Putting People First

An extract from Tim Brown’s Change by Design.

The job of the designer is “converting need to demand.”

If it is that simple, why are there not as many success stories like the iPod? The answer is that we need to return human beings to the center of the story. We need to learn to put people first.

The basic problem is that people are so ingenious at adapting to inconvenient situations that they are often not even aware that they are doing so. This is why traditional techniques such as focus groups and surveys, which in most cases simply ask people what they want, rarely yield important insights.

Our real goal, then, is helping people to articulate the latent needs they may not even know they have, and this is the challenge of design thinkers.

Let’s focus on three mutually reinforcing elements of any successful design program: insight, observation, and empathy.

INSIGHT: Learning from the lives of others

A good starting point is to go out into the world and observe the actual experience of your users. Look at the myriad “thoughtless acts” people perform throughout the day. Their actual behaviors can provide us with invaluable clues about their range of unmet needs. Hiring expert consultants or asking “statistically average” people to respond to a survey or fill out a questionnaire will not help.

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. And the easiest thing about the search for insight — in contrast to the search for hard data – is that it’s everywhere and it’s free.

OBSERVATION

We watch what people do (and do not do) and listen to what they say (and do not say). This takes some practice.

Observations rely on quality, not quantity. The decisions one makes can dramatically affect the results one gets.

Today, some of the most imaginative research in the behavioural sciences is being sponsored by companies that take design thinking seriously.

EMPATHY

It’s possible to spend days, weeks, or months conducting research of this sort, but at the end of it all we will have little more than stacks of field notes, video tapes, and photographs unless we can connect with the people we are observing at a fundamental level. We call this “empathy,” and it is perhaps the most important distinction between academic thinking and design thinking. We are not trying to generate new knowledge, test a theory — that’s the work of our University colleagues and an indispensable part of our shared intellectual landscape. The mission of design thinking is to translate observations into insights and insights into products and services that will improve lives.

Empathy is the mental habit that moves us beyond thinking of people as laboratory rats or standard deviations. If we are to “borrow” the lives of other people to inspire new ideas, we need to begin by recognizing that their seemingly inexplicable behaviors represent different strategies for coping with the confusing, complex, and contradictory world in which they live. 

We build the 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.

Case Study:
Emergency checkin — Trying to understand a patient journey first hand

Two competing narratives. The hospital saw the “patient journey” in terms of insurance verification, medical prioritization, and bed allocation. The patient experienced it as a stressful situation made worse. The insight: Hospital needed to balance its legitimate concerns with medical and administrative tasks with an empathic concern for the human side of the equation. We may infer that the emergency room facilities — not unreasonably, perhaps — are designed around the requirements of the professional staff rather than the comforts of the patient. Insights lead to new insights as seemingly physical details accumulate.

A second layer of understanding is less physical than cognitive. How does the patient make sense out of the situation? How do new arrivals navigate the physical and social space? What are they likely to find confusing? These questions are essential to identifying what we call latent needs, needs that may be acute but that people may not be able to articulate.

A third layer — beyond the functional and the cognitive — comes into play when we begin working with ideas that matter to people at an emotional level. Emotional understanding becomes essential here. What do the people in your target population feel? What touches them? What motivates them? Political parties and ad agencies have been exploiting people’s emotional vulnerabilities for ages, but “emotional understanding” can help companies tun their customers not into adversaries but into advocates.

BEYOND THE INDIVIDUAL

If we were interested only in understanding the individual consumer as a psychological nomad, we could probably stop here; we have learned to observe him in his natural habitat and gain insights from his behaviors; we have learned that we must empathies, not simply scrutinize with the cold detachment of statisticians. But even empathy for the individual is not sufficient.

“Markets” are not aggregate of many individuals. Whole is greater than the sum of its parts.

With the growth of Internet, it has become clear that we must extend our understanding to the social interactions of people within groups and to the interactions among groups themselves. Designers require an understanding of the dynamic interactions within and between larger groups. What are people trying to achieve as individuals? What group effects, such as “smart mobs” or “virtual economies,” are taking shape? It is hard to imagine creating anything today without trying to gain an understanding of group effects. Even a chair.

THE GREATEST OPPORTUNITY

The greatest opportunity lies in the middle space between the 20th century idea that companies created new products and customers passively consumed them (often exploiting fears and vanity) and the futuristic vision in which consumers will design everything they need for themselves. What lies in the middle is an enhanced level of collaboration between creators and consumers, a blurring of the boundaries at the level of both companies and individuals. Individuals, rather than allowing themselves to be stereotypes as “consumers,” “customers,” or “users,” can now think of themselves as active participants in the process of creation; organizations, by the same token, must become more comfortable with the erosion of the boundary between the proprietary and the public, between themselves and the people whose happiness, comfort, and welfare allow them to succeed.

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.”

UNFOCUS GROUPS

One of the techniques to keep the consumer-designer involved in the creation, evaluation, and development of ideas is the “unfocus group,” where we bring an array of consumers and experts together in a workshop format to explore new concepts around a particular topic. Traditional focus groups assemble a random group of “average” people. Ex: For a new concept for women’s shoes — invite a color consultant, a spiritual guide who led barefoot initiates across hot coals, a young mother who was curiously passionate about her thigh-high leather boots, a female limo driver. Needless to say, this group proved to be extremely articulate about the emotional connections among shoes, feet, and the human condition.

TO CONCLUDE

Chance only favors the prepared mind. Techniques of observation, principles of empathy, and efforts to move beyond the individual — can all be thought of as ways of preparing the mind of the design thinker to find insight: from the seemingly commonplace as well as the bizarre, from the rituals of every day life and from the average to the extreme. That insight cannot be codified, quantified, or even defined — makes it the most difficult but also the most exciting part of the design process. There is no algorithm that can tell us where it will come from and when it will hit.