I have some beef with Design Thinking

One of the first things you'll learn or hear about when you take your first steps into UX design is this magical  thing called "Design Thinking".

Design Thinking is oftentimes presented as a process UX designers use to design user-centred solutions. This process takes designers through an initial phase of understanding the user, towards problem definition and ideation to end with a prototype that can be tested with users. After that testing phase, the cycle repeats. Emphasise, define, ideate, prototype, test.

Sounds straight-forward, right? And that’s the problem. Design is not straight-forward nor can you create user-centred solutions in different contexts using the same 5-step formula. That’s just one of the issues I see with Design Thinking.

Let’s dive deeper into this…

Problem 1: The Design Thinking process is oftentimes visualised as a linear process

This is what you see when you search “design thinking process” on Google: colourful circles placed next to each other. Five easy steps to create an awesome design that caters to users. Each phase neatly follows the next.

One of my biggest lessons as junior UX designer was that the Design Thinking process does not work like five clearly defined steps. In fact, the design process is quite chaotic in real life. Here are some things I’ve experienced in the past years:

• Joining a project close to the launch of a product, when research was already conducted and another UX Designer already created wireframes. I was put on the project to make sure the developers would implement our designs correctly and I was not involved in research, problem definition or ideation.

• There was limited budget for usability tests so we had to be picky with what we want to test with our prototype, as we could not test everything we wanted.

• We jumped between research and problem definition several times, because the initial research wasn’t enough the really grasp the user’s needs.

Problem 2: (Big) organisations have their own product development processes

When you work together with different teams like commercial or operational teams, you’ll find that these teams have their own processes and way of working. As the only designer in a multi-disciplinary team, the chance is high that you’re only one familiar with Design Thinking.

It can be difficult to align Design Thinking with other ways of working. This became most clear to me last year, when I worked closely together with a team that was not familiar with UX Design and Design Thinking. I couldn’t just simply use the design process I was used to because:

• My colleagues had no experience with working iteratively and had a hard time seeing the value of starting with wireframes and working towards a high-fidelity prototype.

• The team brought a strong business perspective, which made it challenging for them to switch to a user-centred perspective.

• The team was very data-driven and there was little room for qualitative user research like user interviews, something that we as UX designers do all the time.

• Managing a complex stakeholder landscape was new for me and I struggled with communicating the value of design - let alone design processes.

• Working with developers brought the additional challenge that their agile way of working divided their tasks in two-week sprints, which made it difficult to plan open design tasks and handover from design to development.

Problem 3: Design Thinking focuses on ‘newness’, not on maintenance

Every company I worked at have their own design process, which might be adapted or derived from Design Thinking. The processes all differ slightly from each other, but what they have in common is that these processes go beyond the usual Design Thinking process.

Where Design Thinking stops at testing a prototype, the design processes I now follow focus on delivery and maintenance. Design Thinking however has a strong focus on ideation. That is particularly relevant when coming up with new value propositions for (new) products and services. As soon as you move from ideation and exploring new products into maintaining a launched product, you’ll find the Design Thinking process lacking.

A risk that should be mentioned here is that Design Thinking easily gives teams the feeling they’re creating innovative solutions, when in reality they’re merely scratching the surface of true user-centred and innovative design. This is what Michael Hendrix among others calls “theatre of innovation”.¹ The reason this so easily happens with Design Thinking is because of this formulaic approach. This gives the impression that as long as teams follow the Design Thinking steps, do workshops instead of meetings and throw a bunch of post-its on a wall, innovation will automatically happen. Of course that’s not true, for innovation you’ll need experts that have the will and capability to dig deeper.²

Should we abandon Design Thinking?

Even though Design Thinking has gotten criticism over the years, I don’t think we should abandon it entirely.

Learning about Design Thinking early on in my career has helped me a lot to understand the scope of UX design and what this field is about. It made me familiar with the different methods UX designers use and showed me how designers move from uncertainty to making an educated guess.

I find Design Thinking especially powerful in its focus on ideation. Design Thinking encourages coming up with different solutions to a problem, all based on research. That’s something I miss at times. When I was employed in an agency I oftentimes had to work with tight deadlines. Now that I work in a corporate, I find that the focus can lay too much on maintenance and shipping features. In both cases there’s little room for ideation and exploration.

In conclusion, I believe the value of Design Thinking does not lie in its process but in its mindset. Adapting a mindset that puts the user in the center and encourages iterative work can help us keep our curiosity and push for exploration.

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1. "Ideo breaks its silence on design thinking’s critics" by Katharine Schwab, via Fast Company (source). I don’t have the space in this article to talk more about theatre of innovation but it’s a very interesting topic so I recommend you research more about this!

2. Natasha Jen mentions in her talk “Design Thinking in Bullsh*t” how some of successful Design Thinking work is just human intuition rather than the result of a methodology. She also points out how Design Thinking is lacking ‘crit’ - or critical feedback based on evidence.
"Design Thinking Is Bullsh*t" by Natasha Jen, via 99U (source)

Lilian Ayla Ersoy explains how Design Thinking democratised design “where a solo creative is often mixed in with employees and clients that have very little experience with design in a fast-paced and multi-tasking environment.”
”Why Design Thinking is failing and what we should be doing differently” by Lilian Ayla Ersoy, via UX Collective (source)