When Telling Insights first looked into Design Thinking (DT) a few years ago, the first thing that surprised us, was how familiar it felt. The DT philosophy is human-centered, which is obviously the undisputed foundation of market research (MR), and it relies on customer research as the first step of every project.
The Design Research phase, or consumer research phase, is perhaps the most challenging point in the intersection between pure DT and MR. Coming from MR, we were surprised to realize that consumer research is not always undertaken with the necessary rigor, speaking in general terms and always from our own point of view.
Manuals describe numerous techniques to conduct the research phase, all of them based on MR. Unfortunately, the importance of the research phase is not always recognized – it does not examine the sample enough, nor is it carried out by personnel trained in social research. As market researchers, it is our duty to highlight the value and contribution of the research phase and ensure it is conducted with suitable guarantees of quality.
After researching the consumer’s needs, the next step in the DT process is to define the challenge. This is not very different from any MR project. Finding a common, concise and clear challenge is not always easy, due to divergent interests or discrepancies regarding the project scope, but the project leader must achieve consensus on the project objectives and keep them in consideration throughout the whole process.
At this point it is essential to involve the key stakeholders, which may be challenging as it is hard to ensure their presence in the long, time consuming sessions that are usually required. Their absence, however, may hinder the project success. A DT project should develop products or services which, in addition to meeting consumer demands, are feasible and realistic for the company.
After defining users’ needs and problems, the actual design phase starts. Now it is time to think very carefully about what we should achieve at every step. In our experience, there is such a wealth of fascinating and, at first glance, practical exercises, that it is tempting to propose a myriad of them. Many of them, however, will not deliver any valuable input or will only provide redundant information and should therefore be carefully selected to fit the objectives of the project.
Another important and unique milestone, arguably the most characteristic in DT, is prototyping. There are many prototyping techniques and, in our experience, it is not usually necessary to design the perfect prototype. It is actually possible to design close enough artifacts and prototypes that allow the user to understand how the service would perform. An expert should undertake this.
The final phase of the project consisted of validating the prototypes in focus groups and face-to-face in-depth interviews with potential users, which has been scheduled to select the service with the highest demand and set the pricing strategy for the launch.
To better understand the DT process, I would like to showcase a recent project in which we used this approach.
A national newspaper sought to design new value-added services. The project was structured into three stages: research and ideation, prototyping, and validation. In the first stage we conducted four co-creation workshops, lasting four hours each, in which both the target audience and the client’s staff participated together. The first part of the workshops was dedicated to exploring habits and needs. The next two hours were devoted to generating ideas and the first screening. And, during the final hour we worked in teams on the preferred ideas. For ideation, we used the “empathy map” as a main tool. We have already incorporated this as a regular tool in our projects as it helps in keeping the consumer at the center.
The prototyping phase began with two sessions of analysis and selection of the winning ideas, with stakeholders’ involvement, followed by the functional development of the prototypes. The procedure during the workshops was to pass all the ideas through three filters. The first one was to consider whether the ideas were attractive to users but at the same time economically viable and feasible for the company. In a second screening, an in-depth analysis was made of the value that these ideas could bring according to these questions: Does it solve any problem? Does it give me an advantage over others? Will it allow my brand to perform better than others? Finally, the ideas were analyzed according to the implementation effort and user value matrix. The objective was to select three ideas/concepts to prototype, which were developed with an intermediate level of operation.
From our standpoint, Design Thinking is very close to market research as a philosophy and a work approach. Market research can easily include DT tools into its procedures, especially in the qualitative area. And DT must rely on market research to ensure the design research stage is performed rigorously. Both are bound to get along.
