer.  (3) We’re just starting to implement design thinking at Marchex so I can’t say it will work for sure and probably won’t know for 6-12 months.  I can tell you design thinking is a big deal at places like Intuit, Jet Blue, Pulse, and Audi and it’s basically the underlying process for all of the projects at Ideo (arguably, the world’s leading design innovation firm).

Below are five design thinking principles that weren’t obvious to me:


1. The #1 job of customer research is not product validation (nor is it asking what products users want).
2. Space can be a game changer.
3. Ideation isn’t just smart people brainstorming.
4. Prototypes aren’t future products.
5. Research isn’t a waterfall process.

I’ll elaborate on each one over the next couple of months and start with customer research today.  

Customer Empathy! = Customer Research

This was probably the biggest aha! moment for me.  I tend to think Marchex is a customer centered place and my previous products at Google and Microsoft involved major investments in customer research.  Over the years, I’ve probably run, participated in, or consumed the results of tens of thousands of customer touch points through quant surveys, usability studies, customer visits, persona boards, conjoint studies, and analyst reports.  Design thinking argues all of that doesn’t matter without empathy. 

Aside from the dictionary definition, empathy is about getting non-obvious insights about your users well beyond their interactions with your product.  In fact, it’s essential to glean a ton of it before you even first envision your product or feature idea.  You can gain empathy through in-depth interviews and anthropological observation.  In-depth interviews are open ended discussions with customers where the researcher really internalizes experiences that matter to the customer.  Then they debrief and  unpack the customers’ feelings, motivations, values, priorities, biases, etc.  It’s sitting down with a real human, face to face in their place of business, home, or favorite café (not a research lab with a big mirror) and learning about what makes them tick.  Ultimately, empathy is discovering the unexpected things about customers you would never learn by reading a quant study, looking at demographic pie charts, or even using a traditional focus group. 

As an example, a recent design thinking project looked at parents of children going to college as a user group.  The obvious need is a way to stay in touch and keep track of their kids’ lives in college.  However, the much deeper, richer, and more interesting insight divined through a series of in-depth interviews found that the parents more primal and core need was to be invited into their kids’ new lives.  It wasn’t just hearing about what classes they were taking or who they were dating but an invitation to bring mom and dad into their lives in a way that presumably showed recognition, validated relevance, and love.  That’s some pretty rich stuff and could give rise to a whole new vein of product, feature, design, and positioning ideas that something more sterile like “help parents stay in touch with kids in college” would likely miss.

A half joking litmus test for an in-depth interview is whether your research participant ends up crying.  If the entire interview is dry, staccato, and doesn’t tap in to emotions , uncover tensions, or highlight rich stories about previous experiences, you’re not getting deep enough.  You want quotes like “I hate it when….because…”  “ Last year, this happened to me and I did this because…”   It frustrates me that…. because…..”  “I love …. because ….”  You should ask “why?” and “tell me about a time when…”   five to ten times over the course of the interview.  One great tool for gaining empathy is building a post-interview “empathy map.”  An empathy map is a way for your interview team to unpack the customer’s words, actions, thoughts, and feelings.  It’s super cool and you can learn more about that tool here http://bit.ly/azzWOR  .

Another point about customer empathy is the argument that six in-depth interviews may drive more insights and unlock more innovative opportunities than a series of quant surveys.  If you don’t really understand the personas and motivations of your users, you might not be asking the right questions in your quant surveys to begin with.  In hindsight, this makes a lot of sense since I’ve always found that the free text responses to open ended questions in online surveys tend to be much more interesting than the structured answers. 

Lastly, you’ll notice there isn’t a lot of talk about market size and industry structure or customer segmentation.  That’s because an underlying belief about design thinking is it’s better to build a product that extreme groups of users love and taps into a deep emotional pull versus a product that is targeted at a large group of middle-of-the-road users but doesn’t really nail it for any of them.  Obviously, there’s a balance to strike here but the focus on the user and not the market was kind of refreshing.  As an example, OXO kitchen tools were originally designed to meet the needs of arthritic users and that passion for those users’ needs led to a winning mainstream product.  It’s very possible those OXO handles might not have gotten there had the products’ designers focused on the home cooking market in general from the outset.

Happy empathizing.

Tom