Design Thinking

IEEE Software Editorial

Annie Combelles, Inspearit, Christof Ebert, Vector, Percival Lucena, IBM

To quickly generate new ideas is one of the many challenges of organizations today: regardless of its size, companies today rely on their ability to innovate to maintain their competitiveness. Their performance depends on their efficiency to mobilize internal knowledge and to foster collective intelligence. In that sense, Design Thinking being a mix of analytics and intuition, provides valuable support to product management and a necessary step to focus on user experience.

Design Thinking is a problem-solving and innovation method. It is based on creative design methods, such as iterative problem reframing, early prototyping and involving different stakeholders. Across industries It has shown its value as a methodology for the generation of innovative ideas. Currently the method extends its reach into software and IT, becoming part of agile method framework. Building upon these early experiences, design thinking is used in software engineering as it pragmatically connects problem understanding, solution exploration, and innovation.

With its growing relevance in agile software development Design Thinking deserves a snapshot on its underlying methodology along with analysis on state of the practice, usage schemes, lessons learned, risks and benefits. This theme issue shows underlying methods, context and practical application of Design Thinking.

Prototypical problem-solving has been for a long time a bridge between customer/market needs and product engineering. Japanese marketing expert Noriaki Kano realized as early as the seventies that customer needs can often not be articulated. At the same time, we waste energy in product development to build consecutive releases by predictable enhancements of functions. Toyota realized with lean development a strong focus on what matters - controlling costs and keeping things simple while at the same time enhancing user experience. Industry icon Steve Jobs followed these principles and redefined already existing red-ocean products, such as mp3 players and mobile phones, by leaving out many familiar functions and adding a few exciting features. Design thinking further extends these principles to explore the possibilities of what could be, and to create outcomes that benefit the user. 

Products of tomorrow need to provide continuous choices that balance changing needs/usage of individuals, markets, and society. Industrial software development is still driven by huge feature lists that are frequently extended. The excitement in the market (in terms of exciting and innovative products) is not commensurate with the growing complexity of delivered systems. Here is where Design Thinking extends current software engineering practices.

Following the twin peaks model of problem analysis and solution creation, Design Thinking looks to control risk and uncertainty by developing a series of prototypical frames to progressively customer expectations. Along this twin peak analogy, Design Thinking connects analytical problem solving with creative idea finding and iterative solution modeling. It helps to capture design rationales and building upon reflective techniques used in agile development. In its drawing upon prototyping and agile teamwork with iterative reframing of problems, Design Thinking nicely enhances more traditional techniques such as Scrum and Feature-driven Development. Agile scaling such as LESS, SAFe, SoS benefit in their corporate and portfolio-oriented approach from the multi-dimensional perspectives of Design Thinking. Co-creation as a core element of Design Thinking maps to data exploration in big data and data analytics. As such, Design Thinking is holistic by nature and brings various stakeholders to the table to redefine value creation processes and to continually explore how to build the best product.

With source-code artifacts and natural-language artifacts being constantly shaped in a process of learning, recalling, and accepting, materialized artifacts from prototyping can capture an agreement on terms while remaining comprehensive to all parties. For instance, best practices for User Interface (UI) designers suggest using sketched paper prototypes to discuss UIs with end users rather than polished screenshots or even the actual UI. These software engineering driven Design Thinking techniques are currently enhanced to a more comprehensive media modeling, used in various tool extensions such as business process modeling and design modeling.

Design Thinking makes it possible not to rush into the product design, but to dedicate upstream time to generate a maximum of ideas against identified needs and to propose the elements on which to build a response element to users. Multidisciplinary groups guaranteeing a diversity of points of view need to be set up. Then a prototyping phase allows to check the feasibility of the ideas and involve users, their feedback being a central element of Design thinking. Finally, the transition from prototype to product development being a pivotal step, full of risks, the Design Thinking approach limits the loss of information due to the involvement of the development teams into the product design phase.

Link to IEEE Software Design Thinking Special Issue —> https://lnkd.in/eGUeKfd