Product design
Change by Design
Tim Brown
Good product work balances feasibility, viability, and desirability while treating observation and iteration as part of the system.
23 Readwise highlights · In book order
Highlights
Design thinking begins with skills designers have learned over many decades in their quest to match human needs with available technical resources within the practical constraints of business.
Design thinking relies on our ability to be intuitive, to recognize patterns, to construct ideas that have emotional meaning as well as functionality, to express ourselves in media other than words or symbols.
We can think of them as inspiration, the problem or opportunity that motivates the search for solutions; ideation, the process of generating, developing, and testing ideas; and implementation, the path that leads from the project room to the market.
design thinking is fundamentally an exploratory process; done right, it will invariably make unexpected discoveries along the way, and it would be foolish not to find out where they lead.
“Fail early to succeed sooner.”
The willing and even enthusiastic acceptance of competing constraints is the foundation of design thinking. The first stage of the design process is often about discovering which constraints are important and establishing a framework for evaluating them. Constraints can best be visualized in terms of three overlapping criteria for successful ideas: feasibility (what is functionally possible within the foreseeable future); viability (what is likely to become part of a sustainable business model); and desirability (what makes sense to people and for people).
Victor Papanek, “to buy things they don’t need with money they don’t have to impress neighbors who don’t care.”
The project is the vehicle that carries an idea from concept to reality.
“all of us are smarter than any of us,”
A culture that believes that it is better to ask forgiveness afterward rather than permission before, that rewards people for success but gives them permission to fail, has removed one of the main obstacles to the formation of new ideas.
The evolution from design to design thinking is the story of the evolution from the creation of products to the analysis of the relationship between people and products, and from there to the relationship between people and people.
observation: watching what people don’t do, listening to what they don’t say
For design thinkers, however, behaviors are never right or wrong, but they are always meaningful.
Accordingly, almost every project we undertake involves an intensive period of observation. We watch what people do (and do not do) and listen to what they say (and do not say). This takes some practice.
It makes sense for a company to familiarize itself with the buying habits of people who inhabit the center of its current market, for they are the ones who will verify that an idea is valid on a large scale—a fall outfit for Barbie, for instance, or next year’s feature on last year’s car. By concentrating solely on the bulge at the center of the bell curve, however, we are more likely to confirm what we already know than learn something new and surprising. For insights at that level we need to head for the edges, the places where we expect to find “extreme” users who live differently, think differently, and consume differently—a collector who owns 1,400 Barbies, for instance, or a professional car thief.
“If I’d asked my customers what they wanted, they’d have said ‘a faster horse.’”
empathy: standing in the shoes (or lying on the gurneys) of others
The mission of design thinking is to translate observations into insights and insights into products and services that will improve lives.
The mission of design thinking is to translate observations into insights and insights into products and services that will improve lives.
This exercise proved to be challenging in the extreme since we can’t watch the cognitive process of someone thinking about money in the way we can watch the behavioral process of someone paying a bill or withdrawing cash from an ATM.
We build these bridges of insight through empathy, the effort to see the world through the eyes of others, understand the world through their experiences, and feel the world through their emotions.
It’s not about “us versus them” or even “us on behalf of them.” For the design thinker, it has to be “us with them.”
“Chance only favors the prepared mind.”