Why you should be using design thinking to develop digital products

I wish the news coming out of startup-land were better, but unless you’ve pivoted to A.I. in some way, funding is tighter, budgets are shrinking, layoffs are in the news every other week, job searches are taking forever… it’s grim. (Not to mention the fact that too many of those “A.I. startups” are kinda full of it, but that’s a post for another day). The reason I bring all of this up, though, is that now more than ever, we can’t afford to swing and miss when it comes to new initiatives or innovation efforts. We have fewer collective swings right now, so you have to make each one a hit. Now, we’ve been fans of design thinking for years at ENO8, but I can’t think of a better time to spread the good word about why we love design thinking, how to do it well, and what it can do for your business.

The Full Story on Design Thinking

If you’re interested in the full story on design thinking, check out the video we published on the subject below:

The tl;dr of it is that I interviewed Emily Holmes, who is a design thinking guru. She’s consulted for some small brands like Coca Cola, NASA, Microsoft… Her preferred framework for design thinking is called “the double diamond method,” which we’ll lay out in more detail below if you’re not the video-watching type.

The Double Diamond Approach to Design Thinking

The Double Diamond, created by the UK Design Council, is a powerful visual tool that guides us through two main phases in product development: exploring the problem space and the solution space through “divergent” and “convergent” thinking:

In the first diamond, we diverge by gathering insights and understanding the broader context of the problem, then converge by defining the core issue that needs solving. The second diamond follows a similar pattern but focuses on generating and refining solutions.

The Importance of the Problem Space

One of the key takeaways from the double diamond is the importance of the problem space. Too often, companies see a problem, realize they have the capacity to solve that problem, and jump right into designing and building the solution.

But what often happens is that they’ve misunderstood the core problem, and they solve the wrong problem entirely.

You need to understand the “why” of the problem before you solve it. You have to really explore peoples’ lives, their problems, WHY they have that problem, what’s the root cause of that problem, before you jump to building a solution.

Here’s a perfect example:

When you see this man reaching for a book, what’s your first instinct?

It’s probably to hand him a ladder or step stool to help him grab it. Totally natural response — most humans want to be helpful and solve problems.

But what if we’re solving the wrong problem for him?

He may not need a “book” per se… maybe he just wants an answer to a specific question?

Maybe Wikipedia will get him that answer faster / better.

What if he needs something to prop up a leaning table at home?

Maybe hiring a handyman to fix the table is a better long-term solution to his particular problem.

What if he just needs a paper weight to hold down documents in a breezy office?

Well then, get the man a dang paperweight.

This is obviously an oversimplified example, but it still illustrates an important point. We need to understand the WHY of a problem before we just jump to what we think the solution is. That way, you’re not solving the wrong problem entirely.

The double diamond is great for this.

Great Landing, Wrong Airport

Another advantage of the double diamond is what Emily calls “great landing, wrong airport.”

It’s when you design a great product, but like the book example above, it doesn’t actually solve the right problem.

A perfect example of great landing, wrong airport comes from the 2000s with the Microsoft Zune. It was a great technical product that allowed users to carry a lot of .mp3s in their pocket. But, as with almost all things Apple, Apple wasn’t the first to launch a product in their space. They took much more time understanding the entire context around users’ problems before jumping to their solution… which usually dominates the competition.

What Apple realized is that people didn’t just want to store .mp3s on the go, they wanted a seamless music ecosystem where users could easily find and buy music, create playlists, have all that sync automatically to their music player, AND have the music player be incredibly intuitive and easy to use.

We all know the rest of the story — the iPod and iTunes together changed portable music forever.

While Apple may have not consciously called their innovation approach The Double Diamond, they certainly understood and exploited the problem space fully before jumping into solution design and build.

Divergent and Convergent Thinking

Alright, so let’s say you’re on board. You see the power of design thinking and want to put the double diamond framework into practice. What comes next?

Focus on divergent and convergent thinking.

In the problem space, you diverge out (the bulge in that square above) as you ask probing questions, look at all possible angles of the problem, before converging back down to the core issue.

The same process repeats itself with solutions. When you brainstorm and explore the full solution space, actively resist shooting any ideas down. You don’t need to worry about cost or feasibility to start… really flex in terms of what an ideal solution might look like, and look at it from a lot of different angles.

You diverge out until you have a handle on all the possible solutions. Once you have the solution space well explored, THEN you start to converge back down. You find what might be the ideal solution, then start to consider feasibility, cost, timelines, etc. Sometimes you can build the ideal, sometimes you have to make a few trades. But either way, you’re building a better version of that product no matter what.

The bottom line is that design thinking, and specifically the double diamond framework, are great tools for both innovation AND cost savings. When you have fewer swings to take, design thinking can help you make sure those swings become hits.