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On Design Thinking

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150 pointsluu27 comments

I studied Interaction Design in Sweden in 2008 and design thinking and IDEO was all the rage. It felt very superficial to me and just another way to indoctrinate students into believing business people really wanted to solve real, difficult problems, rather than just sell more stuff. I wrote a little about what I saw as the conflict between business and design here: https://keyvan.net/2011/07/interaction-design-serving-corpor... and https://keyvan.net/2010/03/interaction-design-in-the-corpora...

I've also studied interaction design and service design. In my experience the conflict between what a user/designer wants and what the business wants are so completely different it's just frustrating to work in projects like that.

Getting everyone onboard every time, when they are only looking for you to solve their problem the way they want it solved is just horrible.

You see this time and time again where products that were well received are turned into hellscapes to extract more money from users.

I would also say that I've had "conflict between what a designer wants and what the user/business wants", which is a pain.

My girlfriend got a design strategy MBA several years ago (her family thought it was a bullshit degree) and has worked for two of the largest companies in the U.S. (one of those jobs is still current). These companies are taking design strategy VERY seriously based on the projects I see her working on, and the outrageous salaries they’re paying her and her cohorts.

In the end, they are in the business for profit. So of course it is always just to “sell more stuff,” but in order to do that you have to fix deep-rooted problems within the company, its culture, its customers and products. She works on all those things.

If the trend continues as I’m observing it from the outside, more companies will be hiring design strategists and researchers in-house and these design consultancies will have a lot less work in the next 10 years.

What happens if there's a tension between what the business wants and what the user wants, and the user's requirements are "wrong"?

I was in a design thinking training session once where we were tasked with designing a hypothetical digital wallet. We interviewed a persona who was a minimalist, and his goal in life was to buy as few things as possible in life (note: not to buy things more cheaply, but actually to avoid buying things at all). He wanted the digital wallet to help him avoid purchases.

On the face of it, his goals are admirable. But it seems to me it shouldn't be the responsibility a designer to design for those goals. The user can elect to practice his minimalism by personally opting out, but we oughtn't need to design our product around that.

Isn't design (at least commercial design) be about harmonizing the needs of business and individuals, not to necessarily to fulfill each stated need of the individual? I mean, there is a kind of design that does not account for the needs of business: it is called "art". But I don't think that's not quite what we're about.

(don't get me wrong, I'm very much against user-hostile design. But I also believe that industrial design is a balancing act between business and customers, and the task of the designer is to help resolve that tension. User-centric design leads to all kinds of abominations too. MoviePass for instance -- to use an extreme example -- was very user-centric at the expense of a sustainable business model.)

Your comment makes me think about FB's design. Astronomical compute and human power brought to bear to personalize, A-B test, contextualize and curate with the express intention of driving engagement.

In another thread, I remember someone suggesting FB's express goal was getting people addicted, and another user took issue with claiming that was a goal. I mentally sided with the OP, MAXIMUM ENGAGEMENT feels like an A-B tested way to describe driving addiction to me.

It's a shame that resources of such incomprehensible, never before seen enormity can be brought to bear for such a task, but a digital wallet that tries to subtly drive user behavior towards frugality feels intuitively bad.

Less purchases mean your data is built upon a cadre of less valuable consumers. That's bad for your digital wallet business! Not to mention it's manipulative, but then quite a bit of this business is manipulation. I wonder how I'd react if I read a news article about some company manipulating its users to be happier, more prosperous..

What if android's auto complete suggestions were trained on a corpus that promoted the kinds of responses that come from people google knows to have attained high autonomy * feedback?

Subtly manipulating people into negotiating better outcomes to their own personal tyrannies in their workplace or relationships. It would be SO WEIRD.

Facebook made the news a while ago with some salacious headline about using its powers to see if its feed could make teenagers more depressed. They concluded that they have that power.

Instinctually, my wish would be that perhaps companies shouldn't have vast dossiers on every living human -- but to even imagine turning back the clock on that feels like delusion.

Since we're all members of the panopticon anyways, couldn't my phone tell me ways I'm exemplary or special when my self esteem is low? Gah, it's gross to even contemplate, but maybe it's less gross than the current focused laser beam trying to get me to vote, buy and be angry as others wish..

Very interesting to read about one of the failed IDEO projects. It's hard to find anything even remotely suspicious of IDEO or its ideas, and that alone makes this piece worth a read.

The author talks about how Rittel and others rejected building design methodologies to apply to Wicked Problems, but once you define an alternative approach, how do we distinguish that from a design methodology?

A design methodology is supposed to be taken whole cloth to new domains. Whereas without one you are free to approach each new piece of work and domain differently.

One of the leaders at IDEO (and part-time prof. at the business school) spoke to my grad. class. He gave one of the slickest powerpoint presentations I've ever seen.

Good article, but I don't think it says much that should surprise us. Large corporate firms will inevitably end up talking corporate-speak, and sell a service whose actual value is lower than its luster. Moreover, in every field, there will be some practitioners who hold a myopic view when it comes to problem-solving.

There seems to be an aura about/around design stuff/work that blinds people to the very real fact that it is still just a business.

Slickest presentation? In what way? Is it online somewhere?

Not that I know of.

It was slick because of how high quality the designs, and colors, etc for each slide were. Most importantly, though, it was the best 'story-telling' I've seen in a presentation.

Design and presentation is IDEO's bread and butter, so it makes sense that make sure to get those things right when speaking to outside audiences.

Slick wasn't meant as a pejorative.

Good design don't come from just asking question, it comes from understanding the need. Often time when dwelling in a problem space, an industry, a customer sector, there is a underlying common problem to be solved. But everyone articulates the problem differently. A good design is to find a general solution to all these seemingly random problem.

Have seen quite a few "designers" who drinks the koolaid of design sprint, design thinking, etc by asking everyone what everyone thinks the product should look like, then proceed to prototype a frankenstein that "addresses" everyone's concern. Not once did it end well

Agreed. The best products often propose a way for doing things that people didn’t think about. But they show a deep understanding of the actual needs. I don’t think many users of 70s computers would have come up with mice and windowing systems if asked how to improve systems.

My girlfriend is a design strategist and I don’t see that at all amongst her colleagues and friends. I think that’s a very outside perspective on what designers must think like. Good designers are a lot smarter than that, and I’ve seen first hand how bad your example can end up. Usually, it’s not the designer’s fault, but the client.

Often, a client or your company has an idea about how something should look or function regardless of research, prototyping and testing. I’ve seen the process take place over wasted weeks just for a client to say, “Yeah, but that’s not what we wanted or envisioned. Make it like this or make it fit somehow.”

That’s when I’ve seen products and services fail spectacularly while the designers and researchers ask themselves, “What was the point of all that work then?”

Edit: There’s also kind of a branding problem with design strategists where, as someone else pointed out, a lot of them are just good at packaging and presenting mediocre ideas into really slick powerpoints and presentations. And many of these strategists even present themselves as very artsy and slick and can spout off very woo-woo lines of magic and dazzle with their charisma. It gives people who are exposed to these designers the impression that they’re all just a bunch of snazzy consultants who offer no real value.

Good article. I think a lot of times, including with myself, design is used as a "hack" to somehow skips steps. It's not like IDEO had to design the whole mac, or design how the FIRST mouse would work, or the wiring, or the bluetooth. They had these tools and had to put them together, with already. If there is a goal way too far out and "design" is supposed to get you there, I would guess there will be a lot of speedbumps on the way.

Was the iPhone design thought largely out of thin air? Or was it brought about by people who understood and worked the the technology for years and that is what drove the design focus?

Design thinking requires total control between input and output, and applied to the real world on a large scale this includes politics, which isn't compatible with democracies.

Great article. I think many people in the design community measure their success by how many eyeballs they can catch. Ultimately it was the city commission that led to the poor management. They could have adopted a staged process but were likely getting misplaced advice from outsiders. From what I read, Ideo could have done a better job of setting expectations.

I can't do design, and I have a lot of respect and admiration for those who can, but I have a lot of trouble seeing design thinking as anything other than formal terms applied to things that are obvious and intuitive ("human-centered") and the freshest buzzword phrase to make clients think something ordinary is actually special.

The irony ... in order to solve for the stakeholder’s assumed problem statement, the advice was to avoid assumptions...all assumptions, I assume, except the assumptions of the report.

From the article

> They prototyped and tested solutions to municipal problems. Finally, in collaboration with the Blue Ribbon Committee, the IDEO team published a report. It aimed to address the problem—an absence of “competitiveness” for new business and talent—that Mayor Braddy had diagnosed.

And further down the article from the report itself:

> (“Instead of assuming,” for instance, “that the right answer to dealing with trees cut as a result of development is a policy to limit the amount of trees that can be cut, why not ask the question, ‘How can we maintain a desirable degree of shade and tree coverage as part of Gainesville’s overall design?’”)

From a human factors engineering POV, this is straight usability research. Instead of assumptions, use observations and interviews— then form problem statements. Instead of a single solution, form ‘how’ statements about intent. In Product Management parlance: speak in terms of problems, not solutions. The design cycle then moves to create product/refine product.

Don’t disagree. It reads like they didn’t eat their dog food though.

I recently read about an example of IDEO "missing the forest for the trees" on the subject of transportation and urban planning:

The limits of design thinking: The most difficult design challenge is asking the right question

by Joe Cortright (2019)

http://cityobservatory.org/designed-to-fail-2/

https://web.archive.org/web/20190509170145/http://cityobserv...

Essentially, they applied "design thinking" to transportation without considering the role that locality plays in transportation.

IIRC, I first read about IDEO in "Creative Confidence", a book I enjoyed and found personally inspiring. Looking fwd to HN comments on this ~recent article.

Hard not to be cynical. IDEO is a design hammer... so they hit the nail that Gainesville gave them.

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