Design thinking in product development at ProductTank Oxford

roger on 20/02/2020

Design Thinking is a process to gather insights and turn them into innovative products.

Design Thinking is about:

  • Learning by doing
  • Exploring
  • Asking questions
  • Being ok with being wrong

Barriers to Design Thinking

  • Fear of failure
  • Fear of being wrong
  • Unwillingness to share bad ideas
  • Lack of social trust in the group

Benefits of Design Thinking:

  • Easy
  • Affordable
  • Flexible

Problem framing, problem solving, functionality & usability, aesthetics

Empathise, define, ideate, prototype, test.

Be flexible about the amounts of time in each part depending on the nature of the problem to be solved.

Design Thinking is good for tackling big complex, ambiguous problems.

Kaizen, on the other hand, is about incremental improvements.

Divergent thinking is open to explore and change. Convergent thinking is about having a clear path towards a clear goal.

Structure in the world offers freedom in the mind.

Design Thinking is about exploring and testing solutions to ensure they fit the problem before investing significantly.

Get better at finding problems.

Prototyping is about getting feedback and learning from users. The level of fidelity of the prototype depends on what you want to learn.

Don’t get too invested in a prototype, it might not be the right one.

Need to explore lots of different potential solutions to give confidence that the chosen one is the best.