Design Thinking - A Better Way of Solving Problems

Parker Gates one of the co-founders of Stoked, walks us through design thinking for problem-solving. Learn how to use design thinking methods to tackle big projects and save time, money, and energy!

We’ll cover the benefits of gaining empathy as a means of better understanding your user/customer - leading to greater customer insights, better design, and ultimately better business.

Transcript

I think the number one impact that people and teams notice themselves, observe about themselves, is the effect that doing empathy work has. 

I think as human beings, there's a kind of a lazy assumption that we all know how other people think, or how they feel. And basically, we all think that other people feel like we feel.

Oh, like that guy over there, he feels the same way about this that I do, you know. There's sometimes an assumption about things like that.

So when they practice empathy work for the first time, and they go talk to a user, or their customer, or a colleague, they're oftentimes very surprised by the disparity between their own experience and someone else's experience, right?

I mean, they're just shocked. And then I think that wakes them up to the need for not only empathy work, but design thinking as a whole, you know?

I think they're skeptics up until that point, until they realize that they know nothing about someone else's experience until they've sat down and been really intentional about getting it.

A lot of the organizations that we have worked with in the past decade, oftentimes quite large, and with being really big, can often come a lot of bloat and slow project cycle times.

Oftentimes, we work with organizations where their projects last, at minimum, six months and you know, at best, two to three years.

So we come in and we squash that down to three or four one-week segments where they understand their user needs really quickly where they start to come up with big wild ideas and then where they prototype those solutions really quickly, and they understand their problem so much faster, and they're already on the road to looking at real-life solutions so much quicker than they ever would.

So I mean it obviously saves them tons of time, tons of energy. They are able to maintain momentum, which they're not able to maintain on these like, 3-year projects and then, you know, financially it's much easier on an organization to get something done really, really quickly.

Oftentimes the problem is that everybody likes to think that they can multitask.

That they can do 20 things at one time, and what we find is that when we bring people in and we make them focus on one thing at a time they're able to go much deeper, do better work, in a shorter amount of time, and then finish that work and then move on to the next thing.