Design thinking in the IT industry - a practical approach

Design thinking is a proven, human-centered (audience) creative problem-solving system that allows IT teams to move quickly from insight into user needs to a validated solution.

This method has revolutionized the way digital products are created, and in the IT industry today it is becoming a competence as crucial as programming or project management. This is because it combines empathy, business analysis and experimentation, resulting in products that are desirable to people, technologically feasible, and... earning money for themselves.

Sound enigmatic? Then let's start with a simple, yet model example of the application of the design thinking method. In 2009, Airbnb, which is probably known to everyone today, was on the verge of collapse. An empathetic analysis by design teams showed that low booking conversion was due to the fact that users of the service were repulsed and discouraged by the poor quality of photos of apartments.

The team defined the problem of the visual quality of the offering, generated the idea of hiring professional photographers, tested it in several cities and... recorded a jump (huge) in bookings, which became a turning point in the company's history.

What is design thinking?

Design thinking originated in the practices of designers, but today it is used by technology companies, startups, local governments and universities. Tim Brown of IDEO has extremely aptly defined the model as a "human-centered approach to innovation," that is, integrating people's needs, technology capabilities and business considerations.

So, as you can easily guess, this is not a one-time brainstorming session for project teams but a process. The most common model consists of five iterative steps, and the work is iterative - the team can repeatedly go back to a previous step when testing reveals new information.

Empathizing

The first task of the team is to understand the context of the user. This stage involves observation, conducting ethnographic interviews, creating an empathy map or persona (profile of a representative user or customer), which ultimately helps to go beyond declarations and get to the hidden motivations of potential audiences.

In IT practice, they are often combined with application logs and analytics data.

Defining the problem

The data collected in the first stage is synthesized into a concise design challenge that guides further work. What is important here is that a well-formulated problem is concrete, but does not yet suggest a ready-made solution.

For developers in this stage, it means the initial creation of a coherent backlog epik (to-do list, broken down into smaller tasks), and for UX - the first framework of the customer journey (customer path).

Generating ideas

Only in the third stage does the aforementioned brainstorming come into play, allowing dozens of hypotheses to be generated, albeit without evaluation - here the team moves on to selection according to the criteria of user value and technical feasibility.

Short sessions are popular here in IT, such as "Crazy 8" at Miro.

Prototyping

Selected concepts are materialized in low-fi (low-fidelity) or hi-fi (high-fidelity) prototypes, using mock-up screens, clickable wireframes or simple 3D mockups. The goal of this process is a quick visualization of the idea, not a refined production version.

Testing

Prototypes go here to users close to personas - sessions with 5-7 users reveal about 80% of usability problems. Here, the team observes interactions, collects qualitative and quantitative feedback and decides whether to repeat the solution in a loop (iteration), return to the idea generation stage (ideation), or move on already to create, develop and refine the selected prototype (development).

Design thinking in the practice of IT projects

The methodology is extremely valuable to technology teams for minimizing technical and business risks, as hypotheses here are verified on prototypes before the first line of code falls. This greatly facilitates integration with agile software development methods, creating a consistent model from problem to working code.

It is also important that products created in the spirit of design thinking, hit the real needs, which reduces the cost of corrections after implementation and increases the satisfaction of end users.

Finally, interdisciplinary teams, meaning specialists from different disciplines - UX, developers, QA or those responsible from the business side - work on a given project at the same time, trying to develop a common language from the product concept phase, which shortens the feedback loop.