Hi All! Nico @ Intuit here! 👋 How do you design think?

Nico

Hey everyone! Nico from Intuit here 👋

Would love to hear how you all use design thinking! I am always interested in new frameworks and mindsets. Share your favorite design thinking framework and the "steps" it has. Ill go first!

Design for Delight

1. Deep Customer Empathy
2. Go Broad to Go Narrow
3. Rapid Experimentation with Customers

kara

Hi @Nico4Delight !

This is a great topic, thanks for posting 😊

Here are some of my favorites:

-The 5 Whys for digging deep - this can be helpful for building customer empathy. I have a backlog of 'feature requests' but until I understand the actual problem the user is facing or trying to solve, whatever solution I come up with will likely fall short.

-How might we....for innovative brainstorming. Instead of focusing on a particular solution, we're generating insightful ideas.

-Jobs to be Done - this framework helps me to focus on the core job, and then I can ensure the outcomes and strategies are measurable, impactful, and important.

Have a fantastic day!

kara

CecilyLloyd

Hi Nico! Welcome!

Like you, I am a fan of going broad to go narrow - I've always referred to it as "Diverge to Converge", and it's helpful for me to ensure that we aren't zeroing in on solutions right away before we fully understand the problem we are trying to solve and all of the possible solutions that may be available to consider.

A fun exercise that allows teams to diverge/converge that I've learned during my timing at MURAL is called the Sailboat exercise. Incredibly easy and effective way to prioritize what topics to discuss during a team meeting or offsite, for example.

Thanks for being part of our community!

Cecily

[Deleted User]

Hi @Nico4Delight !!!

Thanks for jumping right in with a delightful question. Big design thinking nerd here, so I think we are going to quickly become best friends!

Mmm... I think one of my favorite activities is a two step process, and I am not really sure if it has a formal name, but it combines two somewhat popular design thinking activities:

Concept Mapping

1. Generate a huge list of nouns (essentially what are all the people, places and things in the domain I am thinking about).
2. Make sure all of terms are broken into separate objects and containers (well, hello sticky notes 😀).
3. Arrange and group them to reveal and highlight key relationships
4. Draw lines connecting key concepts (nouns), and describe the relationship (with verbs)

Ok, here is the magic part. Once we have a clean model of the current reality we are looking at, we can then ask ourselves what this model reminds us of. We can think about the key relationships and patterns and ask "what else works this way?, or "what problems have people solved before that are shaped like the model we just made?"

With this mode in mind, we can take a leap in to the land of "what could be" using...

Alternative Worlds (Essentially, what are examples of experiences that help us imagine making this current situation better).

1. Review the concept map you created previously
2. Generate a large list of products, experiences, and metaphors that come to mind
3. Vote on a smaller subset from this list (3-5) that feel like ideal model to shift toward
4. Create Concept Maps that explain those Alternative worlds (review and compare them and select the most ideal alternate future).
5. Discuss a plan from taking the current state (Concept Map) toward a more ideal state (Alternative World Model).

Thanks so much for setting up this question. Let me know if any of this makes sense, or if you have similar or different approaches to the same moment. I am so eager to learn more about the D4D approach!

Greg

Hey! When I teach Design Thinking at my university, one of my favorite podcast episodes that I recommend to my students is this one, about the Jobs-To-Be-Done - https://hbr.org/podcast/2016/12/the-jobs-to-be-done-theory-of-innovation

I talks about Design thinking and McDonald's Milkshakes and approaches you can use to figure out how to understand customers using the jobs to be done concept.

Linds

You had me at McDonald's Milkshakes 😍 @Greg