DESIGN THINKING

PRINCIPLES
 PRINCIPLES OF DESIGN THINKING
Focusing on People Early On
More than Traditional Market Research
Finding the Lead User
Developing Empathy
Illustrating Ideas
Failing in Order to Learn
Ensuring Diversity on the Team
Offering Team-Oriented and Creative Workspaces

Design Thinking PSG college of Technology Prakash.J

 FOCUSING ON PEOPLE EARLY ON
• Design thinking is more than just customer orientation — it is centered
on people.

• People are the beginning, middle, and end for every consideration.
o We begin with people by taking up a problem faced by your target users or a
wish expressed by them.

• Task in design thinking is not to pursue a technology or business goal —

it’s to satisfy the expressed needs of customers.

Design Thinking PSG college of Technology Prakash.J

 FOCUSING ON PEOPLE EARLY ON (CONTD.,)
In design thinking,

• you don’t ask the question

• “How can we apply XY technology?” Neither do you ask the
question
• “How can we impress the customer with our new product?”

• Instead, you ask

• “How can we solve the problem of our target users in such a way
that it’s less of an effort for them to use our solution?”
Design Thinking PSG college of Technology Prakash.J
 ADVANTAGES AND OPPORTUNITIES ON
EARLY FOCUSING OF PEOPLE
• You focus, right from the start, on the most important wishes and
problems of your target users.

• You gain detailed impressions of the user market

• You prevent your development from bypassing the market.

• You prevent over engineering

• You lower the marketing risk.

Design Thinking PSG college of Technology Prakash.J

 MORE THAN TRADITIONAL MARKET
RESEARCH
• In traditional market research, you ask the customers about their
wishes and needs and what they think about a specific product.

• With these kinds of direct questions, traditional market research

methods such as customer surveys often yield, for numerous reasons,
disappointing results when it comes to the search for innovation

• The average customer has no urgent need for new products for now.

Design Thinking PSG college of Technology Prakash.J

 MORE THAN TRADITIONAL MARKET
RESEARCH
• Imagine that the co-founder of Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg, had
conducted a customer survey shortly before Facebook’s launch in
2003.

• He would have asked many potential users in writing or online whether

they would need a social network.

• With such a question at that time, you can expect that the results
would have been disappointing.

Design Thinking PSG college of Technology Prakash.J

 MORE THAN TRADITIONAL MARKET
RESEARCH
• In this context, one often hears a quote attributed to Henry Ford:

• “If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster
horses.”

• Whether Ford actually said this is doubtful.

Design Thinking PSG college of Technology Prakash.J

 MORE THAN TRADITIONAL MARKET
RESEARCH

• Never expect customers to immediately provide you with solutions.

• When starting with design thinking, the focus is intentionally not on

solutions but on an understanding of the person and their problems,
desires, motives, goals and opinions.

Design Thinking PSG college of Technology Prakash.J

 FINDING THE LEAD USER

• The average customers can offer only a limited number of new ideas

• when it comes to product development, you should look instead for

lead users — the ones whose need precedes that of all other
customers in the market and who have a strong incentive to resolve
this need.

• These people are the first to recognize and track a market trend
before all other possible users have identified this trend.

Design Thinking PSG college of Technology Prakash.J

 FINDING THE LEAD USER

• The interest of lead users in satisfying their need is so strong that they
often develop their own prototypes and sometimes launch them in
the market on their own.

• Some of these people even start their own businesses based on this
motivation (user entrepreneurs).

Design Thinking PSG college of Technology Prakash.J

 FINDING THE LEAD USER
• The Internet is a lead-user product.

• The inventor of the World Wide Web, Tim Berners-Lee, was a lead user.

• As an employee of the European Organization for Nuclear Research

(CERN), he saw that using different network infrastructures was
causing communication problems between the various laboratory
sites.

• He initially established the basis for the World Wide Web just so that he
could communicate more easily with colleagues.

Design Thinking PSG college of Technology Prakash.J

 GET A BREAK ......
A type of savoury rice cake made by steaming a batter consisting of
fermented black lentils (de-husked) and rice.

GUESS THE MENU…..

Design Thinking PSG college of Technology Prakash.J

 GET A BREAK ......
A type of savoury rice cake made by steaming a batter consisting of
fermented black lentils (de-husked) and rice.

Design Thinking PSG college of Technology Prakash.J

 GET A BREAK ......
A fried or baked pastry with a savory filling, such as spiced potatoes, onions,
peas, cheese, beef and other meats, or lentils

GUESS THE MENU…..

Design Thinking PSG college of Technology Prakash.J

 GET A BREAK ......
A fried or baked pastry with a savory filling, such as spiced potatoes, onions,
peas, cheese, beef and other meats, or lentils

Design Thinking PSG college of Technology Prakash.J

 DEVELOPING EMPATHY
• A key principle of design thinking is empathy

• Putting yourself in the position of the customer or user so that you can
explore that person’s feelings, emotions, thoughts, intentions, and
actions.

• In this automated, digitized, and partially dehumanized world, where

decisions are often made solely on the basis of hard facts, figures, and
data and where efficiency increases are a priority, this approach is
promising.

Design Thinking PSG college of Technology Prakash.J

 DEVELOPING EMPATHY
• A lack of empathy was one reason for the failure of Google Glass,
which was introduced in 2012 and then dropped from the market a
mere three years later.

• The Google Glass pitch was that it could show the user emails, calls,
text messages, instructions, or videos directly in the user’s field-of-view.

• One mark against it right out of the box was that it was voice-
controlled - a feature many users ended up disliking intensely as they
were used in public.

• Google didn’t adequately address the needs of the users and, getting
back to empathy,
Design Thinking PSG college of Technology Prakash.J
 ILLUSTRATING IDEAS
• In design thinking, your goal is to make your ideas comprehensible
and attainable at an early stage.

• You visualize your ideas and preferably demonstrate them with a

prototype for potential users to experiment with.

• Prototypes don’t necessarily have to be pieces of hardware; they can

also be drawings, images, role-playing games, model constructions, or
videos.

• When creating and selecting a prototype, the guiding principle is this:

As simple as possible, as meaningful as possible.
Design Thinking PSG college of Technology Prakash.J
 ILLUSTRATING IDEAS

• On its website, Dropbox showed a short video that explained the

benefits of its product idea in a simple and original way.

• The interesting part: This software solution didn’t exist yet at that time.

• The video was a huge success, and more than 100,000 people
registered to find out more about the software.

• The founders thus received positive feedback about their idea and
began with the implementation.
Design Thinking PSG college of Technology Prakash.J
 FAILING IN ORDER TO LEARN
• Another important principle in design thinking involves learning from
mistakes.

• Make sure that mistakes are understood as a fixed component in the

design thinking process and are considered to be opportunities for
learning.

• The tasks you deal with in design thinking are always accompanied by
uncertainties.

• You have to acknowledge that a Zero Defects approach is impossible

in the scope of innovation and that this shouldn’t be the goal.
Design Thinking PSG college of Technology Prakash.J
 FAILING IN ORDER TO LEARN

• The teabag was invented after the tea merchant filled tea
into silk pouches for cost reasons and customers
accidentally immersed those in boiling water.

Design Thinking PSG college of Technology Prakash.J

 ENSURING DIVERSITY ON THE TEAM
• An important success factor in design thinking is the right composition
of the team.

• Design thinking puts people in the spotlight.

• Look at the people for whom you want to find a solution or whose wishes
you want to fulfill.
• More likely than not, these people come from various age groups, consist
of both women and men, or have different cultural backgrounds.

• It helps when your team reflects this diversity.

Design Thinking PSG college of Technology Prakash.J

 OFFERING TEAM-ORIENTED
AND CREATIVE WORKSPACES
• The room design and its furnishings have an often underestimated
impact on an organization’s innovation capacity.

• For innovative work, you have to create a balance between

concentration, communication, and creativity when it comes to
workspaces.

• The workspaces for individual and group work as well as assemblies of

the whole group must have a flexible and inspiring design.

Design Thinking PSG college of Technology Prakash.J