This is Design Thinking

My first encounter with design thinking came when I worked in the marketing department of IKEA. The year was 2002, and I was sent to the city of Delft in the Netherlands, where IKEA had built a department store specially designed to test new developments on real customers.

In this department store there was a separate “experiment floor”, where customers were shuttled through each time something new was tested. By the time I was there, they had built a whole new restaurant concept -- complete with production line, customer logistics, communications and seats for 250 people.

Design thinking — the user at the center

One of the things they wanted to test was how they could place strangers on the same table without creating the experience of invading each other's intimate zones. That way, they could reduce the number of empty chairs (and thus accommodate more guests on the same area).

Now you may be wondering what this has to do with design thinking to do. Quite a lot, it turns out. This was, of course, before “design thinking” became a term, but thinking is a precursor. The essence of design thinking is sighting.

It is about putting the user's needs above everything else — and that these needs are not seen, but observed in the user's actual interaction with the world. Yeah, like how customers behave in an Ikea restaurant.

Prototype is the key

Once needs are observed and defined, it's all about quickly arriving at a prototype that allows you to test hypotheses. It may Of course, be an entire floor in a department store, but in our digital world it is often about a scaled-down minimum solution (MVP).

As soon as it's in place, you can run user tests that allow you to make continuous improvements in an iteration process. New features and solutions are discarded or implemented based on observations of user behavior. All this sounds great in theory, but a common challenge is this: How do you arrive at a workable prototype/MVP as quickly as possible?

This is how a design sprint works

The answer is design sprint. It's in the name that this goes away -- and it's just as effective as it sounds. A design sprint is the schläger version of business strategy, innovation, behavioral science, design thinking, LEAN and agile methodology in one hard-tested powerhouse of a process.

In short, the process brings together different professional perspectives in the same room, solves complex problems, creates and tests a high-quality prototype on real users in one effective week. Sounds impossible? We thought so too -- until we did it ourselves. Now we do it all the time. And it works like a bullet. Every single time.

The magic of design sprint

We have built complex web solutions, communication concepts and service and business strategic designs. It's immensely effective -- no matter what we run through the process. At the other end, we get tested MVPs, brand concepts and service designs with concrete answers to problems. All with a very clear direction for where we need to go next.

It is therefore important to emphasize that a design sprint is not a way to create a finished product, but it Shorts Down the Road your. Significant. One of our clients said it best when, on the last day of a workshop, he exclaimed: “I have been in 3 years of projects that have accomplished less than we have done in 3 days!”.

So then maybe it's not so strange that it's called a sprint. Or that it gets its rightful hype.