Design Thinking
Design Thinking
What is design thinking?
- User empathy → problem reframing → prototype
- Innovate through rapid experiments
- 'User-centered' and 'learning by doing'
Adopting design thinking changes what counts as evidence in the meeting room. 'I think this would be better' gives way to 'Five of the seven users we met last week stalled at this point.' Decisions rest on what was observed, not on seniority, and that is the method's real payoff. The order flips too. Usually a plan is finalized and then executed, but here the problem definition itself isn't locked in early; it is rewritten after meeting users. Instead of learning from sales three months later that the plan was wrong, you learn it in the week-two interviews.
In practice, it is more accurate to see it not as five steps walked in a line but as 'diverge and converge' repeated twice: widen the problem, narrow it to one, then widen the solutions and narrow again. Prototypes also need to be sorted by type. A half-day, low-fidelity prototype, with screens sketched on paper, tests whether the flow makes sense. A working, high-fidelity prototype tests whether it is actually usable. Go high-fidelity from the first round and teams can't bring themselves to discard work they have invested so much in. Nor does it fit every project. For a known equipment defect or a regulation update, simply fixing it is faster, and where you can't meet users directly, you get stuck at the first step. It also helps to be clear about the boundaries with neighboring concepts. Design thinking addresses 'what should we build?', lean startup addresses 'will this business make money?', and agile addresses 'how do we ship quickly?' The three are less substitutes than a sequence you chain one after another.
The most common failure in practice is treating this methodology as a synonym for a 'workshop'. A typical scene: two days, 300 sticky notes, a group photo, and not a single item carried into execution. There are usually three causes. The empathy phase was patched over with a survey summary instead of meeting users in person; the executive who would approve the budget never set foot in the workshop; or no one was assigned to build the prototype, and no two weeks were set aside for it. An ideation meeting that skips empathy is just brainstorming. The bigger loss comes afterward. Once a project ends this way, people meet the next innovation initiative with cynicism, and bringing the method back becomes many times harder.
John KimAuthor of B2B Marketing Design and CEO of Nanum Consulting
Soyeon KimExpert in design thinking, social venture startups, and the social economyAn innovation methodology systematized and popularized in the 2000s by Stanford’s d.school and the design firm IDEO.
Consider a hypothetical case: Company A, a home-appliance manufacturer with 240 employees and KRW 78 billion (≈ US$58,357,000) in annual revenue. Over the past two years, all four new products it launched fell short of half their sales targets, and the return rate stayed around 7%. The head of product planning launched an eight-week design thinking project.
- The product planning lead and two developers spent two weeks visiting 12 customer households to watch them use the product. When a user in their 60s flipped through the manual three times and closed it, the lead wrote in a notebook: 'What we improved was performance, not the first 30 minutes.'
- They pinned the interview notes to the wall and rewrote the problem. Once 'the features are lacking' became 'people give up in the first 30 minutes of installation', 4 of the 6 new features on the development roadmap dropped down the priority list.
- The ideation workshop took half a day. Of 47 ideas, voting narrowed them to 3. The customer service lead then pulled out six months of support logs and said, 'Installation is the number one reason people call us, so we can validate this right away.'
- They built the prototype in three days from paper and stickers. They tested a version that cut the installation guide down to a single sticker on the unit with 20 store visitors, and revised it three times until the number who finished installation rose from 7 to 17.
- Three months after the improved version launched, installation-related support inquiries fell from 420 to 130 a month, and the return rate dropped from 7.2% to 2.9%. From the next project on, the division head required 'visit 10 customer households' before any project could kick off.