Design Thinking - Empathy, Creativity, Rationality
The Problem
Have you ever visited a website and wondered why it is badly designed, has poor navigation cues for you - a first-time user, and doesn't even work right unless you are using internet explorer? (Most Singaporeans familiar with government e-Services portal will know what I am talking about)
Have you ever visited a spanking new, billion dollar mall in Singapore and yet get completely lost navigating it? (Some of you might know which malls I am referring to)
Creating a usable, well-designed (not just in the aesthetic sense) product is not a trivial undertaking and requires the buy-in right up to the top for a large organisation. Yes, a buy-in direct from the decision maker.
The Challenge
Unfortunately, in real life, software projects and brick-and-mortar projects alike are constrained by budgets or corporate culture or, simply, bureaucratic requirements. The final product is often not created with the end user in mind. I call this the "big boys' cognitive dissonance". This happens when the hierarchy of a large organization gets in the way of understanding the actual experience of the product user on the ground.
Through my working life, I have had the luck of working in both a reasonably big/mid-sized company as well as being blessed to be working in a smaller company that I founded. Over the years, it has become apparent to me that "big isn't necessarily good, and more likely bad than good". Especially so when it comes to designing a new product and empathizing with the intended product user. Because of a bureaucratic need to fulfill "key performance indicators", risk taking and out-of-the-box creative thinking processes - critical to creating a usable, innovative product - are thrown out of the window in favor of a safer, "this-is-how-we-do-things-here" approach.
Proposed Solutions
My proposed solution to the large organization's conundrum is simple: commission a 2-men design prototyping team who has direct communication with the man-right-on-top (the decision maker) and who are fully empowered to communicate with target end users of the product they are creating. Keep this team lean and no unnecessary "project manager" or reporting hierarchy please. Take good care of them, pay them well enough at market rates (but not so much as to hamper creativity) and give them all the necessary freedom to take the lead and experiment with a plethora of interactive product designs: focusing on breaking conventions/boundaries (creativity), thinking through the end users' eyes (empathy) combined with rationality from a functional perspective.
Another solution of course is to do what Google does. Google encourages such decentralized experimentations by giving a day off to their employees each week, to work on their passion projects. There are a lot of excuses a company's management team can give to justify why it will not work in their context.
It's too expensive to waste our precious and limited working hours like that.
Our employees do not have initiative like Google employees do.
It all boils down to the willingness of management to get out of the way; and let the talents in the team shine and surprise you with what they can create.
Other Methodologies?
Do you have any ideas on how design thinking philosophy and product creation can be adopted by companies, or even more interestingly, by democratic open source software groups?
I would love to hear from you if you have suggestions on how big companies or large open source software groups (by "big" and "large", I am referring to any organisation with more than 100 active members or employees onboard)
Categories: Design Thinking Product Management
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