Related Podcast and Transcription: Applying Lean to UX
Joe: You talk about Design Thinking as complimenting Lean UX? Can you expand on that?
Jeff: I think there’s a misunderstanding of Design Thinking than perhaps — but Design Thinking, it’s not a methodology for making things pretty. In fact, what it is is a way to leverage the tools that designers have used for decades to solve business problems. So they’re new tools — well, they’re old tools that are being re-purposed in a broader context to solve bigger problems. And so Design Thinking really is about understanding the customer; so it’s about getting empathy for the person that you’re building, your service for the context in which they are engaging with the service and the problems that they’re trying to solve. That’s the first pillar of Design Thinking, and there’s nothing in there about making anything necessarily. It’s really just about understanding as a team what the problems are.
The next step is creativity, and again creativity not limited to an individual or a job title, but creativity for the team in collaboratively generating solutions for the problems that you’ve identified by understanding the customer. And then lastly, the last pillar of Design Thinking is then rational, which essentially means honest with yourself and with your colleagues about which one of your many brilliant ideas actually does solve the problem. And then, it’s about refining the experience and making it more user-friendly, making it more aesthetically pleasing, making it more smooth and so forth And so I think that if people ascribe Design Thinking as a visual design activity, then there’s a misunderstanding there and again, I think that happens and I think that that’s why there is still this design is still ‘making it pretty’ aspect. Design Thinking is much broader than that, and it’s a core component of the way that Lean UX works.
About: Jeff Gothelf is a designer, an Agile practitioner with a specific expertise in User Experience culminating in his book Lean UX: Applying Lean Principles to Improve User Experience.
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