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Copyright © 2021 Gordon Adomdza & Craig McCarthy
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Publisher
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Authors’ Contact
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Cover Design
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Ghana Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
Adomdza, Gordon
Design thinking, project guide: the whys and the hows / Gordon Adomdza &
Craig McCarthy. – Accra: Ashesi University, 2021. 1. Design 2. Graphic Arts
I. Title
DDC 741.6 - - dc 20
ISBN: 978-9988-3-1189-6
GLCN – 19
Dedication
This project guide is dedicated to all the pioneering students, teaching assistants and faculty of the
Foundations of Design and Entrepreneurship class, which provided opportunities to contextualize the
content for the book
Acknowledgements
Special acknowledgement goes to the following faculty who provided useful comments, insights,
illustrations etc. that helped improve on the original manuscript.
Sena Agbodzah Agyepong (PhD)
Yaw Dankwah Osseo-Asare
Nepeti Nicanor
Rose A. Dodd
Dahlia Nduom
Keren Arthur (PhD)
Victor Randolph
David Hutchful
Kwami Justina Morris (PhD)
Abdul-Nasser Alidu
Theodore Philip Asare
Jewel Thompson
Eugene Eluerkeh
1
Table of Contents
Chapter 1: Problem Festival
Chapter 2: Innovation
Chapter 3: Creativity
Chapter 4: Chasing Mysteries
Chapter 5: Intro to Design Thinking
Chapter 6: Reframing
Chapter 7: Ethnography
Chapter 8: Lean Research
Chapter 9: Analysis Frameworks
Chapter 10: Ideation Techniques
Chapter 11: User Requirements, Value Fulfillment Blueprint and Dark Pattern Design
Chapter 12: Wireframing and Prototyping
Chapter 13: Business Model Canvas and Minimum Viable Product
References
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194
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CHAPTER 1: PROBLEM FESTIVAL
Chapter Description
Wicked Problems
Have you heard of the phrase “a wicked
problem”? If not, this chapter will make you
understand what a wicked problem is, and
you will also be able to use the necessary
space mapping tools to visualize and
adequately explain a wicked problem.
Wicked problems are real-world problems
that acknowledge the complex
interdependence of diverse factors and
stakeholders, rather than simplistic, linear
cause and effect abstractions that isolate
the problem from its context (Wahl, 2017).
Introduction
Einstein indicated that if he only had one
hour to solve a problem, he would spend 55
minutes defining the problem and the
remaining 5 minutes solving it routinely.
Innovations are aimed at solving problems.
Some end up on the patent database,
others in the museum, but a good number
end up on the market. The belief here is
that if you focus on the solution (solution
first) and it turns out to be the wrong one,
that may be the end of the road. However,
if you focus on the problem and the
solution turned out to be the wrong one, all
you may need to do is pivot and develop a
new or slightly different solution while still
focusing on the problem. However, a lot of
innovators do not concentrate long enough
on the problem. How does one help
innovators focus enough on the issue under
investigation?
According to the Interaction Design
Foundation, wicked problems are problems
with many interdependent factors making
them seem impossible to solve. Because the
factors are often incomplete, in flux, and
difficult to define. Solving wicked problems
requires a deep understanding of the
stakeholders involved, and an innovative
approach provided by design thinking.
Complex issues such as healthcare and
education are examples of wicked problems
(2018).
The expression “wicked problem” was
coined by Horst Rittel, a design theorist and
professor of design methodology at the Ulm
School of Design, Germany.
He describes ten features of wicked
problems:
●
There is no definitive formula for a
wicked problem.
●
Wicked problems have no stopping
rule, as there’s no way to know your
solution is final.
3
●
Solutions to wicked problems are
not true-or-false; they can only be good-orbad.
●
There is no rapid test of a solution to
a wicked problem.
●
Every solution to a wicked problem
is a "one-shot operation"; because there is
no opportunity to learn by trial-and-error,
every attempt counts significantly. Wicked
problems do not have a set number of
potential solutions.
Image 1:1: Wicked problems
●
Every wicked problem is essentially
unique.
●
Every wicked problem can be
considered a symptom of another problem.
●
There are always various
explanations for a wicked problem because
the causes vary greatly depending on the
individual perspective.
●
Planners/designers have no right to
be wrong and must be fully responsible for
their action.
4
Image 1:2: African Wicked problems 1
complexity, simplifies the space and helps
identify the opportunity areas for
innovation.
●
Florence Nightingale: [tells her story
from the 1800s, the pie chart looking
document, what it meant].
●
Hans Roslin [tells the story of his
approach in recent times] uses more
advanced technology to tell stories and
explore problems using visualization.
If Florence Nightingale, a nurse could
provide data to make better decisions than
the army generals in 1858, what stops us
from providing better creative data
visualizations in 2021? This concept of data
visualization is discussed more in Chapter 9:
Analysis Frameworks.
Problem Space Mapping Tools
Africa has many wicked problems,
problems that are complex and have
resisted solutions over the years as
illustrated in the above image. Some of
these include civil wars, poverty, hunger.
Poor leadership, lack of quality education,
inadequate health care, bad roads among
others
Data Visualization
One of the most powerful ways of
understanding problems is to visualize
them. The reason is that the visualization of
the problem helps make sense of the
1 Source: http://mugishaseeitdifferent.blogspot.com/2012/04/is-africa-responsible-for-itsproblems.html
Designers have created several visualization
tools for understanding problems. The
following are some space mapping tools
you can use to visualize data.
The spider diagrams
With spider diagrams, you need to structure
your thoughts around a problem. This can
be done in a group or individually. You can
do it like this: At the center of a large sheet
of paper, flipchart, or whiteboard for larger
groups), write down the problem you want
to solve. Starting from this central problem,
create branches in all directions based on
5
thoughts and ideas you have about that
problem. Write as many sub-branches of
the problem as you can. This way, it gives
you a broader view of the problem.
Image 1:3: Spider Diagram
Fishbone Diagram
A fishbone diagram is also a visualization
tool for categorizing a problem’s potential
causes to trace its root causes. The fishbone
diagram gets its name from its shape. It
looks like the bones of a fish. Drawing it is
quite simple. At the head of the fish is the
problem, also known as the undesirable
effect. It is better if you phrase the problem
as a question rather than a statement.
“Why did <problem> happen?” rather than
just “Problem.” Sometimes phrasing things
as a question gets a better thought process
than just a statement. Once you have the
head, you have the spine and the ribs
representing the groups of causes. The
causes then branch off the ribs.
6
Image 1:4: Fishbone Diagram
Tree Diagram
The tree diagram helps you map out the main problem, along with its causes and effects,
allowing you to identify clear and manageable goals and the strategy of how to achieve them.
The main problem is placed at the top of the tree and the roots lead to the causes and effects
of the problem.
Image 1:5: Tree Diagram
7
Venn Diagrams
The use of the Venn diagrams can help problem space mapping because it allows the
illustration of the extent to which a problem and its possible causes overlap.
Image 1:6: Venn Diagram
2x2 Matrix
A 2x2 matrix is a tool to scaffold thinking and conversation about your users and problem
space. It can be used to help you think about relationships between things or people. The hope
is that insights will come out from using a 2x2. 2x2 matrices are also great to visually
communicate a relationship you want to convey.
8
Image 1:7: 2x2 matrix
The 5 Whys
The 5 Whys is a mind mapping tool
used to explore the cause-and-effect
relationships underlying a particular
problem. The main aim of the 5 Whys is to
find the root cause of a problem by
repeating the question "Why?". Each
answer forms the basis of the next
question. The "five" in the name derives
from an anecdotal observation on the
number of iterations needed to resolve the
problem. Not all problems have a single
Image 1:8: The 5 Whys
root cause. If one wishes to uncover
multiple root causes, the method must be
repeated, asking a different sequence of
questions each time. This method provides
no hard and fast rules about what lines of
questions to explore, or how long to
continue searching for additional root
causes. Thus, even when the method is
closely followed, the outcome still depends
upon the knowledge and persistence of the
people involved.
9
Choosing the right framework- VUCA
The COVID19 pandemic has shown us that
problems are more complex and uncertain.
We do not have to look at only problems
but instead look for a process that allows us
to map out problem spaces and quickly
understand them. However, looking at
covid-19, there is a lot of complexity and
ambiguity around the problem. This results
in uncertainty when using some
frameworks to analyze the problem space.
For example, using a tree diagram to
analyze this problem may lead to
uncertainty on whether to create a full tree
diagram, one tree diagram or create one
and then create situations where this new
tree diagram will be formed. One way that
helps in guiding to choose the right
framework for a problem is VUCA.
VUCA stands for Volatility, Uncertainty,
Complexity and Ambiguity. It was
introduced to illustrate a world of
uncertainty. Each of the letters in “VUCA” is
described further below and it is also
expounded on more in the Design Thinking
Chapter.
unfolds. For example, a problem that
affects various countries like poor
leadership may be hard to unpack since
different factors cause this problem which
may differ for each country. With this, one
needs clarity to focus on the key factors
causing the problem. Therefore, when
dealing with a problem: Complexity needs
Clarity: What problem space mapping tools
should be used to provide clarity?
Uncertainty.
This refers to not being able to predict the
future. It can be caused by lack of
information, having false information or
even too much information. In such a
situation, one needs to understand the
problem space more by collecting
information, looking for interconnections
and perspectives. Therefore, when dealing
with a problem; Uncertainty needs
Understanding: What problem space
mapping tools should be used to
understand the problem at hand?
Complexity.
It involves a number of factors in a situation
that make it hard to navigate how it
Ambiguity.
It refers to the vagueness of a problem, and
when the situation is entirely unclear. You
have heard of a saying that not everything
is black and white, there are grey areas?
Ambiguity comes in the grey areas. This
makes interpretation hard since the
information is unclear or contradicting
hence affecting decision making. One needs
agility/adaptability and flexibility to make
the right decisions. Therefore, when dealing
with a problem, Ambiguity needs Agility:
What problem space mapping tools should
be used to achieve agility?
10
Stakeholders.
After revealing the causes and effects of
problems, one needs to identify relevant
stakeholders that are causing the problems
and those affected by it beyond what the
primary target user suffers. For instance, a
drug addict youth’s problem is also a
concern for the parents who will be
affected by it. There are two types of
stakeholders in every problem space.
Internal Stakeholders. Internal
stakeholders are those who are directly
linked to the problem and found within the
problem space. They are directly affected
by the problem or are the ones who cause
the problem. External Stakeholders. These
are actors outside the problem space that
have a relatively minimal impact on the
problem space. The problem does not
affect them directly, and they are not the
immediate cause of the problem.
Image 1:9: Stakeholder Assessment Grid
Analysis of the macroeconomic space of a problem
Once the causes and effects have
been identified and the stakeholders, it is
time to explore the macroeconomic space
around the problem. Below are some of the
ways to examine the space around a
problem.
PESTLE Analysis. The most common of such
environmental scans is the PESTLE
11
framework or pestle analysis. PESTLE
analysis refers to an external examination
of six external factors that surround a
problem.
Image 1:10: PESTLE Diagram
Political Factors.
One of the most significant
environments surrounding your problem is
the political environment. It may either be
one of the causes of your problem or
suffers the effects of the problem. Examples
of political factors could include tax laws,
political stability, government regulations
etc.
Social and cultural factors.
These are social attitudes,
behaviors, trends and cultural beliefs that
surround your problem space. Examples
include attitudes and shared beliefs about a
range of factors including money, customer
service, imports, religion, cultural taboos,
health, work, leisure, the environment,
population growth etc.
Economic Factors.
These refer to the overall economic
forces that surround your problem. Some of
these factors may be direct causes of your
problem while others may contribute to the
causes of the problem you are trying to
tackle. Examples of these economic factors
include Economic trends, growth rates,
industry growth, seasonal factors,
international exchange rates, international
trade, labour costs, consumer disposable
income, unemployment rates, taxation,
inflation, interest rates, availability of
credit, monetary policies, raw material
costs among others.
Technological Factors.
Technology is one of the rapid
growing innovations in recent times.
Technology has an impact on your problem
space in one way or the other. Examples of
technological factors include technology
and communications infrastructure,
legislation around technology, consumer
access to technology, competitor
technology, and development, emerging
technologies, automation, research and
innovation, intellectual property regulation,
technology incentives, etc.
Legal Factors.
12
These refer to current and future
legal and regulatory requirements that may
impact on your problem space. Examples
include Laws regarding consumer
protection, labour, health & safety,
safety standards. Environmental
Factors. These refer to factors in the natural
environment that have an impact on your
problem space. Examples include weather,
climate change, carbon footprint,
environmental regulations, pollution laws
and targets, recycling and waste
management policies, endangered species,
support for renewable energy, etc. SWOT
Analysis. SWOT is an acronym that stands
for Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities,
and Threats. Business analysts will use this
tool to identify the internal strengths and
Image 1:10: SWOT Diagram
antitrust, intellectual property, data
protection, tax and discrimination;
international and domestic trade
regulations/restrictions, advertising
standards, product labeling, and
weaknesses, and external opportunities and
threats. We can also use the SWOT analysis
as a tool for analyzing a problem.
S- Characteristics of the problem which
makes it easy to understand and analyze.
W- Characteristics of the problem that
makes it difficult to understand and
analyze.
O- External Factors that can help us
understand and analyze the problem. TExternal factors that may hinder us from
analyzing and understanding the problem
13
Conclusion
The problem festival has the tagline
“Where problems get visualized, and
solutions get penalized” The goal is to get
people to focus on the problems, map them
out, develop narratives of how the causes
and effects are interrelated and present
their findings in a science-fair style
presentation. Finally, one must understand
the frameworks and use VUCA to guide in
choosing the right framework to apply to a
particular problem.
Key Words.
Wicked Problem, VUCA, Problem Festival,
Frameworks, PESTLE analysis, SWOT
analysis.
Problem Sets.
1. List two mind mapping tools you will use
to analyze your problem and why.
2. What is the full meaning of the acronym
PESTLE?
3. What is your understanding of a wicked
problem? Give examples
14
CHAPTER 2: INNOVATION
Chapter Description
Innovation is probably one of the most used
words these days. You continuously hear
people throw around slang like, “this is an
amazing innovation”, “we need to be
innovative”. The truth is that any business
that wants to survive in this 21st century
will constantly have to innovate whatever
they are offering to suit our ever-changing
world. Imagine you still wore the cloth
designs that existed twenty years ago. I am
sure that will feel weird. Surprisingly, we
still wear almost the same kinds of clothes
but with different designs. This is because
they have been innovated to meet the
demands of these present times.
In this chapter, we will look at innovation
and how it has evolved to know what it
looks like today. What do you understand
by innovation?
At the end of this chapter, you should be
able to understand the meaning of
innovation and its approaches. You will also
be able to identify and describe each of the
stages involved in Rothwell's evolution of
innovation and how this has affected or
shaped our present understanding of
innovation. The chapter dives deeper in
each innovation stage, history of each
innovation stage, the advantages,
limitations among others. From this
chapter, one will understand that
customers are currently sophisticated,
which calls for new approaches to
innovation.
Moreover, what does one need to consider
when taking on these new approaches?
What are customers looking for? What
factors affect the approach used? What
approaches are no longer enough in today’s
world? Which new ones need to be
adopted? These questions and more will be
answered in this chapter.
15
Introduction
A new approach is needed when
creating; a new service or product, a new
strategy or when reimagining what we
currently have. When a new approach is
needed, one needs a new way of
innovating. However, different factors
impact new approaches. When innovating,
functionality needs are no longer enough as
customers do not look at the product’s
functionality features (user needs, user
goals, and predict behaviors). They instead
want the aesthetic (harmony, coherence,
composition and trends) and psychological
(positive emotions and relevant thoughts).
Nevertheless, innovating for functionality
needs is simpler than innovating for
aesthetic and psychological needs.
Furthermore, customers are also looking for
a new meaning outside of what they
currently have. Customers are also
aspirational as they move upwards on the
Maslow’s triangle as their needs are
fulfilled. Here, it is hard to innovate for the
customers; therefore, the approach to be
used has to be sophisticated to capture
their aspirations. Additionally, when
innovating a new approach, traditional
market segmentation is no longer enough
because one segment’s solution may not be
the same for another segment. However,
the segment approach, one can ignore the
other segments that may benefit from this
segment’s solution. However, when
innovating under this approach, use cases
that cut across segments, these consider
the whole process and not just the
segments.
Christensen, Cook & Hall (2016), argues
that “people do not want to buy a quarter
inch drill, but they want a quarter inch
hole.” People are looking for a job to be
done so when innovating one needs to
innovate to a “job to be done”. One needs
to understand the “job to be done” and this
is in relation to the psychological need;
hence this also shows how innovating for
the functionality need is no longer enough.
The concept of “job to be done” is
explained further in this chapter. This shows
that customers have become sophisticated
and therefore, innovators need new
approaches to satisfy users.
16
Innovation Approaches and Design
Thinking.
This chapter will argue that there
are a number of approaches to innovation.
However, the dynamics of our world’s
evolution suggests that the approach
needed today has to be fluid and versatile.
It needs to identify important information,
sanitize and sensitize it and then
incorporate it into an implementation plan
that delivers innovation. Traditionally, there
are so many ways of coming up with
innovative ideas. You can focus on new
technology and discover a creative solution
that solves a need for humanity. For
instance, the Internet, GPS, Sonar, etc. all
came from military-related research that
was probably not user-centered or useinspired but started with focusing on a
technology breakthrough. A long time ago,
the belief was that ‘if you build it, they will
buy’. It was said that Ford told customers of
his Model T car, ‘you can have any color you
want, so long as it is black’. The world has
.
changed a lot since then and so has the
approach to innovation. To fully appreciate
the evolution of the innovation approach
over time, here is a historical overview.
Roy Rothwell’s five generations (5G)
of innovation.
British sociologist Roy Rothwell
developed a template for tracking the
evolution of innovation through time. We
will use this template and also add to his
historical overview. Rothwell identified a
macroeconomic factor that defined each
stage of the evolution of an innovative
approach and named them generations.
[E.g., the 70s experienced hyperinflation
and contraction in the global economy and
made innovators look for ways of cutting
costs and making smaller units]. The idea is
to find the list of macroeconomic factors
that drive each generation and argue for
which that generation’s approach is the way
it is.
17
Image 2:1: Here is a model of how Rothwell’s work is summarized by another author 2
The time period
2 Source:https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Rothwell-s-five-generations-of-innovation-approaches-Own-figure-adapted-fromPerunovic_fig1_240233014
18
1.
Technology Push (1G model)
Image 2:2: 1G model (a)
There was fast economic growth from 1950
to the mid-1960s, which increased
industrial expansion and “technology push”
in Japan and the Western world. Scientific
breakthroughs and more “R&D” were the
main focus of the majority of companies.
These two were seen as the solution to
societal problems. According to Rothwell
(1994),
Image 2:3: 1G model (b)
One of the proponents of
technology push is Joseph Schumpeter. He
explained the process of ‘creative
destruction’ (old ways of doing things are
internally destroyed and replaced by new
ways) and where innovations came from.
He argued that technology innovations
were supply- side driven (from deep
pockets like Bell Labs). Advances in
knowledge opened up new opportunities
Technology push views the innovation
process as simple linear and sequential with
emphasis on R&D. The market is seen as a
receptacle of the results of R&D activity. Or
in other words, this is a supply side
approach of the innovation process.
On the other hand, market information in
this model comes at the end of the process
as shown in the diagram below. Hence
innovations like commercial applications
are rarely adapted to the market as they are
taken as technical inventions (Rothwell,
1994).
for invention and innovation. It is important
to note that technology push could involve
basic research (such as often done in
university labs) and R&D-type of research
which is often in product development
companies (e.g., P&G is reported to employ
7,500 PhD.’s and researchers in 71
countries and holds about 25,000 active
patents worldwide).
19
Many of technological breakthrough
innovations in the world came to us in
wartime and were pure technology push
concepts. For instance, here are seven
wartime inventions that we use every day:
Canned food, Plastic Surgery, Sanitary
napkins, Duct tape, Microwave ovens,
Digital photography and the Internet
(Schellhase, 2015).
On the other hand, Blockchain and 5G are
two technological breakthroughs that are
mind-blowing, but no one really knows
what we will really use them for or how
they will work although we get the sense
that they will really change the way we do
things.
Some companies invest in technology push
research. For example, in 2004, one of the
co-founders of RIM (Blackberry) donated
$45.8 million to the University of Waterloo
for Quantum mechanic’s research. While
there are general potential applications for
quantum mechanics such as the benefits
from quantum horsepower and quantum
privacy (for cryptography); one can argue
that the research process is going to
progress until tangible discoveries are
made, and then the question of what
market needs exist for those discoveries will
be asked and answered.
Let us also take the example of Ford
economy trucks for ‘53. The invention of
these trucks could be described as a
technology push because of the innovation
of the improvement in the features to suit
the technology at the time. The trucks were
completely redesigned from the tires to
every other part with new time saving
features to get work done faster. These
redesigned features were new driver's cabs;
new springs are new brakes, new
transmissions, new shorter turning, and
new low friction power. All these
innovations were made because of the
advancement and availability of technology.
Image 2:4: Example of Technology push
Interesting case of technology push
Take Sony portable stereo tape recorder (the Pressman)
Remove recording circuit
Replace with a stereo amplifier
Develop lightweight headphones (most challenging)
Headphones – most innovative part of the system
Removed: second headphone socket
Finding: people wanted personal device
20
2.
Demand Pull (2G model)
Image 2:5: Illustration of demand pull
From the mid-1960s to early 1970s, there
was a “market share battle”. This battle was
characterized by a lot of competition which
led to companies to focus their
development to a “need pull”. Due to this
increased competition, investors changed
their target from new products to
technological change. Companies started
focusing on responding to the needs of the
market.
Market pull, views innovation, again, as
simple, linear and sequential, but now with
an emphasis on the market. The market is
the source of ideas to direct R&D, which
plays a reactive role. Demand-side factors
replace the supply-side approach of the 1G
model (Rothwell,1994).
However, there is too much emphasis on
market-driven improvements of existing
products in the 2G model, which results in
many short-term projects. The diagram
below shows the process of the 2G model.
Image 2:6: Process of 2G model
Schmookler. J. (1966) conducted an
extensive analysis of time series and cross-
sectional patent data and historical case
studies and came up with findings that
21
extended Schumpeter’s work. Schmookler
found that demand-pull influences were
also important (in addition to tech push).
The more intense the demand, the more
creative groups, and individuals were drawn
to work on an unsolved problem and the
more patentable inventions they generated.
The Trendhunter magazine does a real job
in identifying trends and curating them for
innovators to respond to. Here is an excerpt
“With 20,000,000 monthly views,
TrendHunter.com is the world's largest,
most popular trend community. Behind the
scenes, we leverage big data, human
researchers and AI to identify consumer
insights and deep dive opportunities for the
world's most innovative companies. Our
research and workshops empower more
than 500 brands, billionaires and CEOs,
including Coca-Cola, Adidas, Victoria's
Secret, IBM, Cisco, Microsoft, and NASA.
Our head office is based in Toronto,
Canada, and we are fueled by a global
network of 200,000 contributors and
3,000,000 fans. Trend Hunter is currently
studying more than 350,000 cutting edge
ideas using over 3 billion choices from
150,000,000 people.”
Image 2: 7: Other examples areas where demand-pull innovation exists
Health consciousness
Eco-consciousness
Ethnic diversity
Age waves
Time poverty
Quality of Life
Quality of work life imperative
Increased longevity
Value-consciousness
3.
New Materialism
Renewed Traditionalism
Altruism
Rapid techno change
Intense domestic/globalized
competition
Human capital management
Fast, responsive, network corporations
Coupling of R&D and Marketing (3G model)
Rationalization emerged under the pressure
of stagflation and inflation in the mid-1970s
to the mid-1980s. The main focus here was
on corporate consolidation, which resulted
in product portfolios. There was a reduction
in operational costs as companies moved
away from individual R&D projects.
Structured innovation processes were
introduced as marketing and R&D became
more tightly coupled. Here the innovation
as a result of coupling the market needs
and technological opportunities. The
process is still sequential but with feedback
loops (Rothwell,1994).
22
The 3G innovation models’ main
disadvantage is that they tend to neglect
solutions for institutional barriers and
societal needs but rather focus on the
company's new technological capabilities
(Berkhout, 2006).
Image 2:8: The diagram below illustrates the 3G model process.
4.
Integrated Business Processes (4G)
From the early 1980s to the mid-90s the
product life cycles shortened, and the
central theme became a “time-based
struggle”. The focus here was on “total
concepts” to be developed by integrated
products and processes. According to
Rothwell (1994),
The innovation process changed from
sequential shifting (function to function), to
a parallel process of development, together
with integration within the company,
upstream with key suppliers and
downstream with leading customers.
The emphasis here was placed on the nonsequential, messy character of the
innovation process and the role of
feedback. Hence this generation
emphasizes on concurrent learning with
customers and suppliers.
23
Image 2:9: Example of the 4G model from Graves (1987)
The representation of 4G focuses on the parallel and integrated nature of the two primary
internal features of the process.
5.
System Integration and Networking (5G)
Resource constraints rose from the 1990s
onwards therefore, to guarantee flexibility
and speed of development, the focus
shifted to system integration. There was the
automation of business processes through
manufacturing information systems and
resource planning. The process in this
generation looks like the networking
process in the 4G model with an addition of
the time/cost tradeoff. In the 5G model,
being a “fast innovator” helps determine
the company’s competitiveness (Rothwell,
1994).
24
Graph 2:1: Cost and time graph
To enhance the efficiency of the operations,
5G uses a powerful electronic toolkit hence
5G having the most powerful process of the
electronification of innovation across the
whole innovation system. Furthermore, in
the 5G model, technological innovation is
also not sequential but rather cross
functional and multi-actor similar to the 4G
model. The main synthesis from these
generations is that the main fundamental
approaches seem to be technology push
and demand-pull (1G and 2G) with specific
outcomes such as radical innovation and
incremental innovation respectively. 3G is
the integration (coupling) of 1G and 2G. It is
interesting to note that 4G and 5G focus
more on internal processes of innovation
than on outcomes (4G is about crossfunctional teams and 5G is about systemsintegration and networking or open
innovation). One of the factors that have
supported and promoted networking is the
Internet.
Other Factors that affect innovation
approaches today.
The Network effect of the internet. The
Internet has changed how people look at
problems, how designers and engineers do
research, how they analyze data, how they
do test and how they bring out the results.
For instance, users are becoming
accustomed to instant gratification.
Therefore, if they feel a need now, they can
go online and search for a solution,
evaluate options and decide on the best
solution option pretty quickly because of
the internet. Users also have many more
options now than they used to have. Hence,
they are able to evaluate options along a
wider spectrum and therefore, sometimes
beyond functionality. This means that users
may focus on an emotional connection to
the solution beyond the function it
provides. For instance, in buying a laptop, a
user that would like touch screen
functionality may ignore the fact that many
MacBook options do not provide a touch
25
screen while many PC options do. Choosing
a MacBook over a PC when the touchscreen
is a strong consideration will be going
beyond functionality to an emotion-based
connection.
Complicated preferences in today’s world.
Going beyond functionality to an
emotion-based preference in making
choices shows how the preferences of users
have become complicated. It is partly due
to the overload of information (easy
Internet access) and a host of other factors.
the Harvard Professor Clay Christenson, the
Jobs To Be Done concept may explain how
people exercise these preferences. The user
is hiring the MacBook to do a job for him or
her (e.g., a job of providing status for social
recognition, a job that is not about the
functions of the MacBook per se)
(Christensen, etl.,2016).
Jobs to be done.
A job to be done (JTBD) is a revolutionary
concept that guides you toward innovation
and helps you move beyond the norm of
only improving current solutions. It is not a
product, service, or a specific solution; it's
the higher purpose for which customers buy
products, services, and solutions.
The JTBD concept helps the innovator
understand that customers don't buy
products and services but rather hire
solutions at various times to carry out a
variety of jobs. This technique requires no
expert assistance, but you may neesampling
These factors and the complication of
preferences have led to the breaking of
traditional segmentation approach for
understanding when developing innovation.
Companies used to focus on their levels of
market segments in innovating. Today, they
find similar customers in multiple segments
responding preferences, researchers
explore insights to help understand those
actions according to their products and
services in ways they did not develop the
product for. As a user exercises his or her
complicated
help from a statistician. Here is what
Christensen, etl. (2016) said about what a
job is.
“shorthand for what an individual really
seeks to accomplish in a given
circumstance”.
The circumstances are more important than
customer characteristics, product
attributes, new technologies, or trends.
The following is his description of how the
concept works.
“When we buy a product, we essentially
‘hire’ something to get a job done. If it does
the job well, when we are confronted with
the same job, we hire that same product
again. Moreover, if the product does a
crummy job, we ‘fire’ it and look around for
something else we might hire to solve the
problem.” What is the approach for
innovation in the era of jobs to be done?
Christensen says: “You should look at the
26
workarounds that your customers need to
do. It becomes a real source of a lot of
insights.” What is Christensen referring to?
Most people will agree that he is referring
to Design Thinking. The process of ‘looking
at workarounds’ is the process of
ethnography for Design Thinking Research.
The idea of ‘getting insights’ from that
ethnographic process is the process of
sensemaking and synthesis for Design
Thinking Research Analysis.
Other factors.
The role of other factors like global
warming, unconventional war (VUCA
concept), the millennials, green planet, fake
news, China, social media, lifestyle,
technology, demography, population
growth, and other social consciousness
movements.
Design driven innovation
Generation of new meaning through Design Thinking Approach
Another expert, Roberto Verganti,
makes another argument in exploring
innovative approaches that can deal with
the problem of complication of user
preferences in today’s world. He argues for
the Design Thinking approach to innovation
as the logical next generation of innovation
(6G?). He argues that radical innovation is a
major source of long-term competitive
advantage. However, radical innovation is
difficult to come up with. One way to
understand rational innovation is to
consider the innovation of meanings
because people buy meanings, not
products.
People normally assume that meanings are
static and not innovative. However, the
innovation of meanings changes the game
and elevates the extent to which designers
can create radical innovation for long term
competitive advantage. An example is
Nintendo Wii (active physical entertainment
for all), wholefoods (a shift from organic
food being a self-denying choice to
reinvigorating experience). He notes that
such companies “have generated products,
services, and systems with long lives,
significant and sustainable profit margins,
and brand value, and they have spurred
company growth”.
Design-Driven Innovation shows market
leaders such as Apple build an unbeatable
competitive advantage through innovations
that create new markets. Such leaders
compete through products and services
that provide a new meaning giving a new
reason for customers to buy them
(Verganti, 2008).
27
Image 2:10: User centered Design and Design Driven Innovation
In contrasting design thinking with tech
push and demand pull, he argues that these
traditional methods, especially demand
pull, fail to innovate meanings. The
following diagram explains the contrast.
The y-axis refers to the level of technology
(from incremental to radical) and the x-axis
refers to the level of new meaning (from
current adaptations to socio-cultural
models to the generation of the new
meaning).
28
Graph 2:2: Comparison of traditional methods and new meaning
New meaning
In our section on creativity, we described
new ideas as those that sparked outside of
the box of categories. They are the ones for
which there are no previously stored
templates for the brain to use in
categorizing them. We can use that analogy
to probe into the concept of the generation
of new meaning as described by Verganti.
Verganti contrasts new meaning with
current socio-cultural models. These sociocultural bubbles will be akin to the box of
categories we described earlier. The idea
here is that new meaning for users will lie
outside of their box of categories.
29
Image 2:11: Creating new meaning
Thus, Verganti argues that tech push and
design thinking approaches are more likely
to produce ideas that lie outside of the
users’ boxes of categories than the
demand-pull approach that often focuses
on incremental innovation. The second
relevant point to note here is that by
providing new meaning that is outside of
boxes of categories, the design thinking
approach provides users with new ways of
doing things that they may be familiar with.
Verganti talks about design thinking as
more effective in unearthing emotional
experiences that the user is not familiar
with than those that the user is familiar
with.
The following quotes help substantiate the
view of the creation of new meaning.
“Market? What market?! We do not look at
market needs. We make proposals to
connections to things than the other two
approaches.
Hence, new ways of doing old things may
stem from an emotional connection to the
reimagined but previously familiar
experience that has been turned into a
completely new experience. The example
that students enjoy the most is the Snuggie.
The Snuggie is a robe worn backwards but
sold as a blanket with sleeves that allow you
to stay warm while having your hands free
to work the remote control or talk on the
phone. As of 2014, the Allstar Products
Group had made $500m in Snuggie sales
alone. That said, new meaning may more
likely derive from tangible solutions and
people …” ― Ernesto Gismondi, Chairman,
Artemide “If I had asked people what they
wanted, they would have said faster
horses.” ― Supposed Henry Ford quote. "A
lot of times, people don't know what they
want until you show it to them. “Steve Jobs
― BusinessWeek, May 25, 1998.
30
Nuances from contrasting Design thinking
with the five generations model
tech-push or market-pull. Also, most will
defy the time categories.
There are a few more points to synthesize
from the contrast of design thinking to the
other two fundamental approaches to
innovation development.
Although the five generations model was
set in the era's past, it should be noted that
this approach’s actual practice is very much
with us today. Tech push is still relevant in
many industries like drug discovery,
software, etc.
Demand pull is important for addressing
trends in society.
But design thinking is most important if we
want to focus on radical innovation which is
the source of long-term competitive
advantage. By focusing on radical
innovation, you are aiming really high so
that if it. doesn’t happen, you can settle on
a lower pedestal. The main argument is that
the generation of meaning is key.
Exercise 2
This exercise is to connect the 5 generations
to Verganti’s theses. The goal is to come up
with a figure that puts all the generations
on the Verganti map with design thinking as
the potential 6th generation approach.
It is important to note that 1G and 2G are
the most distinctive forms of innovation
and 3G and 4G and 5G are more process
based which shows how you can combine
1G and 2G. So Verghanti can ignore 3G-5G
in his model and focus on 1G and 2G
because you can use 3G-5G as processes in
developing design thinking innovation while
arguing that design-thinking is not demandpull and it's not tech-push.
It's important to note that we are focused
on design thinking and look at the
generation of new meaning because of 1.
Disruptive innovation is the source of
competitive advantage and we need new
meaning to create disruptive innovation. 2.
We are doing a business course, so tech
push doesn’t work, and demand pull is
relegated to the marketing field and 3G to
5G work best at the firm level (organization
because they are more process based). We
are indeed very well aligned with 5G as we
focus on the meaning.
Exercise 1
Since the students came to class with
discovered designs, the instructor can ask
them to determine in which of the 5
generational eras the innovation they found
was situated. Often the common finding is
that most of the innovations will fall under
31
Summary
Functionality is not enough
The conclusion for why we need to change
the approach we use for innovation today is
the effect of our highly networked society
and the fact that increasingly, it's becoming
clear that functionality is not enough. There
is information overload, and we need to be
very agile to be able to identify and
incorporate relevant data into our creative
outcomes. That said, when we get around
to figuring out a process of dealing with the
complexity of the process, you still need to
figure out what to innovate. Both
Christensen and Verganti show us that
functionality is not enough. We need to go
beyond functionality. We need to focus on
the generation of meaning for the customer
or user by understanding what jobs need to
be done. Once we understand what job the
user is hiring the product for, we know that
we have generated a new meaning for the
user, and it is beyond functionality. When
we buy smartphones now, we are hiring it
to ensure a status symbol, to take pictures
quickly and to be able to share immediately.
The smartphone was primarily made for
taking pictures and today its meaning has
changed. So how do designers design for
jobs and new meaning? Designing for
functionality is hard enough. Design
thinking is the only approach that we know
of that can potentially empathize with users
enough to understand them deeply enough
to potentially uncover the job they want to
be done and how it provides new meaning.
Key Words
Innovation, Functionality, New meaning,
Demand pull, technology push
Problem sets
1.
Differentiate between demand pull
and technology push innovation?
2.
Briefly explain the impact of the
internet on innovation.
3.
What is the difference between
design drive innovation and the other types
of innovation in Rothwell's stages of
innovation?
32
CHAPTER 3: CREATIVITY
Chapter description
Creativity has been defined in many
ways by different people. In this book, we
define creativity as thinking outside the
box. What do you understand by thinking
outside the box and thinking inside the box?
As you read through this chapter, you will
understand all these and why the brain is
described as a lazy piece of meat. You will
also understand how thinking outside the
box helps to stimulate creativity. How the
brain categorizes stimuli and how it breaks
those categories. This chapter will further
help you understand different ways in
which you can be creative and will also help
you dispel myths about creativity. You will
get your hands around exercises on
creativity. By the time you are done reading
this chapter, you will discover what makes
you creative.
Introduction
To have a different approach to
innovation in today’s world is to have a
different mindset about how to go about it.
To get a different mindset about the
approach, we need to examine our thinking
patterns, learn about the inherent
inefficiencies that are likely to prevent us
from being excellent in our practice of the
3 Kihn, Martin."'Outside the Box': the Inside Story,"
FastCompany 1995; Random House: Outside the
Box Thinking.
design thinking approach and develop
mental models for success and problem
solving. In this chapter, we explore mental
models which will push our brains out of
categories. And once these categories are
broken, we learn to think outside the box,
thus presenting us with creative ways of
making our thinking patterns more efficient.
Berns. G (2008) notes that novelty is
needed for imagination to commence. And
he also, notes that imagination and
creativity start with perception.
Creativity
Thinking outside the box
Thinking outside the box 3 is a metaphor for
thinking differently. It is said to be derived
from management consulting in the 1970s
and 1980s. It relates to the topographical
puzzle called the 9 dots puzzle arranged in
the form of a box with three dots with
equal distance on each side and the ninth in
the middle. Solvers were instructed to link
all 9 dots using four straight lines or fewer,
once, without lifting the pen. The solution
requires a creative approach that takes the
pen outside of the ‘box’ of dots to complete
the trace in a way that most people do not
think of (Kihn, 2005).
33
Image 5:1: 9 dots puzzle
Creativity has since been described as
thinking outside the box. Prior to this,
creativity was seen in the forms of
evolution, revolution, synthesis,
reapplication, changing direction among
others. It turns out the field of neuroscience
confirms thinking outside the box as a way
of thinking to come up with new ideas. Our
brains perceive stimuli through our five
senses, vision, hearing, smell, taste, and
touch, and respond with action. However,
between initial perception and action, a lot
happens. From childhood, our brains tag
perceptions and store them in templates in
our brain (in the limbic system). For
example, if a child touches a yellow flame,
this is stored in the brain so that the next
time the child sees a yellow flame, he or she
knows not to touch it because the painful
experience from touching it is stored in his
or her brain. So, the brain quickly pulls up
that memory and this guides the child’s
response. Imagine this process happening
with all the interactions you have had with
your five senses to this day. Your brain
builds up a file cabinet of templates that it
uses to process new information. This
process is also called categorization.
So, your brain has categories upon
categories, think files in file drawers in a file
cabinet in the brain, which it draws from.
This is why a person you just met but do not
know can make you feel a certain way
because your brain uses existing templates
of experiences of someone else this person
reminds you of to filter your perceptions of
the current person. It is also why you are
quick to dismiss things you think you have
encountered even if they present a
completely new circumstance (Kihn, 2005).
34
Image 5:2: Categorization Process in the brain (a)
The brain is a lazy piece of meat
In his book, Iconoclast: A Neuroscientist
Reveals How to Think Differently, Gregory
Berns4 calls the brain ‘a lazy piece of meat’!
He says the brain is lazy because it
conserves energy by categorizing.
Therefore, when it is confronted with new
stimuli, it simply draws from those
templates, the categories to aid with
response generation without any more
thinking. This is thinking inside the box and
this is what Berns calls brain laziness. It is
also akin to drawing lines within the box of
9 dots in an attempt to solve the puzzle
(Berns, 2010). Here is an illustration we
have used numerous times with young
people in North America (millennials, it
doesn’t work on baby boomers and we
haven’t tried it abroad). “I am going to say
something, and you immediately say out
loud what comes to mind: ‘Red, low laying
sports car’”. Every time we have gotten
more than 50% percent of the audience
4 Berns, Gregory 2010 Iconoclast: A Neuroscientist Reveals How
to Think Differently by. Harvard Business ReviewPress; First
Trade Paper Edition edition (March 17, 2010)
shout “Ferrari” in unison. This is thinking
inside the box of categories, browsing
through the file drawers and the files within
these drawers to locate a template that fits
that phrase ‘red, low laying sports car’.
There are many different models of red low
laying sports cars that come in the color
red. Also, Ferraris come in different colors.
Whatever the explanation for the
association of Ferrari to that descriptive,
what is clear is that the color red and the
brand Ferrari have been etched into the box
of categories of young people in North
America. Hence, the audience is often not
able to provide ‘creative’ responses to that
phrase. Thinking inside the box is good but
... We are not suggesting that thinking
inside the box is bad. In fact, thinking inside
the box is useful. For the child who stored
the feeling of pain from putting a hand over
a yellow flame, processing inside the box on
the next encounter with a yellow flame by
35
retrieving that stored template helps
prevent another burn. As humans, we need
to think inside the box to survive, to avoid
repeating mistakes and keep safe. We need
to keep files in file drawers in our mental
box of categories. Also, thinking inside the
box involves utility, which is a great
component of creativity, and with it, one
needs to identify and fully utilize what is
available in the box before they can think
outside the box (Peterson, 2010). However,
new ideas are often unfamiliar to us.
Technically, new ideas have to live outside
the box of categories for them to be new. If
new ideas live outside our boxes of
categories, then always processing inside
our box of categories is only going to make
us good analyzers if we apply the right
stored template (note that templates can
be used incorrectly leading to wrong
interpretations, e.g., in cases of wrongful
Image 5:3: Categorization Process in the brain (b)
profiling). Thus, if creativity is about coming
up with new ideas, then a person is unlikely
to be creative if his or her brain mostly
processes within its box of categories and
within the stored files of templates because
new ideas do not live there. Hence,
categorization and inside processing is good
for our survival but inhibits our ability to
consistently develop new ideas. We need to
process outside of our categories to
discover new ideas and be creative.
Remember drawing the line outside of the 9
dots in order to connect them without
lifting the pen.
36
Breaking out of categories
How does one break out of the box of
categories? According to Berns (2010), the
solution lies in how novelty motivates
imagination. It is clear that imagination
leads to new ideas, but the brain prevents
imagination when it processes inside the
box. This is because imagination by the very
meaning of the word lives outside of the
box of categories. You are only imagining
because you don’t find a useful template in
the file drawers. Berns uses the example of
trying to imagine a sunset on an unfamiliar
planet. In our adaptation of that exercise,
we often ask for a volunteer to act out
instructions in front of the class.
“Close your eyes and imagine a Florida
sunset. Describe it.” The descriptions are
often what you expect. Nice sandy beaches,
palm trees, yellow sunset in the horizon,
beach chairs etc. “Close your eyes and
imagine a sunset on a newfound planet XB
40”. The actor normally struggles to
provide a description because he or she
has no stored templates of planet XB 40. Is
it a rocky or gaseous planet? is it cold or
hot? It becomes really difficult to describe
sunset in an unfamiliar and unknown
scenery.
Creativity is imagination at work. Berns
notes that creativity happens when the
brain is forced out of its comfort zone, out
of stored templates and is forced to
imagine. Basically, make stuff up! This is
what happens when the actor describing
sunset on planet XB 40 is encouraged to
keep talking and trying to provide a
description. Soon, the actor starts to make
stuff up. Sometimes, the imaginative scenes
are so good that you wonder if the person
could have contributed immensely to the
script for the movie Avatar. That is
imagination at work. That is the brain
knocked out of its box of categories. That is
the brain processing outside the
box...thinking outside the box! A question
that often comes up here is that the actor is
not pulling from a particular file drawer of
sunsets but is pulling from another file
drawer of planets. That is true in a sense
and all new ideas encompass old ideas to an
extent. However, the point is that at the
moment of imagining a sunset on planet XB
40, the actor had no exact templates in any
of the mental file drawers to draw from and
therefore ended up creating new images.
It’s the imagination of the new images that
lead to the creation of new ideas.
Novelty is needed for imagination to
commence
“Travel to new places, do something
unusual, meet new people, try new foods,
take a different route to school or to work”
You have heard these prescriptions for
coming up with new ideas or for being
creative? Berns notes that novelty is
needed for imagination to commence. And
also, Berns notes that imagination and
creativity start with perception.
37
Neuroscientists believe that Perception is a
product of a brain and not what your eyes
and ears transmit to your brain. We see this
in the planet XB 40 exercise. It is only when
the actor was told to describe ‘sunset on
planet XB 40” that the imaginative process
started. This is the element of novelty that
was introduced to the actor to jumpstart
the imaginative process. Berns gives many
examples of this when he describes
iconoclasts such as Kary Mullis who came
up with the basic principle of the
polymerase chain reaction at mile marker
46.7 on Highway 128 driving up the
Northern California coast when he
encountered his creative instrument of
novelty “the stalks of the California
buckeyes heavily in blossom leaning over
into the road” This element of novelty is
what knocked his brain out of the box of
categories of lab experience denaturing
natural DNA to imagine the structure of
polymerase in the form of the petals of the
flower. Another illustration Berns uses is
the story of Walt Disney. Walt Disney was a
good illustration artist who created
illustrations for ads that showed before the
main feature movie in the theatre. His
element of novelty came when he was
sitting through a number of ads with his
illustrated work when he imagined what it
would be like to have the animation be the
main feature. It was that moment, sitting
there and watching his work play on the big
screen that served as the moment of
novelty which will go on to transform the
animation industry.
Does novelty need physical
movement to occur?
The simplest depictions of novelty
encounters are when the person moves
from one physical space into another
unfamiliar space. But can this movement be
purely mental without the physical
component? It seems to be the case that
new perceptions in one physical space can
evoke the type of novelty circumstance that
sparks innovation. Hearing something on
the radio can unlock a writer’s block as that
new information causes a novelty situation
that forces the writer to process outside of
the box of categories within which he or she
is trapped. One could even argue that
daydreaming could also serve as a mental
journey on which one could find many
novelty situations to spark the imagination.
People can’t help but make up their own
endings of movies that leave them hanging
or make up the continuation of really
captivating novels they couldn’t finish
reading for one reason or another. These
creative moments do not involve physical
displacement.
Novelty in the unconscious
In addition to daydreaming, alteration of
storybook and movie endings, there are
also stories of people waking up at night in
cold sweats because they had a great idea
that they needed to write down. There are
stories of people interrupting their shower
and causing a mess because they needed to
get out dripping in order to write down a
38
great idea they got in the shower. Waking
up from sleep and getting epiphanies in the
shower seem to result from a mental
download to the consciousness of an
imaginative process that happened
unconsciously. It is as if the brain took
within-box processing during the day and
ventured off to explore novelty situations
when the body was sleeping.
These novelty situations would then cause
unconscious imaginative processing to
happen and result in an array of outcomes
that are then waiting to be downloaded
into consciousness once the body is jolted
out of sleep or maybe experiences a
temperature change from a shower. Clearly,
these anecdotal examples point to what
seems to be a process of feeding the brain
with many inputs from different domains
(including novel ones) and then releasing it
to do its own computations. The releasing
of the brain, after intensely engaging within
the box of categories, could be taking a
short or long break, going for a walk, going
to bed or better still taking a mental trip at
your desk. It appears all of these options for
novelty seeking can lead to creative ideas.
There could be a scientific process (or not)
for explaining all of this anecdotal evidence
but one thing it shows is that the brain can
realize or potentially construct novelty
situations and go on to create new ideas
whether consciously or sub/unconsciously.
There was a student in the masters’ level of
this class whose company wanted to
develop a new marketing campaign. The
company had hired a 3-ad agency and
didn’t like any of their work. So, the student
studied the campaign requirements really
well, took time off work, traveled through
the city of Boston in the US, took lots of
pictures, went home, took a shower and
went to bed. The next morning, three
campaign themes came to her, she wrote
them down, shared with her boss and two
of the three got adopted! It’s up to you to
read what you want into it, but that story is
a true story and includes conscious and
unconscious mental processing.
If your novelty moments often occur in the
morning, then you should take the morning
download very seriously. If you set the
alarm clock and jump out of bed and run
out of the house, chances are you won’t be
downloading what your brain computed the
night before.
The effect of novelty needs prior
processing in the box of categories
“Think inside the box before you think
outside the box” is what we often tell
students. Travelling, meeting new people,
taking different routes will do nothing for
your creativity if you don’t have prior
‘inside the box’ processing for which the
novelty serves as a break. Novelty has to be
a break from some earlier processing or
hypotheses. You have to be thinking about
something, and therefore establish a box of
categories, for novelty to cause imagination
outside that box of categories.
39
For instance, as noted earlier, Kary Mullis
was a scientist who thought a lot about
polymerase before encountering his novelty
on the California coast. That novelty
encounter was a break from the lab, a break
from extensive inside-the-box thinking.
Walt Disney was an illustrator whose
mental category was probably set on the
concept of animations being solely used for
ads before the feature film. His novelty
encounter was a break from that. Here is
another one. Newton was a scientist
studying gravity long before the apple fell
on his head. His novelty encounter of the
apple falling on his head was probably a
break from the lab as well. Hence, thinking
inside the box is essential for thinking
outside the box. We often helped students
think inside the box through hypothesis
development. For instance, to study the
nutritional needs of students on a university
campus, inside thinking will involve
brainstorming expectations of student
behavior around nutrition. The research
process will involve novelty seeking in order
to experience outside-the-box thinking.
More often than not, the insights will be
deviations from earlier inside-thinking
expectations.
Exercises on Creativity
Students are encouraged to try out these two fun exercises to test their ability to think outside
the box.
1. Complete the Incomplete Figure Test
A classic test of creativity, the Torrance Test of Creative Thinking was introduced by psychologist
Ellis Paul Torrance in the sixties as a way to administer a more creatively inclined IQ test.
Respondents were given images like the ones below and asked to finish the picture. Higher
points were awarded for answers that included rich imagery, implied narrative, or used humor
or fantasy (Artwork Archive, 2019).
40
2. Complete the Picture
This quick exercise dubbed “The Doodle Dandy,” was found on How Design, and is similar to the
Incomplete Figure Test, but has room for more variations. It’s basically the same principle as the
first exercise, except you get a stack of simple one-line scribbles and a stack of short phrases and
you must create the phrase from one of the doodles.
Here is their sample phrase list, though they also encourage you to come up with your own:
Happy as a clam, I can’t get any satisfaction, Where in the world? A hard day’s night, Human
nature, Is there a doctor in the house? The art of noise, Here comes trouble, Abracadabra!,
What’s that sound? (Artwork Archive, 2019)
Sample illustrations for the above exercises can be found at the end of this chapter as
appendices. These illustrations were taken from the Artwork Archive Website.
Are creative people born or made?
This discussion of how the brain
prevents creativity through categorization
and enables creativity through novelty and
imagination can only suggest one thing.
People may be born creative, but everyone
can be creative if they train themselves to
‘think outside the box’. You can be creative
if your brain can process inside and outside
of the box. You do not need to be born
creative to realize that it’s not possible to
stay inside the box of 9 dots and connect
the dots without lifting the pen. You just
need to be able to realize that if the line
went outside the box of 9 dots, the puzzle
could be solved. The trick lies in the ability
to open your mind to outside the box
thinking, so to speak. We believe that most
people expect creative
41
outcomes by staying in their box of
categories and when they don’t achieve
these outcomes, they lament that they are
not creative. ‘Am just not the creative type’,
we will hear people say. Well, your brain
needs to be lazy, as Berns puts it, to be
efficient. However, if you develop a habit of
jolting it out of its efficiency-mindedness,
your chances of ‘thinking outside the box’
are high. But you have to realize that your
moment of insight, your epiphany moment
of coming up with a new idea, is unlikely to
come from a novelty encounter devoid of
prior thinking inside a box of categories
about a problem you care about. It won’t
happen when you are walking down the
street whistling your favorite tune, as the
commercials make us believe without a
prior focus.
What you need to do to start realizing your creative potential
Be cognizant of problems around
you. Apart from the problems you
encounter or things that annoy you, there
are many other problematic observable
user behaviors that you either ignore on a
day-to-day basis or simply do not realize
they exist. Once you successfully enter that
mode of cognizance, do the following.
1. Name your categories. To achieve
imagination from novelty encounters, you
first need to come to terms with your bias
on the issue. What is in your box of
categories about the problem? You need to
establish what you have believed for a long
time about this problem or what society
believes about this problem. Examples are
cars need 4 wheels for stability; students
need to read textbooks to learn the course
material, insurance works by the insured
paying a premium to the insurer for a future
claim, SEO helps rank web pages in the
search
engines. What if any of these are not ‘true’?
What if they could be done differently?
2. Invert your categories. We often ask our
students to use ‘why’, ‘how’ and ‘what if’
questions to invert their categories in order
to allow novelty encounters to spark
imagination in them. It’s important that
these inversion questions maintain the
status quo of the category without
suggesting potential solutions. For instance,
why do cars have 4 wheels? What if cars
didn’t have 4 wheels? why do students have
to read textbooks? What if students didn’t
need textbooks? How do insurance and
premiums work? What if the insured didn’t
need to pay premiums? How does SEO work
in ranking websites on search engines?
What if page ranking was not done with
SEO? 3. Stop yourself from answering your
inversion questions. Rushing to answer your
‘how’, ‘why’ and ‘what if’ questions defeat
the purpose of using them as category
inverters.
42
Your rushed answers are likely to be too
close to your categories. Put space between
the questions and the answers by seeking
novelty situations that can really lead you
on that new disruptive path to a new idea.
So, invert your categories and wait patiently
for your novelty encounter. Elaborating on
the mechanism for how the inversion
questions lead eventually to creative ideas,
we do believe that the questions act as
hypotheses and they put your brain in a
research mode.
It is this research mode that makes you
realize novelty situations. As hinted
previously, without this research mode,
novelty situations will do nothing to spark
your imaginative process. You can travel the
world, be spontaneous, make new friends
every minute, associate with people from
different spheres of life, actively seek new
experiences etc. and in the end: you will
only say ‘that was a cool experience’ and
not ‘wow, that was a completely different
experience from what I expected. I wonder
why they do it like that and not the other
way around. What if they did this instead?’
Obviously, the previous statement doesn’t
have an element of curiosity but the later
does and the brain sooner or later develops
alternative ways of presenting that
experience...you are on your way to a new
idea or a new business. In his book
‘Creativity’, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, known
to many as the father of creativity research,
describes creativity as follows:
unlikely to start” (Csikszentmihalyi, 1996,
page 95).
“The creative process starts with a sense
that there is a puzzle somewhere or a task
to be accomplished. Perhaps something is
not right, somewhere there is a conflict, a
tension, a need to be satisfied. The
problematic issue can be triggered by a
personal experience, by a lack of fit in the
symbolic system, by the stimulation of
colleagues, or by public needs. Without such
a felt tension to attract the psychic energy
of the person, the creative process is
We think Csikszentmihalyi’s
description supports our assertion that you
need to get into the habit of processing
inside your box of categories to unearth the
‘felt tension’ that Csikszentmihalyi talks
about. You may do that in different ways
but if you are having trouble, try asking the
‘how, why, and what if’ questions about
things and events around you. Don’t drive
everyone crazy with it, do it discreetly if you
can. Make it a habit of making mental notes
of how things work, why they happen, and
what if they were not what they are? As
Csikszentmihalyi notes, your chances of
employing your psychic energy to imagine
potential solutions at your moment of
novelty encounters are higher with the
tensions than without them. Individual
Creativity. We hope you become more of
a creative person as we go through the
design process. The design process needs
43
some creativity, although you do not need
to be a ‘creative person’ according to the
typical description of a creative person one
will find. We just want you to be able to
straddle thinking inside and outside of your
box of categories. Sometimes you need to
step outside the box for yourself and for the
users you are designing for. This is why it is
important to understand how the brain
works to both prevent and also enable
creativity.
Working in teams.
We believe in teams and we normally put
our students in teams whose members we
select. We vary team members as much as
possible because of some of the arguments
espoused above. We believe that a varied
team makes each member a force of
novelty that leads other team members into
Image 5:4: Team’s product
imagination through the questions,
thoughts etc. that they share. In that sense
working in teams with diverse people is the
best way to experience the creative process
because it provides novelty encounters and
also helps filter through imaginations
quickly to arrive at the most feasible and
desirable outcomes that the team seeks.
The results of putting students in such
teams in the past have been incredible. At
Ashesi University, Ghana, for instance,
putting students in teams in the past has
resulted in mega creative projects such as
the Africa Transformers group, which
recycles plastic water bottles to create
products like bins. In 2018, this team won
funding from the Millennium fellowship to
fund their project. One of this team’s
products is shown below.
44
Conclusion
In conclusion, we have established
that the brain uses existing categories to
process new information. This however
hinders creativity. In order to allow
ourselves to be creative, we need to break
out of existing categories. This is achieved
by identifying the existing categories,
inverting those categories and instead of
rushing to answer the questions that arise
from the inversion, seeking novelty
situations that can help us come up with
new ideas. We have also established that
while some people are born creative,
everyone can be creative by identifying
their novelty moments and utilizing on
them. Moreover, working in teams also
speeds up the creative process by creating a
diverse environment that enables members
to have more novelty encounters which in
turn stimulate new ideas.
Key Terms
Creativity
Novelty
Thinking outside the box
Categorization
Problem Sets
1. What do you understand by the term
Creativity and Novelty?
45
2. How does one break out of categories?
3. Berns describes the brain as a lazy piece
of meat, do you agree or not and why?
4. Do you think people are born creative or
not and why?
5. What do you understand by the term
“Thinking outside the box”?
Appendix
1. Complete the Incomplete Figure Test- Sample answer illustration
46
2. Complete the Picture- Sample Answer illustrations
47
CHAPTER 4: CHASING MYSTERIES
Chapter Description
This chapter introduces you to the
design economy and other useful ideologies
such as abductive logic which will be key in
enabling you to become a great design
thinker. The chapter gives clear descriptions
and explanations to the different topics
covered, which will leave you fully equipped
on how to conduct research as a design
thinker. Nowadays, we are confronted with
varied types of problems that require us to
rely on design rather than mere knowledge
in solving them. This concept is well
explained in this chapter. The chapter
introduces the concept of design economy,
explains what we mean by different types
of problems, and shows the ways in which
we can traverse the old methods of
research and adopt methods that include
design thinking, in order to come up with
solutions that actually solve our problems.
By the time you finish the chapter, you
should be able to differentiate between the
deductive, abductive and inductive method
of research, and understand the role of
ethnographic research as a method for
conducting design research.
Introduction
Sherlock Holmes and his friend Dr. Watson
investigate a popular case in England about
a missing horse; Silver Blaze and the death
of its trainer; Mr. Straker. The Silver Blaze
was the favored horse to win the Wessex
Cup horse race. This horse was owned by
Colonel Ross who lived in Dartmoor. This
case is where the infamous line 'The curious
incident of the dog in the night' comes
from, Holmes uses this line to arrive at his
hypothesis for investigating the crime.
When Holmes and Waston arrive at Colonel
Ross’ stable in Dartmoor, Inspector Gregory
narrates the details of the crime to Holmes
and Waston. The night before the incident,
a stranger had come to Colonel Ross’ stable
asking about the horse. The next morning,
the stable boy was found drugged, horse
trainer killed, and Silver Blaze was missing.
The stranger was suspected of doing all this.
Holmes questions the people that were
around at the night of the incident and He
also examines the contents in the jacket of
the murdered- here he finds a cataract knife
which was not an essential tool to horse
trainers. Holmes also finds bills among
contents in the trainer's jacket.
While in the field at the crime scene,
Colonel Ross suggested removing Silver
Blaze’s name from the competition
however Holmes advises him not to do so.
Moving on, Holmes finds footprints of the
horse and follows them which made him
conclude that the horse had fled to
Mapleton, a stable owned by one of Colonel
Ross’ competitors in the race, Lord
Backwater. Holmes finds the horse at
Mapleton but decides to leave it there till
48
the Wessex cup. Holmes believes
imagination is an important tool for
problem solving. Holmes also uses “why”
questions that spark his imagination to
come up with possible outcomes. From
these outcomes, he chooses to investigate
the most likely answer. Holmes focuses on
small underlying questions of the big
question of “Who stole the racehorse Silver
Blaze and murdered his trainer?” An
example of the small questions Holmes
focuses on is: Did the watchdog in the
stables bark at Silver Blaze’s thief? From
this question, Holmes realizes that no one
mentions about the dog barking on the
night of the incident. Holmes assumed that
the thief was not a stranger given that well
trained dog did not bark during the night of
the incidence. As a reader, who do you
think stole the racehorse? Who killed the
horse trainer? The answers to these
questions will be expanded on later in this
chapter.
The inspiration for Design Thinking
Methodology
Our discussion of the 5 generations of
innovation shows that over time, there
have been different factors that have
impacted on the approach that society has
taken to innovation. Once upon a time, the
notion was that ‘if you build it, they will
come’. It was a production orientation. We
have gotten through different orientations
5 http://rogerlmartin.com/
since then and today, it’s clear that with the
advent of the Internet and its impact on
how we interact with and consume
products and services, a new approach is
needed for innovation development. We
start with an article titled “Business of
design”, which was an interview of Roger
Martin, former Dean of the Rotman School
in Toronto until 20135 (he was also
previously head of Monitor Consulting
company). The article outlines three main
points: that we are entering a design
economy (from a knowledge economy) and
that we are confronted with different types
of problems (mysteries) and that we need
to traverse the traditional methods of
problem-solving.
Design economy
Roger Martin notes that we are being
ushered into a design economy where
abductive thinking will deliver more value
than deductive and inductive thinking. We
will explain these terms later in this
chapter. A quick review of Rothwell’s
generations of innovation suggests that
there is a progression from a technology
focus in G1 (build it and they will come),
through a demand focus in G2 (relying on
consumer research), coupling in G3
(integration of G1 and G2), a focus on crossfunctional teams in G4 and a focus on
systems integration and networking or
open innovation in G5. Roger Martin also
talks about production, service and
49
information economies coming before the
design economy and there could be related
to 1G, 2G for production and service and
3G, 4G and 5G related to the information
economy. One can see the connection
between the design economy and 5G. A
design economy can be described as an
economy that draws from a systems
perspective in solving problems, building
value propositions and engaging with
customers and citizens. This means that the
quest to solve problems has to tap into
many different sources of information using
unconventional means and breaking as
many constraints as possible. The Internet
has made it possible for people and
companies to amass a wealth of
information (e.g., big data) and the
challenge has always been how to harness,
process and utilize that information for the
highest impact.
Despite those challenges, it is clear that the
user has increased his or her palate for
preferences as more and more features of
products and services become available.
Gone are the days when you could get any
color for a car so long as it was black (a
reference to an answer Henry Ford
apparently gave for why the Ford Model T
only came in black). A diverse user palate of
preferences means the need for a more
agile system of developing new ideas and
solutions for user or customer problems.
Apart from a variety of preferences, users
are focusing beyond functionality and
increasingly focusing on meaning in the
products and services they enjoy. The
function a product provides is not enough
anymore and needs to provide meaning as
well. G5 seems to do just that. It is based on
systems integration and networking of
different functions in the organization and
also involves open innovation which is
predicated on the notion of a porous
organizational boundary that encourages
information flow in multiple directions
(Henry Chesbrough). One way to think of G5
is a design-thinking, systems approach, for
the organization. The question for us
educators and promoters of design thinking
is what G5 looks like in the training of the
next generation of innovators. How do we
make the complex G5 system accessible to
the ordinary citizen? We believe this is
where design thinking comes in.
Different types of problems
Jeanne Liedtka of the Darden School of
Business, University of Virginia wrote a
book on design thinking [Designing for
Growth]. In one of the sections, she talks
about a developing narrative in the design
field, something Roger Martin also talks
about (Liedtka & Ogilvie, 2011). The
narrative is that our current world presents
more mysteries than puzzles. It sounds odd
because mysteries are things that are
difficult or impossible to understand as a
dictionary will explain it. Jeanne argues that
we used to be presented with puzzles that
are relatively easy to solve. For puzzles, you
just need to figure out how the puzzle
pieces fit together, and it's solved! This is
50
how business education has worked for
years. We present students with case
studies with the notion of puzzle pieces that
the students need to arrange to solve the
puzzle. Students will prepare the puzzle
pieces in the case study, e.g., calculate
financial ratios, do a SWOT analysis, add
TOWs analysis6 and then solve the puzzle.
The idea is that our world is presenting us
more and more with mysteries and not
puzzles. Mysteries do not have mystery
pieces the same way puzzles have puzzle
pieces. Mysteries are often hard to solve
because the solution is often not obvious.
The solution is often hidden in crevices no
one thinks to pry into. It is important
though to note that the word Mystery is
used here for the nature of the problems it
presents more than for the element of
insolvability that it might have.
When we have this discussion in class, we
make sure to provide the definition of
mysteries that Jeane and Roger provide and
then slightly build on it. Jeane’s definition
says that mysteries are those “problems we
are familiar with but don’t understand
well”. Students often find it odd to say that
a problem like nutrition is a mystery and
therefore needs to be reimagined. The fact
is if students reimagined nutrition (which
they will tell you they understand really
well) they will come up with new and
interesting solutions to nutrition problems.
This will be the case even if the students
6 TOWS analysis is a tool that is used to generate, compare and
select strategies.https://www.marketingteacher.com/tows-analysis/
were not creative at all and just followed
the design thinking process. However, the
problem is getting them to accept the
framing of nutrition as a mystery.
It is important to stress the definition of
mystery while maintaining the distinction
from the puzzle. The idea is not that design
mysteries are impossible or difficult to
understand. As Roger’s definition says,
there are two parts to it. The problems are
familiar or easily recognizable. The second
part is that we don’t fully understand them.
This basically means that there is so much
room to understand them that we can say
that we don’t fully understand them even if
we can argue that for our current purposes
our understanding is pretty good. When
you look at it that way, then a lot of
problems can suddenly be mysteries. E.g.,
how people enjoy produced entertainment
like movies, how people communicate, how
people get nutrition, how people grow old,
how people wake up, how people fall
asleep, how people take stimulants like
coffee, how people transport themselves,
how people learn, how people get out of
poverty, how people relate to the
environment. And the list goes on.
Here is a good example of a problem that
we are very familiar with but what
entrepreneurs have done with it suggests
that we didn’t understand it or better put
‘there was a lot more to understand’. The
51
example is that of Instagram and Snapchat
both digital interaction tools in the shadow
of Facebook. Instagram and Snapchat both
focus on a problem that we are very
familiar with or very much recognize –
sharing of the photos and selfies we take.
Instagram was bought by Mark Zuckerberg
for $1Bn and Snapchat is worth about
$9.6Bn (Dec 2020). It is clear that even
though the photo-sharing problem is one
that we are familiar with, the human
behavior processes behind how people
share, will like to share, desire to share
pictures is a ‘mystery’ – something with a
lot more room for understanding. We can
argue that the founders of Instagram and
Snapchat got a glimpse of this mystery and
the valuations spoke to that. Who knows
how many more different aspects there are
to the mystery of sharing photos that have
not been uncovered yet? Wasn’t that the
groundbreaking idea that Facebook was
founded on in the first place!?
So, our extension of the definition of a
mystery, in this case, is that a mystery is a
problem that we are familiar with but there
is a lot more room to understand it better.
Note the difference between this definition
and the earlier one. In this definition, we
are not saying that we don’t understand
nutrition well enough, we are saying that
there is a lot of room to understand it even
better. It’s a subtle addition but we have
found it to work and motivate students to
apply the design thinking process to topics
and problems that they would normally not
apply them to – with wonderful results.
What we have tried to make our students
understand is that the problems they
identify for their projects or clients can be
familiar, easily recognizable, boring and
mundane.
The real question is what aspects of the
problem lend themselves to digging in to
unearth deep and profound understanding
that can revolutionize how we think of the
problem and how we solve that problem.
The real question is “is there room for a lot
more understanding?” What are the
mysteries in the ordinary and the
mundane? It is also important to note here
that a lot of problems the team starts with
may need to be reframed to make them
interesting mysteries to focus on. So, if the
problem is not revealing its mysterious
characteristics, reframing might be the way
to go. There is the example of Continuum
reframing a problem P&G came to them
with “How to make better cleaning fluid
dispensers”. When the problem was
reframed as “How people clean” it
dramatically changed the way the team
looked at the project and out came the
Swiffer, a multi-billion-dollar category for
P&G. The concept of reframing will be
discussed in depth in the “Reframing
chapter” in this book.
Traversing traditional methods of research
Roger Martin argues that the way to solve
or study mysteries is to do things
differently. We need to traverse the
52
traditional forms of research to embrace
methods that can engage and solve
mysteries. Traditional forms of research
involve deductive and inductive research. If
you ever took a philosophy course in logic
and critical thinking, you would have
encountered the mathematical definitions
for deductive and inductive research logic.
One research logic that is often left out of
logic and critical thinking sessions is
abductive research logic. We will choose
not to speculate on why it is less known in
research compared to deductive and
inductive research. In any case, abductive
research is most associated with solving
mysteries and is at the center of operating
in the design economy. We actually believe
that the extent to which a student or a
student team excels in design thinking
depends on their ability to wrap their heads
around abductive research, internalize it
and operationalize it. Further, the ability to
operationalize abductive logic seems to be
the main skill that art, architecture and
engineering students learn. If this is true,
then what it means is that abductive logic is
teachable, the ability to design is teachable
and therefore, anybody can be a designer.
so that ordinary people can feel
empowered to be designers and do design
thinking and not relegate it to creative
types. Abductive thinking in that sense
demystifies the designer label and the
better we are at describing and
demystifying it the better this instructional
material will be for you and other users.
In academic research, deductive and
inductive logic are well used. And because
most readers are familiar with these two
logics, a good way to introduce abductive
logic is to differentiate it from deductive
and abductive while explaining the two.
Deductive logic in the research sense often
follows a process whereby a theory is
identified, a hypothesis is determined and is
followed by a collection of a vast amount of
typically quantitative data through methods
such as surveys. The data is then
aggregated and computed with a statistical
software paving the way for descriptive
statistics and also the use of statistical
inferences for conducting hypothesis
testing in order to understand the research
question under consideration. This may be
why Roger Martin describes it as “proving
that something must be”.
That is a bold statement, and we make it
because there is a perception that maybe
some people are more inclined to design
while others are not. If we believe that then
there is no reason to unpack the design
process in any detail. If we don’t believe
that (which we don’t) then we need to help
democratize and demystify design thinking
Deductive Logic
Given our discussions about how to tap into
people’s aspirations, it is clear that
deductive methods will produce a lot of
information but will not get to the deep
‘whys’ about people’s aspirations. This is
because the method is focused on finding
53
the average measurements of attributes
and estimating deviations from those
averages in order to develop a set of
conclusions about the question posed. For
instance, from deductive research, we will
know that most millennials have an affinity
to instant gratification, and we can identify
a number of factors that are correlated with
that finding such as the prevalence of data
through the Internet and a sense of
entitlement. What we would not be able to
get from this research is an inspiration to
probe a potential solution to problems
resulting from these findings of millennials.
An example of a Deductive argument by
Muehlhauser Luke (2009).
Let us consider a deductive argument. If the
premises when true succeed in making its
conclusion certain, the argument is valid. If
the premises when true fail to make its
conclusion certain, the argument is invalid.
Let’s look at an example:
All mammals have lungs.
All whales are mammals.
Therefore, all whales have lungs.
This deductive argument is valid because
the conclusion follows with certainty if the
premises are true. There is no possible way
for the premises to be true and yet the
conclusion false.
7 By Muehlhauser Luke
(2009).http://commonsenseatheism.com/?p=2071
Inductive logic
In the research sense is going into the
research scenario without a hypothesis per
se but with previous literature about how
things should be or what the answers could
be in that research context. So, researchers
will typically collect qualitative data, use
text analysis software or other methods to
find patterns in the data and come to
conclusions from which propositions could
be drawn to generalize to the general
population on the research question under
consideration. Again, back to Roger Martin,
this description of inductive research seems
to line up with his description of it as
“proving that something actually operates”.
This method is good for aggregating
thoughts about interesting trends in
qualitative data and developing a theory of
how to approach the insights from the
research. For instance, qualitative
interviews of millennials may reveal a trend
of parental influence in upbringing and
social behavior. That will be an insightful
theory but what will be missing is there will
not be a strong connection to a tangible
solution from that research.
Here is an example of an Inductive
argument7
Most corporation lawyers are conservatives.
Betty Morse is a corporate lawyer.
Therefore, Betty Morse is a conservative.
54
This is a pretty good inductive argument,
because (let us say) both premises are true.
Thus, the conclusion is more likely true than
false.
Abductive Logic
Unlike the methods for research in the case
of deductive and inductive logic, using the
abductive logic in a research sense will be
going into the context with some
understanding of the situation but a pretty
open mind and an intentional focus on
generating insight from unique cases (e.g.,
extreme, one-off). This approach of interest
in unique cases can mean a distraction
away from the average cases. If you
consider research findings to be aggregated
on a mound shaped normal distribution
with the average cases in the middle of the
highest peak of the mound, the unique
cases may be distributed across the upward
and downward slopes of each side of the
mound. These cases could also derive from
unconventional methods (see generative
methods) that provide data that is difficult
to analyze with statistical tools. They will be
unique from the perspective of something
that is unusual from what one would have
expected.
Abductive research will probe deeper into
these extreme cases for inspiration into
potential insights that can lead to tangible
solutions. Although the unique cases lie
away from the average in the middle of the
mound, abductive differentiates itself from
deductive and inductive in that it doesn’t
focus on standard deviations from the
average. Roger Martin describes the
abductive logic as a process that permits
the designer to ‘suggest something maybe
and reach out to explore it’. Using the
example of research into millennial
behavior, abductive research will follow a
number of unique millennials (e.g., those
who stay at home, those living on their
own, those within the school, those
working, high internet users, low internet
users, different ages in the millennial age
range etc.).
Expanding on the Silver Blaze’s
disappearance and Mr. Straker’s death,
Holmes used abductive logic to generate
insights from the case. For Example, he
examined why the dog didn't bark on the
night of the incident? Why did the trainer
have a cataract knife in his jacket? Why
would Mr. Straker have a huge amount of
bills in his pocket under another name? This
led Holmes to conclude Mr. Straker was
living a double life under another name,
and the bills in the pocket helped Holmes
realize Mr. Straker had another wife. Mr.
Straker was in great debt due to the
expensive taste of his second wife.
Therefore, these prompted Mr. Straker to
go behind Colonel Ross’ back to make Silver
Blake lame by cutting his leg something Mr.
Straker had practiced with the sheep at the
stable. Silver Blake sensed something wrong
before Mr. Straker could carry out the
action, the horse panicked and kicked Mr.
Striker to the ground resulting in his death.
55
Holmes’ ideas of investigating this case are
consistent with abductive logic which looks
at different hypotheses and goes with the
most plausible.
Another example of an abductive argument
by Muehlhauser Luke (2009).
The surprising fact, E, is observed.
But if H were true, E would be a matter of
course.
Hence, there is a reason to suspect that H is
true.
Here, E stands for the explanandum, the
fact to be explained, and H stands for the
hypothesis, aka the proposed explanans
(explanation).
Image 6:1: Types of logic8
8 Image from Real-World Economics Review Blog:
https://rwer.wordpress.com/2018/11/18/in-search-of-causality-2/
Sampling for abductive research
This approach for sampling study subjects
will be different from deductive which will
suggest enrolling a high number of people
and inductive which will concentrate on a
smaller pool but without the intentional
focus on unique cases. It should be noted
that rigor could still be used in selecting
respondents for abductive research even as
unique people are being chosen. We often
encourage students to use a random
number table to pick their respondents
from among smaller pools of unique
people. This is however not relevant at
times and therefore is not a strict
requirement. Oftentimes the age-old
ethnographic chain sampling method of
respondents referring to other respondents
for the research works great. And then, of
course, students will normally enroll their
roommates and friends into the study.
Unless there is a need for a very strict
recruitment process, roommates and
friends provide good enough information –
which goes to support the strength of the
process in gathering aspirations even in
cases where you will expect biases to affect
the quality of the data. Every now and then
we will encounter a student team that is
really keen on getting things right that they
will go out of their comfort zone to properly
recruit for their study.
Back to the millennials' research. Let’s
assume that the abductive research process
56
identifies a millennial who exhibits instant
gratification only in certain experiences and
not others. The team
will be excited about this person and probe
deeper into the person’s behaviors and in
the end, their objective would be to
determine the person’s aspirations and
figure out how to meet those Aspirations.
Take another example of research into
understanding the Northeastern University
(NU) experience. Deductive logic will
suggest surveying 5000 students and
drawing inferences from the data. Inductive
logic may suggest conducting deep
interviews with a senior class in the
business school to develop an
understanding of the NU experience.
Abductive logic may include studying 5
different types of NU students, those with
coop experience, those without, year or
multiple year abroad, rich parents, poor
student on scholarship, average student –
all to get different perspective that ‘suggest
something maybe [in the NU experience]
and reaching out to explore it’.
Further, to provide more illustration for
those who might need it, a good analogy to
abductive logic is crime investigation of cold
cases. X-files kind of work. A crime
investigator can use deductive logic
(proving that something must be) by going
through other case files for patterns. A
crime investigator can also use inductive
logic (proving that something actually
operates) by going to a different but
particular case to learn about how things
happened in that case and relate it to the
present case. But more often than not, a
criminal investigator of a cold case has to
rely on his or her hunch. What has been
overlooked in the investigations? What is
unusual about this case? What is likely
missing? What is out of place in the
evidence? Is that a reflection of somebody
in those glasses that this guy in the picture
is wearing? A crime investigator works
outside of historical data. He or she thinks
abductively, ‘suggesting something maybe
and reaching out to explore it’. He or she
finds ‘arguments to the best explanation’. It
is that type of thinking that helps solve the
cold case. Read above about how Sherlock
Holmes solved the murder case around
Silver Blaze, the racehorse by discovering
the curious case of the dog that
didn’t bark.
T-shaped thinkers and abductive logic
Gregory Berns, the author of iconoclast
reminds us that there are many people in
history who seem to have exhibited the
abductive logic in their discovery of the
inventions they are known for. He talks
about Iconoclasts such as Florence
Nightingale, Steve Jobs, Walt Disney,
Chemist Kary Mullis, glass artist Dale
Chihuly and others who exhibited traits that
can be likened to abductive thinking. Each
bucked the trend and chased a unique
insight in a way that revolutionized the way
we do things because of their discoveries.
57
The relation of abductive logic to these
iconoclasts also helps us connect them to a
term that is used to describe innovators in
the designing thinking space – T-shaped
thinkers. T-shaped thinking is the ability to
be analytical (the tail of the T) as well as
being empathetic, intuitive and
experimental (the top of the T). It suggests
that the designer should be empathetic and
step into the shoes of the user. Since
empathy is not a science, the designer
needs to use intuition to guide the
empathetic process and be experimental
about it (iterative) because the designer is
not going to get it right the first time.
The increasing belief in T-shaped thinking
seems to be the underlying reason for the
growth in design courses and design schools
in a business school setting. The idea is to
equip business students previously
accustomed to analytical thinking with
intuition, empathy, and experimentation.
As noted earlier, analytical thinking works
well in solving puzzles. T-shaped thinking
goes beyond puzzles to gather information
in ways that lend themselves to solving
mysteries. Essentially, abductive logic in
research uses the process of T-shaped
thinking. Thus, without T-shaped thinking,
students may find it difficult to be better
abductive thinkers. The implication is that
without T-shaped thinking, students will not
be able to play in a design economy.
9 Roberto Verganti, Design Driven Innovation – Changing the Rules of
Competition by Radically Innovating what Things Mean. Boston, MA:
Harvard Business Press, 2009
Data and abductive thinking
Since the cases explored in abductive are
often unique, it will involve both
quantitative and qualitative logics but
consensus about what is being observed or
processed may not rely on statistical
software as often used in deductive
research or text analysis as often employed
in inductive research. Data will include
visual, video, quotes, observations that are
difficult to run through software. As such,
analysis of abductive research data only has
to rely on frameworks with a strong and
keen aptitude for sense-making from
complex and messy data. There will be
more discussions on the process later.
Abductive and design-driven
innovation
A natural link to abductive logic is the
connection to Roberto Verganti’s9 design of
a new meaning hypothesis. Verganti argues
that the generation of new meaning will
generate new markets or new demand.
New markets will come from outside of the
current market segments. It will follow then
that in applying design thinking, we not only
study users but non-users as well so that we
can know what users love in order to maybe
make a compelling case to non-users. If
non-users get on board, that’s a new
market.
58
Another connection of abductive thinking is
to link it to the discussion of creativity and
pushing the brain to break categorization
and operate outside of its box of a file
cabinet of categories. Because abductive
logic more than deductive and inductive
logic concentrates on ‘what might
be’/argument to the best explanation’ the
chances of imagination are high and
therefore insights are expected to be more
radical and different from operating within
the box of categories. In that sense,
abductive logic is more likely to take us
outside of the box and make us more
creative than deductive and inductive logic.
How companies solve mysteries.
Both small and large companies
need to be agile innovators in the design
economy. The smaller the company the
more likely functional areas are organized
as projects and it has the flexibility to
engage in prototyping and hence may be
better at being agile and getting a profound
understanding of customers than later
companies. Larger companies that are able
to function as small companies are likely to
reap the benefits of design thinking as well.
However, that is often not the case. Many
large companies did start small with an
innovative product or service and then
started growing and expanding. When
companies grow big, they need systems and
routines to manage resources, risk and
ensure profit. Like the analogy of the brain
preventing creativity because it becomes a
“lazy piece of meat” (Gregory Berns), many
large companies become a “lazy piece of
meat” and therefore find it difficult to
innovate. According to that analogy, the
brain becomes a lazy piece of meat because
it strives to conserve energy by becoming
very efficient in processing new stimuli
against stored patterns for decoding
information. This efficiency in processing
means that the brain is not operating
outside of its file cabinet of stored patterns
(the proverbial not thinking outside the
box).
Since new insights and hence creativity lives
outside of the file cabinet, the brain
becomes lazy at innovating and hence even
though it's very efficient at what it does, it
is a lazy piece of meat when it comes to
innovating. Since companies get stuck in the
routines, their own file cabinets, they find it
difficult to operate outside of systems and
routines to create new products and
services. Hence, most firms treat innovation
as separate projects through skunkworks
(internal corporate venturing) or play
venture capital by investing in new
companies (think of these new companies
as projects - external corporate venturing).
Internal corporate venturing can lead to
new innovations that are rolled into the
business of the company or spun out to
generate more value. External corporate
venturing provides companies with first
right of refusal if the newer company wants
to sell and also allows them easy access to
the technologies developed by the new
firm.
59
Essentially, projects, internal or external,
are better situated to birth innovation and
creativity because they are not routinized
within a file cabinet of old patterns that
they need to conform to but operate
outside of the organization's routines, a
place where new ideas, insights, and
epiphanies live. Projects are more situated
to allow abductive thinking and prototyping
to get abductive thinking right - since a lack
of routinization means project teams are
not bound by deductive and inductive
thinking. Because operating outside of file
cabinets is at the heart of abductive
thinking and because projects enable
abductive thinking, then companies that are
able to leverage projects are also able to
utilize abductive thinking to solve mysteries
by understanding users in profound ways
and using prototyping to get deeper to the
level of profoundness that stretches
abductive thinking to its deepest depths.
Conclusion
In conclusion, we have learned that a design
economy is an economy that draws from a
systems perspective in solving problems,
building value propositions and engaging
with customers and citizens. T-shaped
thinking is the ability to be analytical,
empathetic, intuitive and experimental. It
goes beyond puzzles to gather information
in ways that lend themselves to solving
mysteries. Deductive, abductive and
inductive logic are some types of research
methods that can be adopted when doing
design research. And which logic applies
best in any situation. Finally, we have
learned how imagination works using the
Silver Blaze’s case and how it also plays in a
vital role in problem solving.
Key terms
Abductive logic
Inductive logic
Deductive logic Design economy
Problem Sets
1. How would have solved the Silver Blaze
case if you were Holmes?
2. Differentiate between abductive,
inductive and deductive logic and give an
example in each?
2. How do companies solve mysteries? And
what do you understand about a design
economy?
60
CHAPTER 5: INTRO TO DESIGN THINKING
Chapter Description
and see how they have captured Design
Thinking.
What is design thinking? And why do you
think it is important to study design
thinking? By the end of this chapter, you
should have a clear understanding of what
design thinking is and assess why the study
of design thinking is critical.
For instance, in 2009, the Wall Street
Journal reported that B Schools (business
schools) were going to disappear and be
replaced by D Schools (design schools). This
prediction was in reaction to the opening of
the D-School at Stanford University.
Introduction
At General Electric, Procter & Gamble, and
other companies, a design perspective is a
problem-solving apparatus that can be
applied companywide (Wong, 2009).
You must have probably come across the
word design thinking once or twice before
today. If you never have, then that's no
problem, you are going to learn about
design thinking in this chapter. According to
the Interaction Design Foundation (2018),
design thinking is a non-linear, iterative
process which seeks to understand users,
challenge assumptions, redefine problems
and create innovative solutions to
prototype and test. Coming up with an idea
is easy. Coming up with the right one takes
work. With design thinking, throwing out
what you think you know and starting from
scratch opens up all kinds of possibilities
(Linke, 2017). Design Thinking is the new
buzz phrase! It is the new phrase in the
business school setting. If you google it, you
will come across a number of application
contexts. Before we define it, let's take a
cursory look at where it's being applied. We
do this by taking a number of reputable
international newspapers and magazines
Phil Gilbert, an executive at IBM is a tall
man with a shaved head and wire-rimmed
glasses. You normally see him with cowboy
boots and blue jeans at work. Surprisingly,
he is an executive at IBM, a company that
still has a button-down suit-and-tie
reputation. If you cannot read meaning into
his dressing style, look at this, there's a
huge black-and-white photograph hanging
in his office of a young Bob Dylan, hunched
over sheet music, making changes to songs
in the “Highway 61 Revisited” album. It’s an
image, Mr. Gilbert will tell you, that conveys
both a rebel spirit and hard work. Mr.
Gilbert is not trying to redefine an entire
generation. Instead, he wants to change the
habits of a huge company as it tries to
adjust to a new era, and it is not very easy.
IBM like many other companies exists at a
time when there is rapid advancement in
technology and is under pressure to meet
61
up. For IBM and other companies, the
question is: Can you grow your new
businesses faster as your older, lucrative
businesses decline? According to Mr.
Gilbert, the answer to this question is
design thinking. His title is general manager
of design. Among other things, design
thinking flips traditional technology product
development on its head. The old way is
that you develop a new product idea and
then try to sell it to customers. In the design
thinking way, the idea is to identify users’
needs as a starting point (Lohrq, 2015).
According to Ileana Stigliani (2019),
assistant professor of design and innovation
at Imperial College Business School, design
thinking is a skill that every MBA student
needs because it's an important mindset
that lends itself to solving complex human
problems.
Today, there are many professional sessions
on design thinking such as the Insights for
innovation Course, which focuses on
human-centered design and at Universities
especially as “The Innovation of Products
and Services” course. MIT’S approach to
design thinking, a course offered by the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
In the 2009 article in the Wall Street
Journal, they made an argument about
business schools, realizing that they have
been equipping their students poorly to
deal with the problems of today. That, a
focus on analysis did not help understand
problems appropriately. Business school
lecturers typically made students compute
ratios and statistics for decision making
devoid of any deeper evaluation of the
psychographics of the users involved.
According to the above article, David Kelley
argued that given the nature of problems in
our world today which are VUCA, we need
to go beyond the analytical to utilizing
empathy to ‘step into the shoes of the users
and have a deep understanding of their
needs. When we say VUCA, we are trying to
describe the nature of the external
environment in which most businesses are
found. It stands for:
Volatility- the process of being subject to
frequent, rapid and significant change.
Uncertainty- is a component of that
situation, in which events and outcomes are
unpredictable.
Complexity- the multiplicity of issues and
factors, some of which may be intricately
interconnected.
Ambiguity- lack of clarity and the difficulty
of understanding exactly what the situation
is.
62
Image 3:1: VUCA10
Since empathy is not a science, there is a
need for Intuition to lead the structured
process of empathy. Intuition and empathy
are not going to make the designer get it
right the first time. Hence, the designer
needs to have an experimental mindset to
test new ideas with potential users and
stakeholders to get closer to the truth.
These arguments meant that as a research
process (because all problem-solving
processes are research processes), design
thinking needed new tools for data
collection, solution capture and testing, in
order to be able to model empathy,
intuition and experimentation.
10 Source:
Designers use ethnographic methods in
data collection, sensemaking or synthesis
through visualization for analysis, ideation
techniques for developing solutions and
prototyping to test new ideas. In order for
ethnography to apply, the research effort
needs to take a 100-foot view to enable
focus around a large enough space around
the problem to include all necessary
stakeholders.
The process goes through a flow of
divergence (when lots of disparate data is
collected), convergence (and analysis
narrows the frame) to a point of view that
then leads to ideation (yet again opening
the frame) to prototyping (to narrow the
frame to an ideal solution).
https://www.theirm.org/media-centre/latest-news-and-views/an-exploration-of-the-importance-of-the-future-risk-manager-in-
understanding-the-impact-of-risk-leadership-in-a-vuca-world.aspx
63
Given the outline of the process, it is clear
that the approach has gained prominence
for a number of reasons:
●
Reframing: Ethnographic
methodology for data collection often
requires (re)framing of the problem which
allows for a lot of effort to be point into
problem space mapping and analysis, a
process that is not well done in typical
problem exploration situations.
●
Ethnography research allows
companies and researchers to consider
known user groups as unfamiliar people
groups. Since ethnography has been used to
understand unfamiliar people groups, it
allows companies to suspend the
knowledge they have about their users so
they can empathize more deeply and
develop insights they did not have before.
●
Sensemaking: Sensemaking tools are
able to organize and capture the essence of
disparaging and multi-faceted data. This
allows for companies to be able to make
sense of their qualitative data (which is
often ignored for quantitative).
●
Ideation: Design Thinking allows for
problems to be thoroughly mapped, studied
and analyzed before solution concepts are
applied. It prevents jumping to conclusions
and taking decisions with minimal
information.
●
Prototyping: Prototyping in design
thinking helps companies try out new ideas,
fail fast and save resources. Prototyping
extends from paper to software, to business
models canvases etc., all of which are tools
to help companies test ideas before they
commit significant resources.
For these reasons and more, it is not
surprising that Design Thinking has become
a buzz phrase in today’s world.
Why is design thinking so important
in our world of today?
Over recent years it has become very
important to develop and refine skills which
allow us to understand and act on rapid
changes in our environment and behavior.
We live in an increasingly interconnected
and complex world. Design thinking offers a
means to survive with all this change in a
more human-centric manner. Design teams
use design thinking to tackle ill-defined or
unknown problems (otherwise known as
wicked problems). The process re-defines
these problems to focus on people and
allows designers to focus on what’s most
important for users. Design thinking offers
us a means to think outside the box and
also dig that bit deeper into problemsolving. It helps designers carry out the right
kind of research, create prototypes and test
out products and services to uncover new
ways to meet users’ needs.
The design thinking process has become
popular over the last few decades because
it is the key to the success of many highprofile, global companies such as Google,
Apple and Airbnb. This outside the box
thinking is now taught at leading
64
universities across the world and is
encouraged at every level of business.
Design thinking improves the world around
us every day because of its ability to
generate ground-breaking solutions in a
disruptive and innovative way. Design
thinking is more than just a process; it
opens up an entirely new way to think, and
offers a collection of hands-on methods to
help you apply this new mindset.
Stages in the design thinking process
The design thinking process has 5 stages
summarized in the diagram below.
Image 3:2: Design Thinking Process11
Empathize
Empathizing is very important in the design
thinking process. It highlights the
significance of listening to the customer’s
requirements and wants relative to the
particular problem. The approach aids us
save our discoveries and learnings during
this stage in a systematic way such as
empathy maps. You can consult experts to
find out more about the area of concern
through observing, engaging and
empathizing with people to understand
their experiences and motivations, as well
as immersing yourself in the physical
environment so you can gain a deeper
personal understanding of the issues
involved. This will help you set aside their
own assumptions about the world in order
to gain insight into users and their needs.
Define
Here we combine all the insights collected
at the time of listening and observing
people at the empathizing stage. We start
to synthesize in order to define the core
problem you and your team have identified
11 Source:http://www.spring2innovation.com/2019/04/design-thinking-vs-user-centred-design/
65
up till this point. At this stage, you have to
frame the problem clearly, so it is easier to
come up with solutions or opportunities.
this stage remains the same; that is, we
intend to create rough drafts of solutions to
decide if these will prove beneficial for the
problem.
Ideate
After clearly framing the problem or the
opportunity it is time to search for possible
solutions. Since you have clearly
understood the needs of your users, you
need to start generating ideas on how to
meet these needs. To do this, you have to
brainstorm or ideate. Design thinking
stresses that during this phase, we should
not ignore ideas that seem obvious or easy.
Any idea can sprout a brilliant concept. So,
make sure to look into every idea with a
fresh mindset.
Prototype
Prototyping brings the solutions into vision.
At this stage, you have to produce a
number of inexpensive, scaled-down
versions of the product or specific features
found within the product, to investigate the
problem solutions generated in the
previous stages. Different methods are
involved in it, such as sketching, rapid
prototyping and many others. Whichever
method you go in for, the core purpose of
Test
The next stage is testing. In this stage, we
test our prototype with the customers to
monitor the response and deem whether
the solution satisfied them or not. This is
the final stage of the five stage-model.
However, in an iterative process, the results
generated during the testing phase are
often used to redefine one or more
problems and inform the understanding of
the users, the conditions of use, how
people think, behave, and feel, and to
empathize. Even during this phase,
alterations and refinements are made in
order to rule out problem solutions and
derive as deep an understanding of the
product and its users as possible.
66
Conclusion
By now, you should be ready to take on the
design thinking process. Design thinking is
very crucial in helping you come out with
human-centered solutions because it helps
you have a deep understanding of the
problem and those it is affecting.
Key Words
Design thinking, ideate, prototype,
empathize, Test, define.
.
Problem Sets
1.
What do you understand by the
acronym VUCA?
2.
Why is design thinking important in
our world of today?
3.
Explain the stages you will go
through in your design thinking process
67
CHAPTER 6: REFRAMING
Chapter Description
This chapter focuses on framing and
reframing of design thinking challenges. As
you go through the chapter, you will be able
to understand why it is important to spend
more time trying to understand a problem
rather than solving it. The chapter also
discusses the importance of a humancentered approach to solving design
challenges and the usefulness of lean
research. As a design thinker, this chapter
will challenge you to frame your research
questions that give the most possibilities.
Design challenges, just like other problems
or research areas are framed in a certain
way. However, in framing design
challenges, three steps are followed. These
steps include creating a context of the
challenge, finding your focus and reframing
your design challenges in order to provide a
good setup for design research. Reframing
opens more possibilities in a design
challenge. More on this will be described
further in this chapter.
Introduction
From startup entrepreneurs to
Fortune 500 executives, innovators at all
levels use design thinking. People are able
to come out with innovative ideas by
involving human perspective at all stages of
the design thinking process. When you
begin with design thinking, the first step
you need to take is simply to identify a
challenge or problem. Avoid brainstorming
immediately. You need to find a reason for
the existence of your idea before the big
“aha” moment comes around. Albert
Einstein emphasized the importance of
identifying the problem with the quote “If I
had one hour to save the world, I would
spend 55 minutes defining the problem and
only five minutes finding the solution.” He
admits that his best innovation came from
first carefully analyzing a problem. To set
the stage or get insights for your next big
idea you have to Identify a gap, problem or
challenge to solve (BridgeInnovate, 2019).
Steps to follow in identifying a
problem to solve.
●
Create context
Your challenge should not be too narrow or
too broad. Custom tailor the challenge. It
should be just okay. When you define a
problem, think of it regarding its next larger
context. Set the stage appropriately. You
are working to make a better recycling bin
as part of a town-wide sustainability
program. Before you even find a problem to
innovate, examine the recycling bin and its
ability to fit the people you are designing it
for. You may decide to make the bin for a
dining room, which is in a ranch-style
68
house; which is in a middle-class
neighborhood; which is a suburb of Accra
city. Understand where your problem rests
in the greater picture of life
(BridgeInnovate, 2019).
●
Find your focus
Now, you have the right context, frame the
challenge in human experience. The
human-focused innovation is the genius of
Design Thinking. Put the person using the
bin at the center of it all. For example, you
are crafting a challenge statement for
increased sustainability. Which one of the
following example statements will you
consider best for human-centered design?
1.
Increase the town’s recycling efforts
from 40 to 50 percent.
2.
Solve all the town’s current and
future environmental problems.
3.
Increase sustainable behavior
among the town’s citizens.
Number 3 is the answer for Design Thinking
since it frames a challenge around human
involvement. The first two challenge
statements focus on the inanimate
(BridgeInnovate, 2019).
●
Reframing your challenge
As noted, most mysteries or problems need
to be reframed to provide the best set-up
for design research. Tina Seeling has an
interesting piece in her book inGenius in
which she states a problem and its
reframed form. “What is the sum of 5 plus
5?” which was reframed into “What two
numbers add up to 10?” The idea is that the
second question lends itself to many
possibilities while the first one restricts you
to one answer (Seelig, 2013).
This is a quote from a CoDesign article that
she wrote in which she said, “mastering the
ability to reframe problems is an important
tool for increasing your imagination
because it unlocks a vast array of
solutions.”.
Although we try not to overdo it, we often
can relate the concept of reframing and the
two quotes from Seelig to the box of mental
categories. In this relation, we see that the
first question of the sum of 5 plus 5 restricts
you to the inside boundaries of your box of
categories but the second question of what
two numbers add up to 10, keeps you
outside the boundaries of the box. If the
aim of the design is to be insightful and see
things in the research that may not have
been seen before and also potentially come
up with needs that people didn’t realize
they had, then why wouldn’t we reframe
our questions into forms that lend
themselves to creative thought? (Seelig,
2013).
Tina Seeling talks about Why and How to
format for reframing questions. Why
questions force deep search for
understanding. One illustration of the
power of the word ‘why’ is the 5 Whys
approach, one originally developed by
Sakichi Toyoda and used within the Toyota
Motor Corporation. It is the iterative
69
question-asking technique to quickly get to
the root cause and effect of a problem. It
comes from the Japanese Kaizen concept
and is widely adopted in engineering. So,
the power of the word is very well
established. Tina Seeling talks about the
Whys as a way of opening the frame for a
question. We often encourage our students
to use Whys but not go all the way to
number 5. We caution them that using the
5 Whys for problem framing could lead to
premature insights in a problem
brainstorming section before the research
commences. The 5 Whys for this purpose
may be adaptive for experienced designers
but students who do not have prior
experience may develop biases in the
process. Hence, we advise to try the How
framing first and then add a few Why
frames. How framing lends itself to research
more than brainstorming of potential
solutions (Seelig, 2013).
Here is the example we often use to
illustrate the framing discussion. This is the
basic 5 plus 5 question that P&G asked the
design company Design Continuum, now
Continuum Innovation, to help them solve.
“How can we dispense cleaning fluids more
innovatively?” As a design company,
Continuum reframed the question to “How
do people clean?” The research protocol
was then developed for the reframed
question and the Swiffer was born. While
remembering that Swiffer became a multibillion-dollar category for P&G, it should
also be noted that if Continuum didn’t
reframe the question P&G asked, we
wouldn’t have gotten the Swiffer today!
Students have come up with questions that
get reframed into:
How do people eat, how do students plan
for their daily commute, how do students
do laundry, how do members of a dorm
sign in non-members? Each of these
questions is begging research and
engenders the students to learn about the
mystery in a broad way. [We will use HOW
to frame problems].
NB: the use of HOW here is not the same as
the How Might We framing that we have
encountered. The How Might We frame is
best suited for ideation more than
generating new insights from users.
An illustration of reframing by Tanner
(2019)
“Imagine yourself as a child waiting with
several friends for a fruit snack after an
afternoon of hard play. Each friend receives
their own special fruit from your best
friend’s mother: mangoes, apples, grapes,
and oranges. You are happy to get your fruit
as you know it will be special (since this is
your best friend’s mother)—that is, until
your bowl of lemons arrives.
After receiving your lemons, you have two
choices. The first choice that comes to your
mind is to feel sorry for yourself as you now
realize how much your best friend’s mother
does not like you. As an innovative child,
however, you think differently.
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You look at this problem as an opportunity!
You take your lemons and go home and
make lemonade and then sell glasses to
your friends. With the money you earned,
you go and buy your favorite tropical fruit.
In effect, you make lemonade out of
lemons. This is the essence of positive
reframing: taking what appears to be a
Image 9: 1: Lemonade12
12 Image Source: https://www.shutterstock.com/search/reframe
difficult situation and finding something
positive to make out of it. You put another
frame (perspective) on the situation you
face. You look for other ways to view your
situation” Tanner (2019).
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Reframing: The Airplane Analogy
Most often, when people have a
problem, they focus too narrowly on the
problem. Is that what you do? If yes, you
need to change that. This is because when
you look too narrowly at a problem, you
focus only on the user and forget about the
stakeholders affected by the problem.
When this happens, whatever solution you
design may not effectively solve the
problem because it does not work for all
those affected. It is worthwhile for you to
step back and look at the problem again,
taking into consideration not only the users
but a few relevant stakeholders that play a
huge part in the understanding of the
problem. Now, how do we look at a
problem in a way that we consider all the
relevant stakeholders and the user? We will
use the airplane analogy to explain that. In
the airplane analogy, we look at three levels
of thinking about the problem.
Spy Plane View
The spy plane goes up high and hides in the
sky to spy on a target. If you think about a
problem using the spy plane view, you are
too far from the problem or looking at it
from a wider perspective. That is, you are
including too many stakeholders or
irrelevant stakeholders when analyzing the
problems. For example, you are tackling the
problem of teenage pregnancy and you
want to check the role customs that play in
promoting or curbing teenage pregnancy in
Africa. This is almost impossible to do. The
scope of our study is too large and there are
too many stakeholders involved. How do I
start studying the cultures of the 54
countries in Africa? Or subcultures that
exist in the various tribes or even
communities? It is therefore important that
you come down a little.
Bulls Eye View
Looking at the problem from the bullseye
view makes it too narrow. It focuses on the
user and is too specific. It lets you focus on
only one user, solve the problem for that
user and later realize that there are other
stakeholders who cause that problem or are
affected whom you did not include in the
problem analysis. For example, in trying to
solve the problem of teenage pregnancy,
you may try to educate only girls about
teenage pregnancy. This is not enough
because they are not the only ones
involved. What about the boys who
impregnate the girls? Or the traditional
leaders who create customs that allow for
teenage pregnancy? You may have to
consider all these stakeholders or else you
will find yourself creating a solution that
does not solve the problem.
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Helicopter View
When you step off the Spy plane
view and drop right down to the bull eyes
view and discover you are too far below,
you have to step up to a perfect height
above the problem to have a perfect grasp
of it. Use the helicopter view to do this.
Helicopters do not fly above the clouds.
Looking at the problem from here gives you
the opportunity to have a closer look and
grasp of the problem. The clouds are no
longer blocking your vision. You can see the
problem clearly. It captures the right set of
stakeholders surrounding the problem.
Because you are high up enough to see
those who cause the problem or those who
are affected by the problem in the analysis
of the problem. For example, in analyzing
the problem of teenage pregnancy may be
in Berekuso village, it will be important to
include everyone in Berekuso ranging from
the girls and boys to the teachers at
schools, traditional rulers and community
leaders to have a complete grasp of the
problem and create an effective solution.
While doing the helicopter view, you need
to consider the practices of social
distancing. This means the helicopter view
has to have a wider view because that view
has to be socially distanced. This has been
influenced by COVID19 pandemic.
Conclusion
As a design researcher, you should not just
jump into brainstorming your solutions but
rather take time to understand the problem
you are trying to solve. Take a moment to
step away from the problem and carefully
look at it. It may not be what you think it is.
Always ensure that you reframe your design
research questions in order to get more
possibilities from them. By now you should
be able to frame design challenges
following the steps given in the chapter.
Not forgetting the different views of looking
at the problem space; spy plane view, bulls
eye view and the helicopter view. Which
view should be employed when? These will
help in tackling your problem space
properly.
Key Terms
Reframing, spy plane, Helicopter, Bullseye
Problem Sets
1.
Think you of any situation you have
encountered and reframe it using the
reframing knowledge you have acquired
from this chapter
2.
Pick a problem of your choice and
state a possible “spy plane”, “Helicopter”
and “Bullseye” view of the problem.
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CHAPTER 7: ETHNOGRAPHY
Chapter Description
In Greek, the word Ethnos means
people and grapho means to document,
therefore, ethnography literally refers to
studying people. It involves observing
participants in their natural environment or
habitat, in order to understand certain
social behaviors or cultures. As a result of
its social aspect, ethnographic research
plays a key role in design research. As you
go through the chapter, you will be able to
get to know what design ethnography is,
and how you can use it in your projects.
Moreover, you will encounter various
ethnographic research methods, such as
analogical reasoning, immersion,
observational shadowing, depth interviews
among others.
Furthermore, research is a very important
component of design thinking. This chapter
introduces you to ethnography as a way of
conducting design research. Throughout the
chapter, you will encounter different
ethnographic approaches, and learn about
cases where these methods can be used to
conduct research. Finally, what you would
do where social distancing is required and
yet most of the ethnographic research
methods require getting involved with
people? This chapter provides methods on
how to carry out ethnographic research
while social distancing.
Introduction
Ethnography
During the 20th century, a British born;
Bronislaw Malinowski developed the term
ethnography. Simultaneously, other early
sociologists in the U.S affiliated with the
Chicago School embraced ethnography and
started using it in urban sociology. Moving
on, a lot of sociologists have massively
contributed to developing ethnography and
formalizing it in books. From the Glossary
Term, Coleman & Simpson defined
Ethnography as stated below.
“Ethnography is the recording and analysis
of a culture or society, usually based on
participant-observation and resulting in a
written account of a people, place or
institution”
In ethnography, the researcher aims at
developing a rich understanding of how and
why people think, behave, and interact as
they do in the field of study. This is achieved
by the researchers or ethnographers
embedding themselves in the field of study
for a long term to properly understand and
document what they are studying
(Crossman, 2019).
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Ethnography is about telling a credible, rigorous, and authentic story.
David M. Fetterman
According to Denzin (1998), ethnographers should consider the following eight principles when
observing, recording, and sampling data:
1.
The groups should combine symbolic meanings with patterns of interaction
2.
Observe the world from the point of view of the subject, while maintaining the
distinction between every day and scientific perceptions of reality.
3.
Link the group's symbols and their meanings with social relationships.
4.
Record all behavior.
5.
The Methodology should highlight phases of process, change, and stability.
6.
The act should be a type of symbolic interactionism.
7.
Use concepts that would avoid causal explanations
“Guards and prisoners in jails, patients, and physicians in hospitals, the elderly, the various
religious groups—all have cultural perspectives…. As people move from one cultural scene to
another in complex societies, they employ different cultural rules. Ethnography offers one of the
best ways to understand these complex features of modern life. It can show the range of
cultural differences and how people with diverse perspectives interact” (Spradley, 1979, p. 12.).
75
Illustration of ethnographic research
Imagine a group of Ashesi students from
the Foundations of design and
Entrepreneurship class that go to carry out
ethnographic research in the Ashanti region
about galamsey. Galamsey refers to illegal
gold mining in Ghana. Their research is
concentrated on a problem question of
“Why some people have continually
participated in galamsey despite its harm to
the environment.” Since these students are
carrying out ethnographic research, they
will have to stay in the Ashanti region for a
long period of time of at least 2 weeks.
During this time, they will immerse
themselves in the daily lives of the people
participating in the galamsey so as to
understand and get a full picture of what
they are researching about. These students
will follow the galamsey people to the
mining sites and see what exactly happens
hence employing the observational
approach of ethnographic research. Also,
these students will have to study what
activities these galamsey people engage in
apart from illegal gold mining. Additionally,
they will employ the various methods of
ethnographic research like in depth
interviews, diary methods, experiments
which will be discussed later in this chapter.
Design Ethnographer
According to Dudek (2017), people are
studied in the environments in which they
live, work, and interact hence, we observe,
interview, and facilitate direct interactions
with people in order to understand them
and their world better. We are part
mentalist, and part altruist. We weaponize
empathy so that we can deploy it daily to
craft advantages for our customers,
communities, and our world.
“The goal is to see people’s behavior on
their terms, not ours. While this
observational method may appear
inefficient, it enlightens us about the
context in which customers would use a new
product or service and the meaning that it
might hold in their lives” Ken Anderson.
A design ethnographer is someone who
facilitates empathic conversations between
users, clients and other designers, as well as
other experts and stakeholders involved in
the service design process. Wisegeek
provides a nice succinct description of the
work of ethnographers,
” An ethnographer is a person who gathers
and records data about human culture and
societies. There are various research
methods that can be applied to the different
sub-categories of this social study, such as
field, design or visual ethnography. An
ethnographer often needs to be able to find
patterns in and understand issues faced by
a wide sample of people with diverse
backgrounds.”
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Ethnographers are trained to extract the
voices of stakeholders, the people that will
be affected by the decisions derived from
our work. Ethnographers are people-centric
and story-based. They put themselves in the
shoes of others to understand how they
see, feel, or think when they look at the
world. They spend a lot of time discovering
and looking through the lenses that our
participants use to understand their world.
Design ethnographers live in “problem
spaces” which are zones of exploration
which can be specifically targeted as, what
kind of power button should be placed on a
microwave, or as vast as a deep dive into
the blogosphere.
It is also important to note that design
ethnographers are design thinkers. They
firmly understand the design process, they
know what is required in every stage, how
this can be explored, discussed and shared.
This is why they are able to conduct
research in a way that reveals what users
need, and they are able to provide
information that is useful to product
designers who are now able to incorporate
the necessary features in the final product.
As you take this class, you will be
encouraged to conduct ethnographic
research in order to have a better
understanding of the target users whose
problems you are trying to solve and also to
have a clearer understanding of the
problem as it relates to users.
Design ethnography can be applied to
absolutely everything.
Take this as a challenge: Find a problem
space on this planet that does not have a
significant human component tied into it
somewhere. Sometimes, as a design
ethnographer, you hear the annoying
phrase ‘get into their head’ which is
invasive and fairly improbable. In reality,
the closest you can ever be to ‘being in
someone’s head’ is to have an educated
guess and founded on the information at
hand. This is what we specialize in,
obtaining information and transforming it
into useful knowledge. The work of design
ethnographers has three major stages,
Realizing
Begin by making the problem space real for
you. You need to understand the landscape
of a problem space and a way to render it,
in order to find ways to study it. This sets
the pace for creating tools to facilitate the
flow of information from our participants
into our research. The work of an
ethnographer always begins with a deep
understanding of the surrounding
environments, constraints, and social
structures, within the problem space. When
working with people you cannot force them
to voice out their opinions; you have to
know what's going on and begin by dipping
in a little toe.
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Sympathizing
Empathizing
Here we begin to feel for our
participants since we know what their pain
points are. We begin to see things from the
perspective of our participants, and we use
this to begin our analysis. We synthesize
insights into how the problem space can
affect our participants and create
frameworks and methods to understand
the complex systems in which each person
lives. These frameworks are the beginnings
of how we will communicate our findings.
Our clients are the people trying to
understand a problem space, and with time
to improve it.
This is a critical moment for ethnographers
as they are so immersed in the participant's
world, that we feel with them. There are
stories of ethnographers in the field who
immerse themselves in another way of life
for research purposes and are unable to
find their true selves again after a period of
time. Empathy is necessary for us to be able
to derive representative insights about our
participant groups, but we must carefully
temper it with our own expertise and filters.
It is much harder to do this than it is to
describe it.
Ethnographic Research
Image 7:1: Characteristics of Ethnographic Research13
13 Image source:https://seanvantyne.com/2017/12/17/ethnographic-research-key-really-understanding-customers-needs/
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Ethnographic Research Methods
These are methods that researchers or
ethnographers employ when carrying out
ethnographic research. They include Indepth interviews, observational shadowing,
Immersion, among others.
In-depth interviews
In-depth interviews involve conducting
intensive individual interviews with a small
number of respondents to explore their
perspectives on a particular idea, program
or situation. They are used when you want
detailed information about a person’s
thoughts and behaviors or want to explore
new issues in depth. While in-depth
interviews have an advantage of providing
much more details than other data
collection methods, they are also prone to
bias, time intensive, require interviewers to
be properly trained and the results from
these interviews cannot be generalized as
samples are small and not randomly
chosen.
Interviews give an opportunity to learn
from people what they believe, how they
think, and how that affects their life by
asking them questions. Interviews should
be crafted to answer a research question or
problem. There are two different forms of
interviews: fully structured and semistructured. Fully structured interviews are
interviews where the interviewer has a list
14 Source: https://slideplayer.com/slide/11691936/
of questions to ask and the same questions
are asked to every interviewee. On the
other hand, Semi-structured interviews also
have a set of questions to be asked, but the
interviewer has the flexibility to add
additional questions based on the
interviewees' responses. Semi-structured
interviews are more flexible, and they give
room for more specific questions to each
interviewee. However, with fully structured
interviews, the interviewer can more easily
compare the responses from one person to
the next, since the questions asked are the
same. (Ethnographic Methodology, 2019)
Take note of the following when carrying
out interviews.
Image 7:2: In-depth Interviewing tips14
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Observational shadowing
This is a method of data collection in which
the researcher closely follows those being
studied in their natural habitat, to
experience the situations in their daily life
or work, collecting insights through the
detailed nuance of firsthand real time
exposure. It is used to gain insight on who
the individuals being studied really are as
opposed to who they say they are. In design
research, observational shadowing enables
design researchers to understand existing
behaviors so they can adapt their designs to
those behaviors (Interaction Design
Foundation, 2019).
Observational shadowing can also involve
the following users to observe how they use
a product or service in their natural habitat.
An example of observational shadowing is
following a doctor around in the hospital to
understand how they interact with patients.
Another example is how a product may be
developed for a particular use, but people
use it in a particular way. They may not be
aware, and they may be subconscious that
they are using it in the wrong way.
Following such groups of people is
observational shadowing.
Immersion
This is a form of ethnographic research in
which researchers immerse themselves
totally in the society in order to gain an indepth understanding of it. It involves
visiting a particular society or community,
befriending the people and living there with
them for a certain period of time to gain
understanding about them. During this
time, researchers live and do things just like
the locals. Immersion can take months or
years to set up and perform. An example of
immersion is language immersion, where an
individual only speaks a non-native
language in order to learn it.
Immersion Research: Pros and Cons
The pros and Cons of using immersion
method are illustrated below:
Pros
●
This method enables the researcher
to gain more qualitative information about
a subject or culture than any other method.
Cons
●
Immersion takes months to years to
set up and then to carry out.
●
A researcher needs permission to
participate in the activities of a particular
group. A researcher must get permission of
the people who are being studied,
communicate the intent of the research,
and also gain the trust of the community
with regards to the information not being
misused.
●
Additionally, completing
professional ethics responsibilities to the
university and permits from governmental
bodies to carry out research using the
immersion method takes a lot of time.
●
Human behaviors are complex
leading to different observations every day.
●
This method can be dangerous since
the researcher is always working in an
unfamiliar environment.
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Diary method
Experiments
This research method involves
having participants record entries about the
activity or experience being studied in a log,
diary, journal or a self-administered form
that you give them. The data is recorded
either when events occur (event-based
diaries) or at specified times or time
intervals (time-based diaries) (Lavrakas,
2008). The recording and collection of data
by participants is done over a period of
time, usually a couple of days or months.
Lavrakas also points out that diary data can
be used to make cross-sectional
comparisons across people, track an
individual over time or study processes
within individuals or families. An example of
a diary method is giving participants a
product for example soap and having them
keep a record of the effects or changes they
experience whenever they use the product.
Diary methods can be used to study issues
such as mental health, media exposure,
nutrition time use etc. An advantage of the
diary method is that there are technological
innovations such as voice recorders and
web-based diaries that make it easier to
record data. Moreover, it allows for events
to be recorded in their natural setting.
The disadvantages include the fact that it
requires a lot of time commitment which
can discourage participation. Moreover,
data entered by participants may not be
very accurate. Participants can also forget
to record data, causing errors in the
research.
This is a scientific method where the
researcher manipulates one or more
variables, and controls and measures any
change in other variables. This research is
mainly carried out and controlled in
laboratories. An example of experimental
research is conducting a laboratory test
where the research is being conducted
under scientifically acceptable conditions.
Great experimental research is considered
to be successful only when the researcher
confirms that a change in the dependent
variable is solely due to the manipulation of
the independent variable (Bhat, 2019).
Below are the advantages and
disadvantages of experimental research
(Ayres, 2019).
Advantages
●
Researchers are given a high level of
control.
●
No limitation to the industry or
subject matter involved.
●
Experimental research provides
conclusions that are specific.
●
It is hard to replicate conditions that
could take a long time so that the variables
can be tested appropriately.
●
Experimental research allows cause
and effect to be determined.
●
Experimental research can be
combined with other research methods.
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Disadvantages
●
There are possibilities of human
error since results are highly subjective.
●
It creates unrealistic situations.
●
Experimental research consumes a
lot of time.
●
It does not give actual explanations.
●
Difficult to measure the human
responses in experimental research.
Participatory research (co-discovery)
Participatory research is a method
of research that involves including and
collaborating with members of the
community where the research is taking
place to understand and resolve community
problems. The researchers using this
method employ various kinds of research
methods like group discussions of personal
experiences, interviews, surveys, among
others.
With this method, participants give a
perspective to the process of being the
object or subject of research by getting an
opportunity to tell their own stories. Also,
participants are able to give a voice to the
community or group that is being
researched by offering their own
interpretation of the researcher's findings,
voicing their opinion in response to the
researcher. Collectively, the researcher and
the participant derive conclusions and offer
each other feedback. The activeness of the
participants involved in the research
encourages other participants to join the
conversation and respond with their own
interpretations (Given, 2008). One of the
advantages of Participatory research is that
it allows understanding social reality from
ordinary people’s perspectives and on the
other hand, one of the disadvantages is the
mistrust of the society and participation
fatigue can highly influence the outcomes
of participatory research (Tadevosyan &
Schoenhuth, 2019). This method suits well
in a social context compared to other
ethnographic methods.
Analogical reasoning
This involves using patterns of past
incidences to determine the future. It's
commonly used to make decisions and
solve problems. Aravind hospital in India
uses McDonald- fast food company as an
analogy. Aravind hospital learned
management principles from McDonald’s
which enables them to make a profit of
millions of dollars a year and yet they
provide free eye treatment to millions of
poor Indians. Aravind’s surgical procedures
are organized like assembly lines and this
was influenced by McDonald’s. Each
operating room at Aravind hospital has two
tables. The doctor performs a surgery which
takes around five minutes on one table. By
the time he finishes, a new patient is ready
on the next table.
“Analogical reasoning is using an analogy, a
type of comparison between two things, to
develop understanding and meaning. It's
commonly used to make decisions, solve
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problems and communicate” (Spacey,
2017).
Recommendation: Hormone replacement
therapy could reduce the effects of aging in
postmenopausal women.
Reversal- after doing research
This happens when the recommendations
given from a particular research are
reversed.
“In a June 2019 meta-analysis published in
the journal eLife, Diana Herrera-Perez and
colleagues mined nearly 3,000 randomizedcontrolled trials published in the Journal of
the American Medical Association, the
Lancet, and the New England Journal of
Medicine from 2003 to 2017. In total, they
identified 396 medical reversals.”
Below are some excerpts of the
examples.
1.
Wearable technology Saleh (2019)
Recommendation: Wearable technology,
which tracks physical activity and burned
calories, helps with long-term weight loss.
Reversal: In a subsequent clinical trial,
adults in a weight-loss program were
randomized either to use a wearable device
plus web interface or to use a selfmonitoring program. After 24 months,
participants using the wearable devices lost
an average of 3.5 kilograms versus 5.9
kilograms in the self-monitoring group.
2. Hormone replacement therapy
Reversal: Subsequent analyses showed that
hormone replacement therapy has complex
risks and benefits. Therefore, the hormone
replacement therapy is not suitable or
recommended for the prevention of chronic
disease in postmenopausal women.
Ethnography with Social distancing
The coronavirus pandemic has presented a
challenge in carrying out ethnographic
research since the guidelines in reducing
the spread of the pandemic include social
distancing. This will be difficult to carry out
in depth interviews, immersion,
observational shadowing among others.
However, ethnographic research can also
be done remotely using the methods
below:
Use of existing content
As the saying goes, there is nothing new
under the sun, whatever your research is
about, there would be a high chance of
similar research that has already been
done. Take content from existing content
like pictures and videos analogically. This
will involve analogically extracting
information from these existing pictures
and videos. Then transcribing this
information, this requires writing out the
information in the content. It will aid in
83
getting quotes and notes from the
transcription thus helping in understanding
the situation that you’re trying to explore.
Here you don’t have to collect the data but
rather collect third party content that
captures the context of your study to
extract content to inform the topic you’re
studying. Be careful about capturing
important insights.
Use of a proxy user
This involves getting people to role play the
experience of your users so you can extract
insights. Take an ordinary person, profile
and recruit them to make sure they can
play. Then train them on the situation that
you want them to act. Expose them on a
hypothetical journey map of the user you
want to understand. If you want to
understand for example a teacher, you can
get your mother, explain the journey map
of the teacher to your mother and ask if she
can play that role so you interview her. The
person you are using does not have to be a
professional actor or actress, but they need
to be able to fit in the role of the intended
user. There is numerous research that
proves proxy users are good at doing
research for example a study by Gielen
&Stappers (2013) about “Design research by
proxy: Using children as researchers to gain
contextual knowledge about user
experience.”
Another example of research involving a
proxy user.
A team made a website that would allow
people to request for household services
like mowing the lawn, dry cleaning, running
errands among others. They tried to get
professionals to sign up, but they were not
successful, so they organized a role play
session with a random person who played
the role of a professional banker. During the
role play and the interview, this person
indicated that he would never go to this
website as he would prefer using an area
boy to come and do this kind of work for
him. From this, the team realized that there
was a problem of trust and security with
their services. So, the team incorporated
trust and security in the system by putting
insurance of items used in errands,
background checks for people who do the
errands, and including other things that
would provide trust and security. But they
got this from a proxy user.
Conclusion
We have established an understanding of
how one can carry out ethnographic
research. Which ethnographic research
would be best given a particular situation
and topic under study? The different
methods of ethnographic research, the pros
and cons among others. We have also
established how ethnographic research can
be carried out where social distancing is
necessary. And as part of this course,
students will be required to do research for
the different problems that they are solving
84
therefore, we hope that this chapter will
help the students realize, sympathize and
empathize while deploying the various
ethnographic research methods.
Key Terms
Ethnography, Analogical reasoning, InDepth Interview, Observational Shadowing
Design Ethnographer, Immersion,
Experiments, Diary Method, Proxy User
Problem Sets
1. What do you understand by the term
ethnography?
2. Give 5 examples of ethnographic
research methods and define them.
3. How do you carry out ethnographic
research where social distancing is
required?
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CHAPTER 8: LEAN RESEARCH
Chapter Description
Introduction
The main objective of this chapter is
to make you gain full knowledge of what
lean research is all about and be able to
apply lean research principles in carrying
out research. This will help in ensuring that
you are able to meet the objectives of your
research. This chapter also dives deep on
the guiding principles and questions that
can be used while carrying out Lean
Research. How we carry out research
matters because the research process
involves interference in the lives of people
(research subjects) and this interference
could lead to positive or negative
outcomes.
Lean research is a research framework
aimed at creating positive outcomes from
the research process by placing the
experience of research participants and
other stakeholders at the center of the
design and implementation of the research.
Disrespectful and inefficient data collection
practices that produce irrelevant data are
common, therefore, it is important that
researchers come up with alternative
research methods that incorporate the lean
research principles (which will be discussed
in this chapter) to ensure that research data
is meaningful not only to the researcher but
to research participants and stakeholders.
A few years, the Berekuso township burned
Ashesi students from carrying out research
in the community. Ashesi students used to
go to the Berekuso community; carry out
research, promise, leave and never return
to talk about their findings. So, it got to a
point where the Berekuso residents got
disappointed and burned Ashesi students
carrying out research there. This is the main
reason why lean research was introduced at
Ashesi University. Lean research puts the
respondent at the center of the research. It
also involves the 4Rs which makes the
research to be relevant, rigorous, rightsized
and respectful towards the respondents.
These 4Rs help to cater more to the needs
of the respondents regardless of the
research methods applied. The 4Rs will be
explained further in this chapter.
Considering that the needs of the
respondents as Lean research does is in line
with Ashesi’s ethos of training ethical
leaders. This is because ethical leaders
usually put people’s interests or wellbeing
at the center as lean researchers also put
the interests of the respondents at heart.
Lean research is a way of realizing the
Ashesi mission because it teaches putting
attention to the needs of the respondents.
Also, the lean research process works well
with design thinking of which Design
thinking is the core of this course. Lean
86
research also is respondent centered and is
user centered.
The best way to implement lean research is
to capture it within the protocol that is
developed in research methods. For
example, tying lean research in
ethnography includes coming up with
ethnographic approaches and then looking
for how to make them lean research. This
can be done by starting with what
traditional research would say about what
approach or ethnographic method to use.
Based on the conditions on the ground,
how can that tradition be improved by
using lean research?
Lean Research
Lean Research is a research practice
aimed at guiding and improving the practice
of field research involving people and their
communities in relation to international
development and humanitarian work. Here,
research is done to comprehend and
increase the impact of programs that seek
to improve the lives of people in
communities characterized by poverty,
vulnerability, and other challenges. Even
though the outcome of the research is often
to improve the lives of research
participants, the impact of the research
process on the lives of research subjects,
communities, and local partners is often
ignored.
Scholars, practitioners, and donors
acknowledge the fact that research is a
form of intervention in the lives of research
participants, especially those confronted
with poverty and vulnerability. They,
therefore, came up with lean research to
ensure that this intervention is of benefit
and positively impacts those involved. They
do this applying the lean research principles
of rigour, respect, relevance, and right-size
to reduce the burden of research-onresearch participants at the same time
increasing the value of the research output
to both research participants and
stakeholders.
When deciding on how to design research,
lean research draws from human-centered
approaches to development and design,
enabling it to place the experience of
humans who are the research subject at the
center of the decision-making regarding
research development and design. Lean
research is aimed at increasing the quality
of information gathered during research,
increasing the use of research findings to
stakeholders and ensuring that the research
outcome is beneficial to study subjects and
their communities as well as donors and
decision-makers. Lean Research is able to
achieve this by creating a respectful and
enjoyable research experience for the
research subjects.
The Lean Research Framework
In order to reduce the burden of researchon-research participants and maximize the
value of its output for stakeholders, lean
research offers a guiding framework for
carrying out and evaluating research.
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These are:
1) rigorous, regardless of the research
methods applied
2) respectful towards research subjects,
implementing partners, and others engaged
in the research process
3) relevant to research subjects, partners,
and decision-makers
4) right sized, in terms of protocols and
costs compared to the potential usefulness
and impact of the study.
The four principles of Lean Research are not
new but are often pitted against each other
as trade-offs. Lean Research emphasizes the
fact that it is important to conduct research
in a way that reflects and exemplifies all
four principles of lean research and
challenges them to identify ways in which
they can implement them in an integrated
manner. As a broad framework and
approach to social science research, Lean
Research can be applied regardless of
whether the methods are quantitative,
qualitative, or mixed.
Lessons drawn from lean manufacturing as
well as human-centered design helps the
practice of lean research to focus on the
continual improvement of the research
process, especially at points of interactions
where researchers interfere with research
subjects, local partners, and others engaged
in research production. It seeks to improve
research outcomes by improving the
experience of those most directly involved
in research production--particularly the
research subjects--and by orienting the
process around their insights and priorities.
It challenges researchers to improve already
existing research practices and opens a
space to innovate new ways of approaching
familiar steps in the research process.
Lean Research Principles
Rigour
Lean Research is conducted according to
the method and procedure which is best
suited to the specific nature of the study.
Research must adequately address issues of
both internal and external validity and
ensure accurate reporting of results while
protecting sensitive subject data. High
standards of rigour ensure the integrity of
the research process and results, a
precondition for research that is respectful
of participants’ time and usable by research
stakeholders.
Respect
For research to be respectful, it has to place
the dignity and delight of the human
subject at the center of the research
experience. It should consist of a clear,
intelligible informed consent process, in
which research subjects feel truly free to
reject participation without fearing negative
consequences. If they decide to participate,
subjects find the experience enjoyable and
meaningful. Subjects have the opportunity
to review and refute research findings and
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feel that their contributions to the research
have been appropriately valued.
Relevance
Right-Size
Research should be of value to stakeholders
and addresses priority issues and questions
for research subjects, study communities,
as well as donors and decision-makers.
Research findings are understandable and
accessible to research subjects,
practitioners, and policymakers. Research
studies and results are framed in ways that
can inform action and decision-making at
various levels of authority, and stakeholders
commit to using findings to inform action.
To ensure that research is right-sized,
research scope and methods should be
well-suited to the research objectives and
the priority of the research questions to
stakeholders. Right-sized research is only as
time-consuming, burdensome, and costly as
it needs to be, and all unnecessary
questions, activities, and protocols are
removed.
Image 8:1: Insights from Lean Research
89
Lean Research Process
Gathering Data
After going through the lean research
principles, it is important for us to establish
a set of actions we have to take in order to
At this stage, you go into the field to collect
data. Here, you may want to consider doing
the following
●
Recruit locals who can retain
achieve the desired outcomes from the
research. Imagine after knowing the great
benefits of lean research and also the
principles but not knowing how to go about
the research. Below are the stages in the
lean research process.
objectivity and make the research
participants feel comfortable. For example,
a translator when you cannot speak the
local language of the research participants.
●
Ensure that the research assistants
Scoping and Designing the Research
time, and in a place that is convenient for
respondents.
●
Consider utilizing strategies to
It is very important to lay down a plan on
how you will carry out your research. This
will serve as a guide when you get into the
field. At this stage, you do the following
●
Establish which data collection
method is appropriate for the research
(Primary or secondary).
●
Consider engaging stakeholders in
the research upfront to identify research
questions and expectations.
●
Consider building up from verified
previous work to save time and resources.
●
Reduce data collection burden on
the research participants.
●
Pre-test survey questions in the field
to make sure the questions are clear,
culturally appropriate, and necessary.
●
Create a respectful consent process
in which research participants feel
comfortable saying no.
●
Plan for effective feedback to
research participants
are well trained.
●
Consider conducting surveys at a
assess data quality.
●
Consider reflecting on the research
experience during the data collection
process
Analyzing Data
After collecting data, you have to make
meaning out of the data. This is known as
analyzing. This stage involves doing the
following
●
Sustain commitment to research
participants’ priority research questions and
analysis of those questions.
●
Consider engaging research
participants and other key stakeholders in
the data analysis
Reporting and Dissemination
This involves reporting research findings to
research participants, donors, and
90
stakeholders for decisions to be made. At
this stage, you have to do the following
●
Think about reporting near-final
results to participants and other key
stakeholders as quickly as possible.
●
When presenting research findings
to participants, consider adapting content
and format to the audience’s needs and
preferences.
●
Consider sharing data with other
partners and other researchers
Lean Research provides a guiding
orientation to encourage innovation and
continual improvement in research practice
and not a set of rules to follow. From
selecting research questions to the
implementation and dissemination of
findings, the principles of rigour, respect,
relevance, and right-size are aligned with
the research process. The different types of
research require different implementation
strategies. For Lean research, the questions
below can be used to guide an iterative
process of incorporating the Lean Research
principles into planned and current
research activities. These questions are an
excerpt from The Lean Research
Framework by MIT D-lab
Consider the following questions
when carrying out Lean Research
Is our research rigorous?
1.
Who or what resources have we
consulted to obtain input on our research
design? How do we know that our research
adheres to the highest standards of our
discipline or field of practice regarding
research and instrument design, data
collection, cleaning, and analysis?
2.
What steps should we take to
ensure the internal validity of the research?
3.
If applicable, what steps should we
take to ensure the external validity of the
research?
4.
How are we designing and
implementing our research process to
ensure that the research is reproducible?
5.
What steps will we take to clearly,
accurately, and transparently report all
relevant research results to stakeholders?
6.
How are we protecting the data of
the people who participate in the research?
7.
If the research is an impact
evaluation or trial, is it registered with the
social science registry?
8.
Will the research be reproduced or
verified by an independent party? If there
are no current plans for this, is the research
conducted in a way that it can be easily
verified?
Is our research respectful?
1.
What are we doing to engage the
research subjects, members of their
communities, or similar populations (where
appropriate) in the design of our study and
our informed consent process?
2.
How are we designing the informed
consent process to ensure that research
subjects receive all the information that
they need in a way that is understandable
91
to them in order to decide if they wish to
participate in the research or not?
3.
What actions should we take to
ensure that the human subject feels truly
free to reject participation in the study or to
drop out of a study once it has started
without fearing or experiencing negative
consequences?
4.
What actions should we take to
create an environment in which research
subjects can enjoy and find meaning in the
experience of participating in research?
5.
Are we appropriately using existing
information and knowledge that local host
institutions may have? How are we helping
local host institutions to obtain the
information they need about the proposed
study to determine if it is to their benefit to
participating in the research?
6.
Have we determined culturally
appropriate forms of compensating subjects
and host institutions for their time and
expenses, and have we consulted key
stakeholders in this process?
Is our research relevant?
1.
What secondary research have we
done in order to assure us that primary
research on the topic we are proposing is
actually needed.
2.
What process are we using to
identify the research priorities of the
research subjects and, if relevant, their
communities? What criteria are we using to
determine to what extent these priorities
should be included in our research.
3.
What steps should we take to
understand what aspects of the research
local host institutions find most relevant
and how are we factoring that into our
research design and dissemination
strategy?
4.
Have we identified stakeholders in
advance of the research project who have
given input into how they would like to
receive and use research findings? How are
we incorporating this? input into our
research design?
5.
Are the research subjects and the
host institution able to clearly articulate the
value of the proposed research study?
6.
What steps will we take to
communicate and share the research
findings in ways that are understandable
and accessible to all stakeholders, including
research subjects?
7.
Have we allocated time and budget
to the process of disseminating research
results to stakeholders and decision-makers
at various levels?
8.
Have decision-makers agreed or
expressed interest in using research
findings in advance of the study? After
completion of the study, have decisions
been made based on the findings?
9.
Are we planning to share deidentified study data, if appropriate? With
whom will we share it and how will we
identify additional opportunities for the
data to be used?
10.
What approach will we use to
understand the impact that the research
92
has had (for example, on the decision,
debate, issue or audience of interest)?
Is our research right sized?
1.
What criteria are we using to assess
how large (in terms of people or households
involved) and costly it is reasonable for the
study to be? Are we considering the
relevance of the research question to key
stakeholders and the type of decisions that
will be informed by research results in
making that assessment?
2.
How are we assessing which
activities and questions are essential to the
research objectives and which ones we can
eliminate? Are we eliminating all nonessential protocols and questions?
3.
With input from various
stakeholders, have we determined the
length of time that is acceptable for an
interview from the perspective of study
participants? How are we designing our
research protocols and instruments to
ensure that interviews do not exceed this
length of time?
4.
If the research involves sampling,
how are we selecting the sample to ensure
that it is large enough, but not too large?
5.
If the study involves enumerators
who are not on the core research team,
how are we planning to train and
compensate them and have we consulted
relevant stakeholders in this plan? In
addition to fair compensation, how else are
we ensuring that enumerators experience
the research process to be respectful,
meaningful, and enjoyable?
6.
What specific steps will we take to
provide study subjects with opportunities to
review and refute (if applicable) the study
findings? Do we plan to publish any
refutations along with our original research
findings?
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Illustration of Lean Research
The Idea to Impact Project15 is a (NEXTi2i)
collaboration between Ashesi University Dlab and MIT D-Lab funded by the USAID to
create an incubator that trains
entrepreneurs whose business model
focuses on creating ventures that tackle the
United Nations Sustainable development
goals. The Idea to Impact aims at redefining
the core purpose of business creation so
that entrepreneurs do not only consider
profit
but also impact. In order to do this,
businesses are introduced to the lean
research methodology by the Ashesi D-lab
15 https://www.ashesi.edu.gh/stories-and-events/stories/3317ashesi-and-mit-d-lab-partner-to-support-student-and-alumnientreprenuers-grow-ventures-targeted-at-un-sdgs.html
through the incubator. This helps
businesses apply the lean research
principles of rigour, respect, relevance, and
right-size when carrying out research. This
enables them to keep the user or research
participant at the center of the research
and eventually the outcome of the business
to ensure that their businesses meet
community needs.
Conclusion
Through the four principles of
rigour, respect, relevance, and right-size,
lean research creates maximum value and
94
usefulness of research data to stakeholders
and minimizes the waste and burden of the
research-on-research subjects. Lean
research is very important if you want to
yield positive outcomes as researchers and
especially as innovative students who are
looking at starting up ventures that aim at
creating impact. Although lean research
may not apply for every research study, it is
a guide to improving your own research as
it lays emphasis on continual improvement
of the research practice.
Key Terms
Lean Research, Rigour, Relevance, Respect,
Right sized,
Problem Sets
1. What do you understand by lean
research?
2. How will you incorporate the lean
research principles into your team’s
research?
3. Why is lean research important?
95
CHAPTER 9: ANALYSIS FRAMEWORKS
Chapter description
After getting out into the world and
talking to people during the research
(empathy) stage you come back exploding
with a variety of findings. It can be
incredibly exciting to know you have all this
potential collected in your head, but it can
also be a little intimidating knowing that
you somehow have to take all the noise and
make sense of it. This is where the analysis
part of the process comes in. The analysis
stage helps you figure out what is at the
heart of the issue so you can find the right
solutions that help every party involved,
from users to the businesses. It can seem
daunting to start, but having a clear process
makes the problem much more
approachable.
Introduction
This chapter dwells on the two types of
data; qualitative and quantitative data. It
also illustrates the various analysis
frameworks and how visualization helps us
to be creative. First and foremost,
Qualitative data is information about
qualities, how people feel about something.
You cannot count this data. For example,
“sharing what people like about a certain
product” “how they think it could be
improved” “whether they would
recommend the program to others or not”
among others. Qualitative data can be
collected through in-depth interviews,
observations, focus groups among others.
On the other hand, Quantitative data is
divided into Discrete & Continuous Data.
Discrete data consists of only counting
numbers. Examples include the number of
chairs in a hall, the number of days in a
month, a person’s age etc. Continuous data
can be broken down into smaller units. It
can also be measured on a scale like length,
time, weight among others. Quantitative
data can be collected through surveys,
questionnaires etc. (Blaikie, 2003).
How to represent Quantitative Data
These are some of the common types of
how quantitative data is captured and
represented:
1.
Bar graph represents data by
displaying bars of equal width on the grid. A
diagram in which the numerical values of
variables are represented by the height or
length of lines or rectangles of equal width.
2.
Pictograph: Uses pictures and
symbols to display data, each picture or
symbol can represent more than one
object.
96
3.
A line graph represents a graph
showing data segments joined by a line
segment to show trends over time.
4.
A scatter plot is a graph in which the
values of two variables are plotted along
two axes, the pattern of the resulting points
revealing any correlation present.
5.
Circle graphs or pie charts here data
represent portions of one whole or one
group.
However, data is not usually countable or
ratable as quantitative data so that’s why
qualitative data analysis comes in.
Qualitative data focuses on the opinions,
emotions and perceptions of individuals.
Visualization
Florence Nightingale used the concept of
visualization to change the hospital and
saved lives with her determination, hard
work and later changing the nursing
profession forever. She was a data
visualization and statistics pioneer. From
the numerous data she collected,
Nightingale realized the poor sanitation
caused the highest mortality at hospitals.
She used tables and diagrams to present
the data she collected. Nightingale
illustrated that simple sanitation
techniques, such as handwashing, available
fresh air and washing of the bed linens
could stop the spread of infectious diseases
and wounds of the soldiers. She showed
that poor sanitation, not battle wounds, lay
behind most English soldiers’ deaths during
the Crimean War in the 1850s and that such
deaths were avoidable by observing that;
for most soldiers, poor living conditions was
the root cause of their deaths rather than
battle wounds. Nightingale showed that
soldiers were much more likely to die of
preventable diseases than male civilians,
even during peacetime. Visualizations
became one of Nightingale’s preferred ways
of communicating about the need for
sanitary reforms to save lives.
On the other hand, Hans Rosling took
visualization to a modern level. Rosling
expressed his opinions by using numbers
and figures. He visualized trends in large
data sets using the latest technology. In one
of his presentations, “he showed bubbles of
data which represented different countries
of different sizes, and different colours
were different continents” (Hucki, 2017).
This can be seen in the Image 9:1 below.
From this we see that visualization provides
insights for research. Just like Nightingale
and Rosling we need to be creative in
visualizing data. This can be done using
analysis frameworks; these provide room
for a lot of creativity in people coming up
with templates that do a good job in
revealing insights.
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Image10:1: Data visualization by Hans Rosling
Making the Data Manageable
Before you can move onto any
actual analysis, you need to be able to
organize and manipulate all the information
you collected. When you are fresh out of
the information collection process it can be
daunting to try to imagine how you are
going to get everything organized. With
information in so many different formats,
none of which are easily quantifiable, it isn’t
always obvious how to categorize things.
First and foremost, you have to understand
what type of information will be helpful or
not. But even with a clear set of steps to
follow, it is important to keep a few things
in mind while getting into analysis.
The process of analyzing all your
data is incredibly fluid, with one insight
creating a chain reaction to a bunch of
other insights which can make you look at
the first one in an entirely different light.
Because of this you will often find yourself
circling back to tweak or re-do things you’ve
already “finished”. It’s really important to
embrace and encourage this iterative
process within the analysis because it can
lead to radical insights that didn’t appear at
first. It also means that sometimes it makes
sense to do things “out of order”. Maybe
you need to do a few frameworks to get
your ideas clear enough to do a point of
view (POV), or maybe you need to get a
POV together to focus your frameworks.
98
Analysis frameworks not only bridge the
gap between the themes and the POV but
also help uncover unique insights as the
structure of the frameworks forces
combinations of information outside the
norm (or box of categories). In that sense
the framework structure information in a
way that forces an insight to appear e.g., a
quadrant of a 2x2 that lends itself to a POV.
Analysis frameworks provide second level
exploration of the raw data after first level
exploration methods such as open cardsorting.
Processing data
Sensemaking
Once you have collected information from
various sources using various media, it’s
time to make sense of them. Going to
context and capturing from observations,
in-depth interviews, diaries, etc. leads to
production of pictures, scribbled notes,
video, audio, diagrams etc. If you were
using the deductive method, your data
would be mostly quantitative, and you will
use statistical software to analyze it.
However, in the design-thinking situation
we have qualitative but in unusual formats
like pictures and notes which need to be
put together for sense making. Hence, we
need methods that are sophisticated
enough to handle the variety.
Card sorting
Here team members extract quotes from
their data gathering efforts. These will be
quotes they heard, observations they have
or pieces of relevant secondary data they
had collected. All these pieces of
information are captured on post it notesthe cards. In a sense card sorting is really
post-it notes sorting. Note that the area of
Voice of the Customer studies supported by
the Center for Quality Management has a
very rigorous process for developing the
voices, the quotes from the study
transcripts. It draws from the Japanese
focus on quality and efficiency. A great book
written by Christina Hepner Brodie titled
“Voices into Choices: Acting on the Voice of
the Customer” written with Gary Burchill,
provides a detailed process on extraction of
voices and subsequent processing, all of
which is widely accepted in the industry for
voice of the customer work. We often do
not hold students to that level of rigour
although it could certainly be achieved.
The post-it notes are then splashed on an
open surface, typically on easel-size point it
paper or on the wall of the classroom. We
make the point that students should resist
the temptation to develop these notes on
the computer and sort them (there is
certainly a software that does this). The
point of splashing the notes on a surface is
to allow for visual and comprehensive
sorting by the individual and the team.
While it is certainly possible to simulate the
group rearrangement digital post-it notes,
there is something special and real about
doing physically. We have had teams want
to do the sorting through these notes online
with very convincing arguments for why it
99
works, and we have always had to disagree
and ask them for what they consider the old
fashion way. Overtime, they see the benefit
of visually working through the notes on the
wall in a group.
Here is an exercise where the student
teams can set-up a card sorting exercise.
1.
Write out the cards/notes from your
user’s perspective (not your interpretation)
considering your mystery points. What did
people say? What did you see (what were
they trying to do)? What did secondary
research reveal? Paste cards/notes
randomly on table or sheet or wall
2.
Rearrange them (each person
should have a turn) – not more than 6 notes
together
o
Look for patterns/groupings –
intuition galore (how's your T-shaped
thinking?)
o
Write higher level labels for patterns
o
Tell a story of what you see, still no
interpretations, save the story to use in the
analysis frameworks
After your team has completed your card
sorting exercise and developed high level
themes, there are two ways in which you
can transition to analysis frameworks
(synthesis)?
1.
Use the raw data from the post-it
notes created for the card sorting exercise
and directly put them into the frameworks.
This requires you to temporarily disregard
the themes and trends from card sorting.
Your goal is to take a different perspective
to see what you can create from the
frameworks. NB: This approach needs a
little bit of experience and a heavy dose of
tolerance for ambiguity because you need
to meta-cognitively identify patterns upon
layers of patterns without sorting the data.
2.
Start with the trends and themes
from card sorting and then go back to the
raw data to learn more about interesting
areas to probe into – this method better
provides evidence of abductive thinking
because you are going to be following
unique insights to probe a little more into.
Within this method, there are two ways of
using the themes.
The Analysis Frameworks
The following are a list of analysis tools we
use for synthesis. It should be noted that
this is one area where a lot has been
written about. You are likely to find a lot
more frameworks in other resources. For
instance, Design Thinking 101 by Vijay
Kumar has a lot of frameworks that can
prove very useful. The Bootcamp Bootleg
and the Human Centered Design Manual
both by the d.School and IDEO also provide
a lot of frameworks that can be used for
analysis.
Personas
We start with the persona because this is
the person we are trying to design for. This
is the person whose values and aspirations
we are trying to pinpoint. Personas are at
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the core framework in the DT process and
can be used in lots of different ways to help
you achieve different goals. What are they?
If you have ever done anything with
marketing research, you have probably
spent some time talking about
demographics and target markets.
Companies often spend thousands of
dollars to collect data to better understand
their target markets. They might then be
presented with a nice little table with tons
of information on age range, gender,
location, education, and maybe even
psychographic labels like “fun loving” or
Image 10:2: Sprint PCS market segment
“new mom”. Companies put huge emphasis
on understanding their target markets, but
ultimately all that these dossiers give them
is a bunch of numbers, not a true
understanding of WHO the people are.
Businesspeople can rattle off a huge list of
numbers and demographics their target
market might fit into, but they can’t actually
picture a person that fits it. This is where
personas come in.
Here is an example of a market segment
developed by Sprint PCS, a mobile service
provider for one of their segments.
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- Job role & responsibilities
- Position in household/workplace
• “Flavor”
Continually, personas are personified
explanations of who, exactly, you are
designing for. Basically, personas are the
“human” version of all the metrics and
demographics. In that sense, a persona
helps you humanize the common traits,
demographics, psychographics, business
attributes, and general lifestyle of a typical
(not average) consumer or customer. In a
consulting project, personas are used to
describe your client’s ideal (not current)
consumer/customer. However, they may
certainly be used to describe the
consumer/customer that your client
currently views as ideal in the long run.
Personas:
●
Answers the key question for design
- “who is this for?”
●
Demonstrates the emotional and
functional needs of users through
humanizing those needs
• Personal profile
- Age, sex, education, job, hobbies, family,
socio-economic group, etc.
• Role
●
As design options are created each
one can be very rapidly tested.
●
Illustrates the objectives while
creating a sounding board for potential
solutions.
So instead of talking about blanket
statements that describe entire
populations, we reframe the data and make
it about a single person. Personas are
almost always a made up “ideal” person
that exemplifies all the traits you think your
target market has, but you can sometimes
use a real person you interviewed as your
persona if they are naturally a perfect fit.
Thinking of your target market as an actual
personified human being, with a name and
a life and everything, can help you get past
the numbers and start designing for actual
people, not just demographics.
Here is the person Continuum Innovation
developed from the segmentation data
provided them by Sprint PCS.
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Image 10:3: Persona
What Continuum did was they took the
data on the Sprint segment and humanized
it as suggested. For instance, they named
him Pete and wondered how Pete’s life
looked like if he earned $74,000 income,
what kind of car he drove, what he listened
to, watched etc. It really helped the
company relate to that segment rather than
stare at the segmentation data.
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Another example
Let's say that you are analyzing the target
market for Urban Outfitters. A traditional
take on identifying the target market might
come up with something like this:
●
15–25-Year-olds
●
Students
●
Trendy
●
Middle to upper middle class
●
Urban and suburban
While looking at users in this way isn’t
wrong, it doesn’t actually describe much
about who you are talking about. A
persona, on the other hand, gives you a
clear snapshot of exactly who might be
walking into an Urban Outfitters, and can
help you remember some of the finer
details and intricacies that they might be
experiencing. One persona that might work
for urban outfitters is this:
Sarah
18, high school senior
From a suburb 15 min outside Boston
Sarah is about to graduate high school and
is excited to start college at a large
university in Boston.
Importance of Personas
Personas can do lots of things. First and
foremost, they force you into a new frame
of thinking, making you think of your
project in the context of someone specific,
not just a blanket audience. This helps you
to really connect with and deeply
understand the people you are designing
for; you get to feel like you know them.
Personas are not just great to help you if
you already have a clear picture of who
your audience is, they can be really helpful
to clarify your ideas when you are not so
sure. If after the data collection period you
come back and feel like you are just
swimming in way too many people’s heads,
it can be super helpful to step back and take
a minute to gather all the perspectives
together into a persona or two. The process
of building a persona can also help to
accentuate similarities or differences
between your users. What at first might
seem like a single type or persona might
grow into two or three upon a closer look,
or vice versa.
Personas can also help you clearly
communicate your user base to other
people. Having a persona can help outsiders
instantly and vividly understand who you
are designing for, but they can also help
with inter-team communication. Once you
and your team come up with a shared
vision of your users it becomes easier to
maintain your cohesive group
understanding. Personas are part of the
language-building process that occurs
within teams and strengthens the
connections and communication.
How do you do it? Personas can be
incredibly easy to pull together, but they
can also be a challenge. Ultimately, creating
personas is really just telling a story. The
first step in being able to craft a really
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accurate persona is completely immersing
yourself in the research process. After
interviewing and observing lots of people
you will probably start to get a pretty clear
sense of who you are focusing on. Start to
build a list of attributes you associate with
the people you are designing for, figure out
the themes that seem to be running
through everyone you spoke to. Once you
get a basic idea of what things connect all
the people you focus on, start to come up
with a person that you think would fulfill all
the criteria you just set, and then make
them a back story. What do they do in their
free time? What sort of things might they
be interested in the outside of your scope
of focus? Who are they? Make up a story
for them and tell it!
persona and not through their own eyes.
The designer is encouraged to identify
quotes or observations about what the
persona was hearing from their
environment, what they are thinking and
feeling, what they are seeing and what they
are saying and doing. From these empathy
notes, the designer can identify what the
persona’s pain points are and what will
constitute gains.
Empathy map
To be able to use the raw data for the
persona, you may have to sift through the
date to identify the respondent that is
closest to the depictions on the persona
framework. Another way to do it is to have
multiple empathy maps or to use data from
multiple people from the respondent pool.
Different quotes (e.g., from opposing views)
can make the empathy map confusing and
difficult to work with. A little more intuition
will be helpful in clearing any confusion
about the map.
An empathy map provides the designer
with the opportunity to unpack the persona
identified. Since it's focused on unpacking
the persona, the analysis starts with the
raw data, maybe the cards or notes, and the
map is built on that based on the criteria
that is prescribed by the map. It should be
noted that in developing the empathy map,
the designer is completely providing
information through the eyes of the
In that sense, the empathy map not only
maps out details of the persona’s life from
their own words but also suggests what
their aspirations might be and what is
hindering them from reaching those
aspirations. This enables the designer to
easily create a POV statement from the
framework.
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Here are some examples of empathy maps.
Image 10:4: Empathy map 1
Image 10:5: Empathy map 2
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Image 10:6: Empathy map 3
Value-Aspirations-Experience
The Values-Aspirations-Experience
framework also drills down into the data to
map out connections between the values of
the respondent, what they state as their
Image 10:7: Value aspirations experience diagram 1
aspirations and what their ideal experiences
could be. This framework was developed by
Continuum Innovation to connect values
and aspirations to ideal experience in order
to tell the story of how these elements
support the point of view of the research.
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The following are examples of the values-aspirations-experience framework developed by
students.
Image 10:8: Value aspirations experience diagram 2
Their POV from this framework is as
follows: Skipjacks employees need a
scheduling system that is user-friendly,
interactive and accessible at any time and
any location so they can be more efficient.
On the left side of the framework, the story
can be continued to a solution. We often
restrict students to developing the right
side first. However, the complete picture
providing the right side based on the values,
aspirations and the experience of the
respondent and the left side which focuses
on the problem, solution and features of
the solution
Here is an example from a student team that was trying to develop a tool to aid design thinking
training
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Image 10:9: Value aspirations experience diagram 3
Their POV is as follows: Students need a
design thinking device that enables them to
capture insights to problems and build
solutions so they can achieve their creative
genius.
Mind Maps
Mind maps are also used with raw data or
the quotes from card sorting. A mind map
shows the connections between the various
topic areas (bubbles) a respondent touched
on in an interview. There are in fact digital
tools that can do the mapping but because
there is the need to be intuitive and tightly
connect the mystery question to the
research data, we often encourage students
to develop the map themselves and not rely
on software to find the connections for
them. Here is some advice we give students
for the construction of mind maps. In order
to complete a mind map, you need to take
the time to review your research. Take one
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or two interviews that are close to your
persona and map out the bubbles from the
conversation. Highlight recurring themes,
identify patterns, and assess common traits
among these interviews. Also go to the
mystery questions, look for bubbles that
point to what the persona is trying to do
(empathy insights) and then find a way to
connect them.
When you draw your mind map, you put
your respondent or persona in the center
and surround it with thought bubbles.
These bubbles should correlate to major
aspects of your respondent’s thought
process with regards to the mystery
question under consideration. For example,
you may use hobbies, needs, cost,
convenience, and more. You should take
each of these bubbles one step further and
identify the first things that come to your
respondent’s mind along those lines. The
goal of a mind map is to identify unfilled
needs (and the corresponding, necessary
features/considerations) so as to get a
better understanding of your respondent
and their aspirations. The point of a mind
map is to find multiple, important bubbles
that need to be connected. Oftentimes,
when one outlines the different bubbles of
topics in the map, it shows connections of
interest that the respondent is not currently
making. This provides the insight the design
team needs to develop a POV.
Image 10: 10: Mind mapping Diagram 1
In the above example, the respondent
provides an interview about his experience
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with diabetes. A care scan of the map
shows that Tony, the respondent identifies
a strong value or aspiration as follows “I’ve
got two beautiful sons and a beautiful wife.
I want to live”. However, in his interview,
there did not seem to be a direct
connection between the diabetes drug
Crestor and that statement. Hence, a POV
emerges that attempts to draw a direct
connection between those two notes.
Image 10:11: Mind mapping Diagram 2
This is another example on a project we did
with the South African Red Cross on one of
our field studies programs. We were
investigating the benefit of a nutritional
supplement called e’pap on the nutrition of
HIV patients. The interviews of different
people at the Red Cross showed that while
they knew of e’pap and other similar
products, there wasn’t a strong connection
between the mention of the HIV patients in
the conversations and e’pap.
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Image 10: 12: Mind mapping Diagram 3
The following example was developed from interviewing a very active member of a burgeoning
urban farming cooperative in Nyanga, Cape Town, South Africa. The mind map provided some
ideas about how to incentivize young people.
Image 10: 13: Mind mapping Diagram 4
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Journey Maps
Journey Maps are one of the core
frameworks in Design Thinking. A lot of
people’s first introduction to Design
Thinking is learning how to make a journey
map.
What is it? Essentially, journey maps are
incredibly detailed timelines of a process.
That definition is annoyingly vague on
purpose, because you can make a journey
map of pretty much anything you can think
of. Regardless of whether you are mapping
the process of finding an engagement ring
or of building a house, the ultimate goal is
to be as detailed as possible. This means
thinking about when and where the process
you are mapping actually began, and when
it actually ends, and including everything in
between. So that map for the engagement
ring, it might start all the way back at the
couple’s first date, and end after the
wedding. The goal is to take note of every
tiny thing that happens during the entire
process so that you can find hidden
questions, or mystery points, that no one
has thought of before.
What’s it good for? Journey maps can be
incredibly helpful at nearly every stage of
the Design Thinking process. They can be
used before you start research to identify
your current level of understanding and
identify any preconceived notions you may
have. They can also be used in that early
stage to help figure out potential mystery
points you may want to focus your research
on, basically to form a hypothesis. The
important thing to remember about this
pre-research, or hypothesis, journey maps
is that they are NOT evidence of anything.
You absolutely must not let the hypothesis
maps drive any conclusions. Very often you
will find that after going out and getting
research, many things in your initial journey
maps will be completely wrong. This can be
a really valuable insight as long as you
totally let go of the incorrect assumptions
you held before.
Journey maps are also great analysis tools
to help you organize the data you’ve
collected. You can use post-research
journey maps either as an exploratory tool
to help focus your thoughts before tackling
the POV, or as an insight building tool that
is driven by the POV. How you want to use
the journey map is entirely dependent on
what you feel you need, and oftentimes you
might find yourself wanting to use it both
ways.
When it comes to actually developing a
journey map, one will realize that in
addition to identifying the respondent’s
main actions for a journey map, sometimes,
different journey maps could be created on
different processes or behaviors exhibited
in the research. Our advice is to take a few
theme areas that are clustered during card
sorting and develop journey maps on how
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people will go about responding to that
area. This journey map can then be
compared with the hypothesized journey
Client journey maps: When doing consulting
projects, the journey map shows the stepby-step process the client’s customer must
go through in order to fill their needs. It
describes their behavior before, during, and
after the need is met. Depending on the
scope of your client’s problem, your journey
map may not be focused specifically on
consumer/customer behavior, especially if
the problem is not focused directly on the
consumer/customer. It could focus on the
step-by-step process your client goes
through to provide its goods or services.
For client projects, journey maps can be
used both as a pre-research tool (before
data collection) and as an analytical tool
(after data collection). During analysis,
journey maps usually portray common
‘work-arounds’ that your client’s ideal
consumer/customer must use in the
absence of a real solution. However, as a
pre-research tool, journey maps are used to
map out the step-by-step process for
consumers/customers in an ideal situation.
When using the journey map as a preresearch tool it should portray your client’s
desired end state after a solution has been
developed.
map that was developed during the
research phase.
How to do it? Regardless of how you are
using the journey map, the first step is to
try to identify where to start. This can be a
lot more complicated than it seems, so it is
important to really think about it and talk it
over before just slapping it down. If you are
doing a hypothesis map you will just base it
off of your best guesses and understanding
of the problem at hand, but if you are doing
a post-research journey map you will want
to pull all of your information straight from
your research. You can make a map for one
specific person, or as an amalgamation of a
few people. You might find yourself needing
to make multiple paths or branches of the
map to accurately portray the different
ways the process can unfold. The important
thing about journey mapping is not to make
the process fit into a specific map, but to
make the map fit the process.
Journey maps could also be developed for
business systems (called value chain
analysis). The design is very similar with the
only difference being that the value chain is
on the business process and the journey
map is on a human’s experience. As the
following example shows, women are
grossly underrepresented in the production
of honey.
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Image 10:14: Journey map Diagram 1
Here is another value chain-based map that is focused on the journey a blanket makes from
procurement to being used for disaster relief.
Image 10:15: Journey map Diagram 2
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Activity clocks
Activity clocks are mainly used to map out
the actions or activities of a respondent in a
time-based fashion. Activity clocks allow
you to map out an individual’s daily routine.
They are recommended for any research
that dives deeply into a user’s schedule and
habits. They are similar to a journey map,
but they map out your individual’s routine
by the day as opposed to by the process.
Activity clocks can be drawn in a circular
model or in a horizontal (start to finish)
model. Plot major points of the individual’s
day at specific time periods and fill in the
Image 10:16: Activity clock 1
spaces in between with supporting
processes and habits of note. Once full,
map out areas of need and inefficiency in
your individual’s daily routine in order to
reach a new POV.
An activity clock can also be used to map
out the day in a life of a person.
For instance, the following is the day in the
life of a 12-year-old. There are different
color codes for the different ways in which
she communicates with the different
people she interacts with.
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Image 10:17: Activity clock 2
Here are two examples with different levels of detail.
Image 10:18: Activity clock 3
The final one is the activity clock of the of a poor woman in a village
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2x2 matrices
2x2 matrices allow you to map individuals,
products, or services along two major
matrices. The matrices can either be
mapped on a low-to-high basis (such as lowto-high cost on one axis and low-to-high
convenience on the other) or on a
contrasting basis (such as domestic vs.
foreign on one axis). Once you have chosen
two-dimension labels and placed each one
on an axis, you plot various points along the
axes. When mapping out the
values/preferences/needs of respondents,
these points can represent individuals. This
will be the case where you took the
different respondent data, and you mapped
each respondent on the 2x2 matrix.
The 2x2 could also be used to map out the
external environment of the study context.
For instance, it could be used to map out
the macroeconomic situation of nutrition
while your study collected individual
perceptions of nutrition. In that sense, it
could also be used to map out the
competitive environment of the mystery
question under consideration. For instance,
it could be used to map out the needs filled
by (or qualities of) existing competition to
your client’s services, these points can
represent alternative products or services.
When you find clusters of points in a
specific quadrant, these can represent new
POVs. If you plotted individuals, these
quadrants could also represent opportunity
areas because they identify common areas
of need among your general research bases.
The empty areas could even provide a sense
of who the persona could be or in another
sense could help validate a persona. If you
plotted products/services, you could find
opportunity areas in relatively empty
quadrants, because these represent areas
that have not been addressed by existing
alternatives.
In the example below, this particular group
was able to identify an opportunity area for
its high quality, high-price, social-impact
products: older generations, who were less
price-conscious and less concerned with
brand value than their younger
counterparts. This is an example of a person
who collected data on the beer brands in a
store and wanted to know what type of
beer could sell in a new beer business.
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Image 10:19: Data on beer brands
The following is a developed 2x2 matrix on the beer brands collected about. Guess what labels
go on the axes.
Image 10:20: 2x2 Framework
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Here is another example of different ways in which different breakfast cereals can be presented
on a matrix.
Image 10:21: Cereal data
Venn diagrams
Venn diagrams allow you to find common
areas of interest among two or more
different things. They are often made of
circular cards of different sizes and colors
that are placed in relation to one another
on a base area. They can be used to
compare respondents or the different
themes or categories that were organized
during the card sorting process. The
structure of Venn diagrams is simple. You
should draw one circle to represent each
different group. In intersecting areas,
identify all common traits and relationships
between the two intersecting groups.
Identify all uncommon/individual traits in
the rest of the circle. All intersecting parts
are where you will find new POVs and areas
of interest. However, non-intersecting parts
could raise questions that could lead to
insights about why they are not
intersecting.
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Image 10:22: Venn diagram 1
Here is an example the outlines the components of design innovation
Image 10:23: Venn diagram 2
The following is an example of the intersection between the characteristics of an employee and
those of a manager.
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Image 10:24: Venn diagram 3
Here is another example that is used to find a life partner
Image 10:25: Venn diagram 4
Venn diagrams can use more than 3 intersecting circles if the designer can process the different
interacting parts
There is a variant of simple Venn diagrams
which is relational diagrams. Relational
diagrams are often used to map out
institutional concepts with the size
representing the level of importance while
the degree of overlap represents the
intensity of the interaction. For instance,
when trying to represent different
constituents such as men and women,
wealthy and poor, young and old, there will
be different sizes and levels of intersection
between the diagrams.
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Image 10:26: Venn diagram 5
Here is an example that represents different countries
Image 10:27: Venn diagram 6
Here are two other examples of situations in the developing world. The second diagram actually
shows cause and effect as well as solution from the mapping exercise.
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Image 10:28: Venn diagram 7
Analogies
Analogies allow for a different perspective
to be applied to the results from the design
thinking research. The use of analogies to
reach unique understanding and inspire
Image 10:30: Analogies
design Analogies allow for a different
perspective to be applied to the results
from the design thinking research.
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The idea for an analogy could develop from
peculiar information in the research data.
The data might lead the design team to
think of an analogy that provides a stronger
sense of what the data is saying than the
situation itself. In the following example,
American Express approached Continuum
Innovation looking for inspiration for how
to design the delivery packages for its
Centurion black card. The Centurion card
has no limit and is given by invitation only.
It is the kind of card you could probably
walk into a car dealership with and drive
away without a car loan or a briefcase with
wads of green notes but only the slide of
the metal card. The question American
Image 10:31: Packaging from an Analogy
Express wanted to answer was how to
deliver a Centurion card. After a lot of
research, the team developed an analogy
that will inspire them to the solution. The
analogy was that of the card being
delivered by a British chauffeur driving a
Rolls Royce. The card would be placed on a
covered platter and the chauffeur would do
an extensive bow and open the platter for
the client to pick the card. This analogy
depicted in the picture below inspired the
engineers to develop the packaging seen in
the picture. You can see implementation of
the black sleeves of the chauffer with the
white shirt cuffs protruding from the
sleeves. The box also opens like a platter.
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The second example was developed by a
group of students on a field study trip to
South Africa. The challenge was how to
develop a chicken farming business that
was protected from burglars at night. This
business was going to be in the township of
Nyanga where most unsecured things
vanished at night. The students had heard
of Inesfly, an anti-malaria paint that
prevents mosquitoes from flying around in
a room and thereby prevented mosquito
bites in enclosed areas where the paint was
applied. They used this analogy to propose
that a wall be built around the chicken farm
and a 24hr convenience store be built into
the wall. The store will give coupons to the
police to shop there and because it stayed
open, it will have human and police traffic
and therefore prevent burglars from
attaching the farm and thereby
safeguarding the business. While they were
given free rein to come up with new ideas,
they were surprised that a chicken farm
project ended scaling beyond a daytime
activity to include a complex nighttime
activity that made the daytime activity
sustainable. If they had not used that
analogy, they probably would not have
been able to discover a two-part solution to
the problem.
Image 10:32: Inesfly
Summary
Remember when you are diving into the
analysis process, it is important to consider
a few things before you start actually doing
anything. First, analysis is like rugby, not a
relay. What does that mean? It is much
easier and more effective to do the analysis
with other people. Every person’s
experience during the information
gathering stage will be different and being
able to share those different experiences
will bring a greater depth to the group’s
collective understanding of what is going
on. Working with other people will also
shed light on different perspectives on the
same experience. Hearing other people’s
understanding of something can open up
doors you never would have come across
on your own. This is why it follows naturally
from card sorting where you posted the
notes randomly but worked with team
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members to identify the categories and
trends from the data.
Second, you have to make things tangible. If
you take nothing away from this book, at
least get this. When you are dealing with
abstract ideas it can be really challenging to
wrap your brain around them, but it
becomes so much easier if you can turn
those ideas into something you can actually
touch. So, take everything that is floating
around in your head and throw it out into
the real world. Take notes, take pictures,
use post-its, draw pictures, build models, do
whatever you need to do to literally get a
grasp on your thoughts. This doesn’t just
help you better understand your own
thoughts, it allows you to get a grasp of
what other people are thinking and share
your ideas with them. If everyone can
literally see and touch everyone else’s
ideas, it makes it so much easier and more
productive to collaborate.
Third, it is so important to give yourself
time to marinate in the findings. Completely
saturate your space with your findings,
cover the walls with the tangible evidence
of your findings. Go through every little
detail until you truly know everything about
what you’re studying. Re-listen to the
recordings of interviews and re-read notes,
then do it all again. This process can often
be pretty painful, and that is totally OK! If
you rush through the process just because it
is hard or boring, you will miss out on the
“Aha” moments lurking inside the muck and
mire. Give yourself time to really soak in the
problem, let yourself wander around the
fog for as long as you need. While it may
seem pointless or frustrating while you are
doing it, you will quickly come to see just
how powerful immersion in the problem
can be.
Key words
Visualization
Empathy Maps
Card sorting
Qualitative data
Frameworks Persona
Activity Clocks
Sensemaking
Quantitative data
Problem sets
1.
Differentiate between qualitative
data and quantitative data?
2.
What do you understand by
visualization?
3.
Why is card sorting important in
analyzing data?
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CHAPTER 10: IDEATION TECHNIQUES
Chapter Description
Ideation is a creative process that leads to
the formation of ideas. Ideation is the third
stage of the design thinking process. At this
stage, your team must have clearly defined
the problem you want to tackle and stated
the point of view (POV) to inspire and guide
everyone. Then you can start the ideation
process. Your team members will have to
come together to conjure ideas. Remember,
at this stage, there are no “bad ideas”.
Everyone should, therefore, feel free to
contribute theirs. You have to be bold and
curious in order to challenge commonly
held beliefs and explore possibilities past
obstacles. The goal of ideation is not
coming up with the “right idea” it is aimed
at coming up with the “broadest range of
possibilities. At the end of this chapter, you
should be able to define all the ideation
techniques and also identify the ideation
techniques that are appropriate to use in
each situation. These techniques may help
in achieving the best ideas for the course
group works. This chapter looks at each
idea technique deeply and note that several
ideation techniques can be used at once.
Introduction
Look back at a time when you had a paper
to write and you opened a blank word
document and stared at it for what seemed
like ages waiting for that “aha moment”
that will come with that one big idea that
will blow off the mind of the lecturer. Truth
is, that “aha moment” will come faster if
you do not limit yourself to looking for only
one perfect idea but give yourself the
chance to explore many different ideas and
pick out that which is best. Ideation will
help you do this. Furthermore, ideation
comes from imagination and thinking
differently. Gregory Berns; a neuroscientist
refers to the brain as “a lazy piece of meat”!
This is because Berns says the brain
categorizes stimuli in templates and when
confronted with a new stimulus, the brain
checks the existing templates for a response
rather than doing further thinking. Berns
calls this “thinking inside the box” hence
the brain being a lazy piece of meat.
Therefore, we need to overcome
categorization because it makes us come up
with ideas from inside the box.
However, how do we overcome
categorization and think outside the box?
According to Berns, we need imagination as
it brings new ideas. The brain only imagines
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when it thinks outside the box and not in
the inside. Imagination lives outside the
box of categories as we imagine when we
do not find a useful template in the file
creativity chapter shows how one can break
categorization. The ideation techniques play
a similar role in pushing oneself out of
categorization. This topic will be expanded
on further in the creativity chapter.
Ideation Techniques.
Beginning your work with full gusto
only to find yourself stuck after the first
sentence is infuriating, but what’s worse is
staring at a blank page for what seems like
an eternity, waiting for ideas to appear
from somewhere. Even if you have a
designated topic, it can often be seemingly
impossible to think of anything worthwhile
to say about it. Sadly, much to everyone’s
disappointment, your work isn’t going to
write itself. For people who create content
every day, it can be difficult constantly
coming up with new ideas. Luckily, if you
have hit that creative wall, there are several
techniques you can implement to get those
creative juices flowing again. Below are
several creative problem-solving
techniques. These don’t just apply to
content creation either, they can be used in
all aspects of life.
drawers. The ideation techniques in this
chapter are designed to push one to think
outside the box and to break categorization.
For example, the nine-dot puzzle from the
1. Mind Mapping.
Mind mapping (brainstorming or
spider diagrams) involves taking note of
every idea that comes up no matter how
far-fetched it may seem. Come up with as
many ideas as possible as this will increase
the chance of finding the best idea
(Gardiner, 2013). When brainstorming try
not to reject any ideas, you should always
say “yes” to the ideas your group members
bring. Avoid using “yes but”. Here are five
rules for effective brainstorming: postpone
all judgment of ideas, encourage wild ideas,
aim for quantity over quality, build on ideas,
and every person and every idea have equal
value (Daly, Mckilligan, Seifert & Gonzalez,
2016). Ideas generated are blended to
create one good idea. This is embedded in
the slogan “1+1=3”.
Mind mapping has four key visualoriented elements: Keywords,
Diagramming, symbols, and colours.
According to (Polczynski, 2016); keywords
record thoughts, diagramming shows
relationships among keywords, symbols add
increase memorability by adding visual
variety and colours represent a various
group of ideas.
Mind mapping is expanded on further as an
analysis framework in Chapter 10.
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Image 4:1: An illustration of a mind map of a family16.
2. Six Thinking Hats
This technique was developed in the early
80s, but it has now been adopted by
businesses all over the world. It involves
making decisions using metaphorical hats.
Each hat has a different colour which
represents a different direction of thinking
16 Source: https://aperture.org/onsight/lesson-13/
(Gardiner, 2013). Below are the meanings
of each hat (de Bono, 1999)
White Hat – Facts
When you wear the white hat, you focus on
the data available.
Red Hat – Emotions
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Wearing the red hat lets you look at
problems using intuition, gut reaction, and
emotion.
Black Hat – Judgement, Caution
Using this hat, look cautiously and
defensively at all the bad points of the
decision. Try to see why it might not work.
Yellow Hat – Logic, Positivity
This hat helps you think positively and to
see all the benefits of the decision and the
value in it. Gives reasons for your thoughts
or the ideas you bring forth.
Green Hat – Creativity
The green hat lets you develop creative
solutions to a problem. It is an unrestricted
way of thinking, in which there is little
criticism of ideas.
Blue Hat – Control
Thinking with the blue hat on, helps you
keep an overview of what thinking is
necessary to scout the subject.
According to Gardiner (2013), this method
can be used individually or in a group, and
one can ‘wear’ more than one hat at once.
This method of ideation is advantageous
because it generates understanding among
group members that there are multiple
perspectives on an issue, is a convenient
way “switching gears” while thinking and it
leads to more creative thinking.
good at this as their curiosity and
imagination are boundless. When playing a
“why” game with a child you will
understand what is being explained here.
However, as we grow old, the questions we
ask also reduce partly because we have
answers to some of these questions.
Imagine we asked more questions despite
the knowledge we already have? Our
imagination will increase, hence improving
our content. Therefore, the checklist
technique comes in to help to ask questions
3. The Checklist
The checklist helps spark imagination by
asking a lot of questions. Young children are
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before you start your work. Here are six
universal questions that can be asked:
Why? Where? When? Who? What? How?
Any time you want to create content, ask
yourself these questions. This will help to
generate great answers (Gardiner, 2013).
4. Lateral Thinking
This refers to giving a situation a different
look. It involves solving problems linearly;
for example, a situation occurred because
of .. However, the easiest answer is not
always the correct one. According to de
Bono (1999), during lateral thinking, one
has to step aside and look at the situation
differently.
An example of lateral thinking by Gardiner
(2013).
“You have a client who sells tractors. If you
were thinking in a linear fashion, you may
feel the need to create content about how
great tractors are because you need to sell
tractors. Thinking about things laterally
opens up a world of possibilities. Try looking
at the bigger picture.
Tractors are a key component to farming,
farming produces food and resources.
Farms also house animals. A popular
children’s rhyme about farm animals is Old
McDonald, you may wonder how that
rhyme came to be. Why not create content
around the origin of that rhyme?”
Image 4:2: Illustration to show lateral thinking17
5. Random Word Generation
Here you are required to pick two random
words by using an online generator, a
dictionary; or write words on plastic balls,
throw them into the air, and then select the
17 Source:http://thepeakperformancecenter.com/educational-learning/thinking/types-of-thinking-2/lateral-thinking/
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words on the balls you catch first (Gardiner,
2013).
Image 4:3: Random Word Generation18
6. Change Perspective
This involves putting yourself in other
people’s shoes. It helps to look at work
from a different angle. This is because you
may be too attached to your work and also
too close to notice faults in it. Alternatively,
you can get other people to look at your
ideas. This will help in getting constructive
criticism however you do not need to
integrate all the given feedback (Gardiner,
2013).
7. Picture Association
Here you pick a random photo from an
image search on the topic of your choice.
18 Source: https://techwelkin.com/tools/random-words/
Then develop a story around the photo;
how it was taken, and you should work
backwards.
An example of picture association by
(Gardiner, 2013)
“If you see a picture of a dog looking up at
the night sky, ask yourself what it could be
thinking. Is it a stargazing dog? Does that
dog secretly long to be an astronaut?
Perhaps a story about a space dog would be
awesome! A space dog would make a great
mascot for any business so we could look at
the best business mascots. So, on so forth.”
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8. Get Up and Go Out
This involves letting your mind wander, if
you work around screens all day, get up and
walk for a bit. You can take a walk around
your neighborhood, in the woods, field
10. Questioning assumptions
Questioning assumptions at every
development process brings new ideas and
possibilities that hinder obstacles against
the success of the business.
Bryan W. Mattimore, in his book; Idea
Stormers: How to Lead and Inspire Creative
Breakthroughs, tells the story of “his
colleague Gary Fraser, who took over the
oral care business unit at Unilever and had
to take on two much larger, deeply
entrenched competitors in the toothpaste
market, Colgate and Crest. He couldn’t
compete with them head-to-head from a
product standpoint and could not possibly
outspend them in marketing. The solution
was for Fraser and his team to question
every facet of their business, including
product packaging, pricing, and advertising.
The result was the world’s first baking soda
and peroxide toothpaste, Mentadent, which
was very successful” (Mattimore, 2013).
When using this technique, Mattimore
(2013) recommends the following.
1.
Decide how to formulate your
creative challenge.
2.
Come up with 20 to 30 assumptions
either true or false surrounding that
challenge.
among others. Allow the miracle of nature
to inspire and energize you. Similarly,
meditation is another great method to
enhance creativity (Gardiner, 2013).
3.
Use some of these assumptions as
thought starters to generate new ideas.
4.
Make sure to consider all aspects of
your business.
11. Wishing
This involves starting by looking for the
impossible and then look for ways to turn
the impossible to possible in order to make
your wish tangible. You do this by following
the steps below.
1.
Formulate 20 to 30 wishes about
your business with your team. Don’t limit
your imaginations and welcome every idea.
2.
Then focus on some of these
impossible wishes and use them to
generate ideas.
According to Mattimore (2013), you need to
think widely as a team so as to get different
perspectives of the challenge. This will aid
in seeing new possibilities (Frey, 2013).
12. Opportunity redefinition
This ideation technique involves first
creating a statement that simply defines
your creative objective. Opportunity
redefinition helps you to see a wider range
of possibilities by removing “blinders” that
may be restricting your vision (Frey, 2013).
Mattimore (2013), shares the example of
“working with the Catholic Knights
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Insurance Company to help grow their
business.
“In this case, the opportunity statement
was, “How can we sell more insurance to
Catholics?”
Next, pick three of the most interesting
words in the opportunity statement and
generate creative alternatives for each of
them. Mattimore recommends using words
that represent the 5W’s and H- who, what,
when, where, why and how – of your
challenge. Once you have generated your
three lists of alternative words, place them
in a table, with the original words at the top
of each column and the alternatives you
have brainstormed arranged in columns
below them.
Finally, redefine the opportunity by
selecting one word from each column at
random, plugging them into the original
opportunity statement and creating new
variations of it. For example, “How can WE
SELL more insurance to CATHOLICS?” could
become “How can we get FRIENDS OF
CATHOLICS to BE INCENTIVIZED to sell life
insurance to CATHOLIC GRANDPARENTS?”
13. Picture prompts
This technique involves analyzing challenges
visually. It can also be referred to as
visualization. Visual techniques help express
our intuitions, emotions, and feelings. This
makes them suitable for brainstorming
solutions to challenges that have an
emotional root or involve people
(Luenendonk, 2016).
This is how this technique works:
1.
The facilitator/group leader gets
preselected images, hands them to every
team member and instructs them to write
every idea what the images spark in their
minds. The preselected images should be
interesting and customized in regard to the
challenge at hand (Mattimore, 2013).
However, to spark the most creative
solutions, the facilitator/group leader may
include some random or irrelevant images.
The latter is helpful when trying to generate
new product ideas.
2.
In pairs, participants can discuss the
ideas they wrote down and also brainstorm
possible solutions to the challenge they are
tackling.
3.
Then, the pairs can present their
ideas to their groups.
14. Triggered brain walking
This technique is the most flexible one as it
can be combined with other techniques. It
also allows each member of the group to
participate.
According to Frey (2013), this is how this
technique works:
1.
The group begins by looking at
different aspects of the problem to help
generate ideas.
2.
With the help of the
facilitator/group leader, several pieces of
paper are taped to the wall.
3.
Each participant writes their ideas
on paper, builds on their ideas and well as
their colleagues’. Or a group can brainstorm
and after a paper is passed on to every
group member to write their ideas. This can
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be done when the group is seated in a
circular form. This technique leads to a
team generating a variety of diverse ideas.
15. Semantic intuition
This technique can be used to energize a
team that is exhausted towards the end of
brainstorming. This technique requires
team members to merge several sets of
keywords to generate the name of a new
idea even if they have not yet got a new
idea. Semantic intuition helps to make you
have a different perspective (Mattimore,
2013). Below are the steps to follow when
using this idea.
1.
Select three sets of keywords
related to your challenge. For example, if
your challenge is related to a consumer
product, the three sets of keywords would
be, the needs of a customer, promotional
appeals and places in a store.
2.
Then generate variations for each
set of words.
3.
Combine one word from each set
randomly and then brainstorm a ministry
around it.
Image 4:4: Example of Semantic Intuition
16. The Disney Method (Disney’s Three
Rooms)
This method involves having three rooms:
the dreamer, the realist and the critic
rooms. These rooms each provide a
different perspective and stage for ideation.
Walt Disney uses this tactic to tackle their
projects. This method was further studied
by NLP guru Robert Dilts who named it the
‘Disney Method’. While using this method,
one can either use three corners of a large
room or three separate rooms (Ruijter,
2017).
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3) The Critic/ Spoiler
1) The Dreamer
This is the first ‘room’, and everyone comes
up with crazy new ideas. Diverse ideas are
encouraged without judgement. Also, the
sky is the limit here (Ruijter, 2017).
2) The Realist/ Maker/Doer
In this second ‘room’ we make those crazy
new ideas feasible. The ideas are
re-examined to make them practical. We
can do this by applying convergent thinking
and creating a plan to evaluate and select
these ideas (Ruijter, 2017).
This is the last ‘room’ and it requires us to
punch holes in the ideas. Judge, improve
and reject ideas. Find out what possibly
could go wrong with this idea? The
obstacles? The risks? among others. The
comments raised in this room become
questions for dreamers. This process is
repeated until you get satisfying results.
Walt only took on ideas that survived this
stage (Ruijter, 2017).
Image 4:5: An illustration of Disney’s three rooms19
19 Source: https://www.designmethodsfinder.com/methods/walt-disney-method
137
17. Worst idea
This technique comes in when others seem
not to be working. It can be used to reenergize group members (Frey, 2013).
This is how the technique works:
1.
The participants start by creating a
list of terrible, gross, and illegal ideas. This
will help re-engage and make participants
laugh.
2.
After generating a list, the group
should formulate good ideas from those
bad ideas. With every bad idea, there’s a
good aspect to it so focus on finding that
value (Frey, 2013).
Online idea generation tools
Explore as many ideas as possible as the
more the ideas, the better the chances of
getting a great idea. If you have not found
any idea with the above techniques, try the
online tools below (Gardiner, 2013).
Google Trends
These give an overview of the latest
information of what the world is searching
about.
Übersuggest
This tool helps to provide inspiration for the
topics to tackle. It shows the trending
keywords related to your search.
Portent’s Content Idea Generator
This tool generates random titles related to your topic. It can also be used to generate ideas.
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Image 4:6: Four Rules for Ideation20
Examples of phrases to avoid during Ideation
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
We tried that
before
Not enough help.
It's too radical a
change
Let's get back to
reality
That's not our
problem
I don't like the idea.
I'm not saying
you're wrong
But
Time.
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
Now's not the right
time.
Can't teach an old
dog new tricks.
Good thought, but
impractical.
Not that again.
Where'd you dig
that one up?
We did alright
without it before.
It's never been
tried.
Let's put that one
on the back
20 Source: https://web.stanford.edu/class/engr110/2011/Curtis-02a.pdf
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
Burner for now.
It won't work in our
place.
I don't see the
connection.
Let's all sleep on it.
It can't be done.
It's too much
trouble to change.
It won't pay for
itself.
It's impossible.
I know a person
who tried it and
failed
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•
Has anyone else
ever tried it?
•
Let's look into it
further.
Conclusion
Now that you know your ideation
techniques, go ahead and get as many ideas
as you can. No idea is stupid, and some
great ideas come from the worst ideas. To
get as many ideas as possible, it is very
important to use multiple ideation
techniques. The goal should not be to get
one idea that works but to get as many
ideas as possible and work on them to get
the one big idea. While generating ideas try
to be openminded and not judgmental to
your team’s ideas. Allow the ideas to flow
and also avoid negative phrases as those
illustrated in this chapter. At this moment
you should be able to define
•
Quit dreaming.
all the ideation techniques and also identify
the ideation techniques that are
appropriate to use in each situation.
Remember that you can use multiple idea
techniques at once.
Key Terms
Ideation techniques, Creativity,
Imagination, Categorization
Problem Sets
1.
What do you understand by the
term “ideation”?
2.
List three ideation techniques your
team will use and reasons for choosing each
technique
3.
Compare and contrast any two
ideation techniques of your choice.
4.
How do ideation techniques help to
break categorization
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CHAPTER 11: USER REQUIREMENTS, VALUE FULFILMENT
BLUEPRINT, AND DARK PATTERN DESIGN
Chapter Description
At the end of this chapter, you will have
gained in depth knowledge on Value
fulfilment blueprint (VFB), the various
components of VFB, Personal journey map,
Requirements Definition, Front end actions,
Back end actions and support processes and
systems. The chapter dives deeper on
requirements definition and dark pattern
design. This is to help readers to design a
solution that will deliver what is expected
and also to ensure that the solution is void
of any traces of dark pattern design.
Imagine you buy a new video game and find
out that it is not what you expected it to be.
Very disappointing, I guess. Or imagine you
spend long hours at night writing code and
then it runs and gives you a different
output. That is even more frustrating. This is
what happens even with design. Every good
design should be able to deliver exactly
what you want it to deliver, that is why it is
important to specify what is desired from
any system or solution you are designing.
User requirements are what you want or
desire from a system or solution, which you
believe will deliver you a competitive
advantage. You need to come out with a
good set of user requirements needed for
any project, especially computer system
projects, to be successful. This is where
many projects fail, in that they do not
specify correctly what the system should
do. In fact, many systems have just been
given a deadline for delivery, a budget to
spend, and a vague notion of what it should
do
Introduction
Whether it is the sale of a book (tangible
product) or the provision of a hotel service
or the running of a campaign (intangible
product), there is the need to fulfil value to
the user. Both users and firms are often on
a journey in search of value fulfilment. The
journey will outline how the user goes
through the process of encountering,
accessing, and using the solution as well as
engaging the solution provider in after sales
interaction. Experiences along this journey
involves value fulfillment. The journey in
pursuit of value fulfilment includes a
number of sequential steps undertaken by
both users and firms. Thus, while the users
are taking steps to fulfil their need for
value, firms also take measures to ensure
they are able to respond to the needs of the
users in order to create value. The user’s
experience together with the firm's
141
corresponding actions are captured in a
framework called the value fulfilment
blueprint (VFB).
To build a journey map, the user experience
is often captured in the form of a user
journey map which provides the step-bystep outline of experience points as
mentioned above. The user journey will
typically be developed to unpack the user
behavior around a solution. It will outline
the experience points that the user
encounters in going through the pain points
or the solution points that the developer or
organization came up with. So, if a designer
or organization focuses on providing value
at each of those experience points, the
designer would be fulfilling value at an
optimal level for the user.
Value Fulfilment Blueprint (VFB)
Blueprints have been used to describe the
art of building. They provide instructions for
how to develop projects and provide the
necessary information that will enable
other people coming into contact with the
project to understand what it involves and
the requirements to move it from one
phase to another as well as a sense of the
outcomes. The Value Fulfillment Blueprint
draws from the strengths of the concept of
the blueprint.
To ground the concept of value fulfillment
in previous work, the VFB was adapted from
21 Shostack, G. Lynn. "Designing Services that Deliver", Harvard
Business Review, vol. 62, no. 1 January - February 1984, pp 133–139
<Online Bitner, M. J., Ostrom, A. L., & Morgan, F. N. (2008). Service
Blueprinting: A Practical Technique for Service Innovation. California
a similar tool, the Service Blueprint from
marketing literature21 that seeks to unpack
user service experience at a high level of
detail. The service blueprint outlines the
user journey (customer actions) that a
service organization needs to map out in
order to properly fulfill it. The journey map
is outlined from the perspective of how the
user might expect to receive value to fulfil
their needs. It then outlines actions of the
company that respond visibly to the user
journey and another layer of actions that
respond invisibly (in the background) to
enable the visible actions. In our case, it is
important to note the requirements
definition after outlining the user journey
so as to properly inform the company’s
actions. Finally, there is a set of systemsrelated infrastructure or databases that the
visible and invisible fulfilment actions pull
from, which will also benefit from proper
requirements definition (Shostack, 1984).
Steps to creating a VFB
Creating a VFB is particularly important
because most services and goods reach the
final consumer via a process such as the
Awareness, Interest, Decision, and Action
(AIDA) model from the marketing literature.
Though, such processes in this blueprint are
often considered as a peculiar feature of
services, firms producing tangible goods
undeniably also go through some sort of
Management Review, 50(3), 66–94.
https://doi.org/10.2307/41166446
142
AIDA process to reach their final users
(distribution-to-end-users). Hence, it is
useful for producers (both tangible goods
and/or services) to map out and understand
the processes involved in getting their value
(goods or tangible products service) to the
final user. The VFB as adapted from the
service blueprint comprises five main
components as described above, which are
centered on the customer experience and
journey to finding value. The five
components reveal the various facets of the
customer’s journey to pursuing value;
probable point of contact with the firm’s
employees or product (truth-test minute);
accompanying background activities; and
support infrastructure to support the
creation of value.
Components of Value Fulfillment
Blueprint
1.
Persona Journey
Persona Journey comprises the steps that
users take as part of his/her pursuit of
value. In our case, we are focused at this
point on how the persona we developed
interacts with the solution that we
prototyped in order to derive value from it.
So, the team has to outline the specific
experience point before, during and after
the persona interacts with the solution.
These experience points are often specified
across the top of the VFB. The persona
(user) journey to assessing the value
promised, is often at the crux of the VFB, in
that it determines the flow of both front
and back end actions.
The importance of the journey map
Imagine you worked for Apple and were on
the team that first developed apple music.
You knew that the goal was for customers
to stream and download music from your
servers, but they needed to pay you for this.
Instead of envisioning what the customer
would do, you would have developed a
journey map. This is a simple way for you to
know what the customer would do so that
you can develop something that gives
him/her a great experience. Not to mention
a great experience for you in terms of
revenue.
To think of what a simple journey map
would look like, you can think of starting a
waakye stand. Putting yourself in a
customer’s shoes, you know he/she is
hungry and looking for a meal. Thus, the
first thing in the experience is seeing a
waakye signboard. The signboard should
have pictures of tasty looking food to
attract customers to the stand. Within this
stage, the decision of where to locate the
stand would come into play. You then know
the customer would want to know what
exactly there is to buy, so having a display
of the food for the customer to see is
essential. After this, a price list will be
needed for the customer to budget. Once
he/she has ordered, he/she needs a way to
eat, either on site or take-out. Having a
table and chair, bowls, take-out packs and
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cutlery is essential here, so planning of this
must be done. These steps will be well
structured on your journey map to have
good insight on setting up your business in
the right way.
Another simple train of thought for this
Apple Music journey map would be the
customer needs to have a form of payment
(i.e., Credit card, debit, mobile money). This
would be the first point of contact in the
customer journey after hearing about the
service. Creating an account will be next,
then he/she would need to have a way to
search for music. Once this is done, an
option to stream and download music
should be available.
The journey map is important because it
aids you in identifying the path that users
will travel on. Even though your map will
not necessarily detail out the perfect
journey, it will give you good grounds to
develop a product or service that customers
will appreciate.
According to Vivekanandarajah (2019),
other importance of the journey map
include.
●
Eliminating roadblocks that could
creep up in the customer’s experience.
●
Knowing what exactly a customer
would want in a specific scenario
●
Understanding the true process of
how customers move through your service.
Imagine that you own a restaurant and
believe that customers will order their meal
once they sit down. You could be wrong
because you did not truly empathize with
them. A journey map could have helped you
realize that they would be thirsty, so they
would order drinks first, hence having a
drinks menu on the table first.
●
In the process of iterating your idea,
a journey map gives guidance in knowing
where along the customer experience,
change would be affected.
●
Focus on the customer and not
yourself. You may be tempted to design a
product how you want because you believe
it will work. However, your experience
might not be the same as other people.
Thus, the journey map aids you in
empathizing with what a customer would
truly need from your product or service.
●
It aids everyone on your team to be
coherency. If everyone has ideas of how a
customer journey will look like, the journey
map synthesizes each idea to become one
distinct process everyone agrees on.
2.
Requirements Definition
Once the persona journey has been
outlined, the second component of the VFB
is requirements definition along the
persona journey. Requirements definition
tells us what the system or solution must
do, and we apply it in the VFB in terms of
what the system must do for the user in a
way that also provides business advantage
for the firm. We focus on functional and
nonfunctional requirements. Functional
requirements are what you want a system
to do and non-functional requirements are
restrictions on the type of solutions that will
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meet the functional requirements. The
team must identify functional requirements
for each experience point and also identify
the non-functional requirements that will
meet the functional requirements. For
instance, when the persona (customer)
orders, the system should store the
customer and order details (functional
requirements).
The details should be specified, e.g., order
details captured in 3 secs (non-functional
requirements), so the needed information
is stored. Non-functional requirements also
break into performance and development
constraints. Performance constraints are
how the system should perform when it is
delivered. Performance constraints may
include some development constraints such
as the time the solution should be
delivered, how much money is needed to
develop the solution and quality standards
used to develop the solution including
project management, development
methods etc. Development constraints also
include design objectives which assist in
selecting a solution from several alternative
solutions which meets a specified criterion.
The importance of functional requirements
Every product or service operates in ways
that deliver value to a customer. If a
product did not work or “function”, it would
not even be purchased in the first place.
When a problem is first discovered and an
entrepreneur seeks to solve it by
researching, gathering first-hand
information from people who face the
problem and ideating on what a solution
could be, the entrepreneur must then think
of how the solution will work.
If we look at a water bottle (bel-aqua for
example), we are used to its shape and size
because most water bottles look like that.
After using water bottles almost every day
of our lives, we know the value of the
bottle. This value is however understated.
In this case of functional requirements
definitions, picture a world where bottles
do not exist yet. The only way people drink
water is by pouring water from taps into
bowls and then consuming. Also, people
drink water hand to mouth in this world
(find a tap, fetch with your hand and pour
into your mouth). Now as an entrepreneur,
you realize this is a problem and after all
your research, you ideate on a solution that
could help people have water with them on
the go.
At this point, you do not have a clear idea
on what the solution is, but you can analyze
what the product must do. Since customers
are on the go, the product must be easily
accessible (i.e., Must be easy to carry). Then
you realize that customers would want to
physically see if their water is clean, so they
trust the product. Also, you foresee that the
product must hold water securely and not
spill and must be able to withstand certain
temperatures.
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Knowing these things (keeping in mind that
we do not know what the product will look
like) we can create functional requirements.
It is with these requirements that overtime
aid you in developing a final product.
If we look at a bottle cap and its design in
our example’s context, we can assume that
it was developed through a functional
requirement that states the product must
hold water securely and avoid spillage. It
could also have been developed through
another requirement that focuses on the
user drinking water easily.
Filippo Salustri, a Canadian researcher gives
good examples on what good vs bad
functional requirements sound like. If we
need a product that helps users drink Milo
in the mornings, we know that coffee would
most likely be drunk hot (maybe even cold).
In in developing a requirement, you can
state that:
The container must be able to sustain hot
and cold temperatures. In this instance, the
container is mentioned as opposed to cup
or jug because we do not want any creative
blocks. Cup or jug will automatically have us
thinking about what the product will look
like and be able to do and will limit the
requirements that follow in your
definitions, hence producing something
without unique value.
Thus a few importances of functional
requirements are:
●
They help the entrepreneur know
what key features the product/service must
have in order to provide a valuable solution
to problems.
●
They help in the creative thinking of
a designer and help avoid creative blocks in
design. Salustri (2015), states that a bad
example of a functional requirement is to
state the exact material a product should
have. Instead of saying that your product
should use plastic, rather say it should use a
durable material that can withstand certain
temperatures.
●
These requirements can also guide
you in avoiding mistakes. If you start
developing a product without having
detailed out what the product must do, you
can end up missing something essential.
This could lead to wasting resources like
money and time.
●
Again, functional requirements aid
designers to empathize with potential
users, thus developing a well-needed
product or service.
3.
Front End Actions
The front-end actions are the next
important aspect of the blueprint. These
actions include the face-to-face interactions
employees make with users in the delivery
of value for service and contact with the
goods, in the case of tangible products. It is
at this stage that the “truth-test minute”
occurs. This is the moment that users get an
opportunity to assess whether the firm is
offering the value promised by coming into
direct contact with the goods or service.
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4.
Back End Actions
Back end actions mostly comprise activities
that are not visible to the customers. These
are usually activities that employees
undertake in preparation to offer value to
users.
How front and backstage actions support
touchpoints on the customer journey.
If you want to have a nice bowl of fufu and
light soup on a Saturday afternoon with
your friends, that sounds like a lot of fun for
you. All you need to do is find a restaurant,
sit down, eat, pay and leave. However, for
the restaurant, a lot of processes go into
making this experience worthwhile for you,
so you appreciate it and come back another
time.
Picturing yourself as the customer, you
head to La Fancy Restaurant in East Legon
with Kwame and Briggs. La Fancy is a threestar hotel and is very popular for their good
tasting local meals. When you arrive, you
are greeted by the doorman who opens the
door for you and makes you feel welcome.
That is a front stage action.
A front stage action is a physical interaction
between a customer and a service. Usually,
the customer interacts with an employee. It
is a visible and interactive moment in the
customer’s journey. These actions are what
provide a customer with satisfaction and
help the customer see the value in the
product or service he/she is using.
After being greeted at the door, you walk to
take a seat and get approached by a waiter
to take your order. This is another front
stage action. The waiter must be
appropriately dressed, address you
respectfully, have a pen and paper to take
your order and may have a few
recommendations or specials for you to try
out. This is a front-end action because you
can see what is happening. This is a point
on your journey at which you are physically
interacting with some part of a product or
service.
When the waiter takes your order to the
chef, this is a backstage action. This is of
high importance along your journey
although you cannot physically see this part
of the process but have some awareness
that it is happening. Preparing the meal
comes with smells, coordination among
kitchen staff, a lot of hustle and bustle and
heat. This is done behind the scenes and
away from paying customers because it is
not an experience the customer intends to
have. The customer wants a serene
environment where he can have peace to
have conversations.
Once the order is ready, the waiter delivers
it to the customer’s table, which is
considered as another front-end action,
since the customer interacts with the waiter
again. After your meal, you head to the
front desk to pay for your meal. The point
where you give your cash to the manager is
a front stage action, but when he/she is
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processing your payment on the computer,
that is a backstage action since you have no
part in that interaction.
After all this, you leave and are once again
saluted by the doorman, giving you a smile
and making you feel like a return to the
restaurant will happen soon.
Along the customer journey, many front
stage and backstage actions occur which
deliver value. It is important to detail out
Image 11:1: VFB for overnight Hotel Stay service
what the processes will be when developing
a business idea.
5.
Support Processes and Systems
The final aspect of the VFB is to determine
the support processes and systems
necessary for the execution of value. These
are mostly the infrastructural requirements
needed to facilitate the provision of the
goods or services
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The VFB can be said to provide 3 main
advantages:
1.
A step-by-step outline which helps
examine the complex interactions between
the persona and the idea concept.
2.
It also provides an opportunity to
improve on the experiences and creating a
sustainable process to ensure repeatability.
3.
Allowing consideration of the
system that shapes and supports the
customer’s experience with the brand.
Key Summary Points (The Value
fulfillment & Service Blueprint)
●
Value Fulfillment Blueprint is an
adaptation of the Service Blueprint, a
common framework used in mapping out
organizational response to customer
actions in the service industry (Bitner,
Ostrom and Morgan, 2007).
●
It helps design teams to quickly map
out the implementation outline of creative
solutions, leveraging the customer journeys
they created during the design process and
also before they develop a business model
canvas.
●
We use Value Fulfillment Blueprint
instead of Service Blueprint because our
focus is on value delivery and it is easier to
model it for use for Products as well. The
key feature of the VFB is the customer
journey map (customer actions): This is the
journey map of how the user uses the
solution that the team has developed. In
other words, the ideal experience that the
user goes through to know about the
solution, decide to use it, use it and then
whatever the user does after use. Hence, it
might be slightly different from the journey
map that was created during analysis in the
design process but will definitely be
strongly connected to it. (We often
encourage the team to redo/adapt their
design journey to fit the solution
experience).
●
Since the VFB is based on the
journey map of solution experience and the
journey map is focused on the before
during and after of the solution experience,
the VFB also outlines the actions the team
needs to take to ensure that they are
fulfilling the value touch points in the user
journey for maximum impact on the user.
●
It is important to incorporate the
Requirements Definition in the VFB to
optimize on value delivery. Requirements
definition comprises the functional and
non-functional requirements. Functional
requirements need to be identified by the
team for each experience point and nonfunctional requirements identified to meet
the functional requirement.
●
Also, since the VFB was originally
created for service value, it can be difficult
to apply to products. Students often
struggle with what a ‘before’ and ‘after’ of a
product experience is. Note to make is that
for products, the ‘before’ is the steps the
user goes through to learn about the
product and make a choice (the typical
production adoption process/cycle). The
‘after’ is what the user does to ‘keep in
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touch’ with the product use experience
(e.g., of a question for team is ‘should they
develop a user community for the product
so that the users will share stories on
use?’).
●
The Physical Evidence line in the VFB
can be a distraction for value modelling and
should be avoided if possible, at this early
stage. However, physical evidence is
incredibly valuable if ambience influences
the value.
●
Support services make more sense if
explained as infrastructure, user database,
order processing system, logistics system or
any implemented system.
●
The VFB is an important step before
the business model canvas (BMC). It forces
the team to think about what they need to
do to acquire customers, fulfill the need
they found and sustain the customer
lifetime value as much as possible. After
successfully developing VFB, the BMC is
typically a breeze because some BMC
components are identified in the VFB.
Trying to identify the employee actions also
helps the team come to terms with how to
build capacity (e.g., what to do in-house
and what to outsource (all of which affects
the cost/revenue equation components on
the BMC)).
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Image 11:2: Example of a Blueprint22
Requirements Definition
According to Coley Consulting (2019), a
requirement aids in specifying what you
22 Source: https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/96948121.pdf
want or desire from a system. For example,
when running a business, look at, “what do
customers want or look out for from my
system, which I believe will deliver me a
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business advantage". The advantages of this
are a reduction in costs and time for
processing.
Classification of requirements
1.
Functional Requirements
This refers to characteristics you require the
system to portray. Functional requirements
are focused on the “WHAT, not the HOW.
That is, WHAT the system will deliver, not
HOW it will be delivered” (Coley Consulting,
2019).
For example, the functional requirements
for designing washing machines for a
business can be:
●
The capacity of the machine; should
be holding a specific number of clothes at
the same time.
●
The time it takes to finish washing.
2.
Non-Functional Requirements
Imagine having a washing machine that can
also serve as a cooker. Sounds weird right.
Nonfunctional requirements are the
restrictions or constraints to be placed on
the system and how to build it. Their
purpose is to restrict the number of
solutions that will meet a set of defined
requirements. There are two types of Nonfunctional requirements: Performance
constraints and development constraints
(Watt, 2012).
Performance Constraints
This refers to constraints of “how the
system should perform when it is
delivered”. The washing machine example,
without any constraints, might result in
solutions being offered for everything from
drying, ironing, folding. To restrict the types
of solutions you might include these
performance constraints:
●
It should take a laundry load of 5kg.
●
The drum must always be covered
before washing.
Development Constraints
These are constraints done by mainly
project managers to restrict the types of
solutions offered. Development constraints
can be classified in three types (Coley
Consulting, 2019).
Resource - The amount of money available
to develop the system.
Time - Period taken to deliver the system.
Quality - The standards based on to
develop the system like project
development methods.
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Image 11:3: Differences between Functional and Non-functional requirements23
Tips for writing a good requirement
A good requirement should be necessary,
attainable, verifiable, and have clarity
(Hooks, 1993).
Necessity: Ask yourself “What is the worst
thing that could happen if this requirement
were not included? If you fail to answer this
question, then that requirement is not
necessary.
Verification: Determine how you will verify
a requirement. Decide on the criteria for
acceptance. This will show whether that
requirement is verifiable or not.
Attainable: The requirement should fit
within the budget, schedule, and other
constraints. It should be feasible. You need
to carry out a feasibility study if uncertain of
the feasibility of the requirement.
23 Source: https://theappsolutions.com/blog/development/functional-vs-non-functional-requirements/
153
Clarity: The requirement should be simple,
concise and easily understandable. It should
be easily expressed in a single thought.
Dark Pattern Design
A report released by Norwegian Consumer
Council (Forburkerrådet) reveals that some
tech companies are using dark patterns to
discourage us from exercising our rights to
privacy. Dark pattern design appears to be
innocent but are they ethical? Are you using
dark pattern design in the name of offering
a great user experience?
Definition
Dark Patterns are interfaces that are
carefully designed to intentionally confuse
users to follow a path different from the
one they wanted to take. They are
deliberately designed to neglect the user’s
needs and rather reach a company’s
objectives (Cieplinska, 2019). For instance,
clicking fake buttons or unwittingly
extending payment. Apart from these, tech
companies design their product in a way
that its users easily become addicted to it.
According to Fagerstrom (2018), businesses
that are using dark pattern design are only
concerned with designing their products to
24 Source:https://medium.com/beautiful-code-smart-design-by10clouds/5-common-ux-dark-patterns-interfaces-designed-totrick-you-61fdede9718c
make profits. They use their dark pattern
design as a bait to their users.
Dark pattern design examples by
Fagerstrom (2019)24
1. Credit card-required free trial
“Most sites give you the option to do a free
trial before subscribing to their sites. Using
the free trial requires you to again give
them your credit card details, how then is it
free? During the account setup process,
you’re asked to provide your credit card
info. You don’t think it’s a problem as the
sign-up form has a big text saying, “FREE
TRIAL”. You willingly offer your credit card
details and created a trial account. After the
free trial, the company secretly converts
your trial account to a regular paid account
and deducts a fee every month from your
bank account. Most of us can certainly
relate to this. Companies use this to convert
their leads to paying customers. They make
it so easy to sign up for an account, make
the fine prints unnoticeable. Everything is
aligned to the laws. The worst part is — they
make it difficult for their users to terminate
the subscription.”
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Image 11:4: Example Credit card-required free trial
2. Signing you up for promotion emails
automatically
“If you check the promotion part of your
mails after signing up to Jumia or Amazon,
you will understand this well. The new
European GDPR requires that businesses
must obtain their users’ explicit consent
Image 11:5: Example automatic email sign up
before sending them any marketing
material. Customers can uncheck the box
and reject such mails but most times the
text is so small, most customers would not
notice their option and once they click on
Check Out, the company would get one
more email on their ever-growing mailing
list.”
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3. Misleading Popup
Sometimes, while surfing through the web,
a phone advert may just pop up on your
screen. It requires you to “Sign Up” but the
“No, thanks button” is rarely visible. In
order to get rid of this pop-up message,
most visitors give in their email addresses. A
better and ethical design should have a
clearly visible “No, thanks” button right
next to the “Sign-Up” button.
your solution is void of any form of dark
pattern design. From the above examples of
dark design patterns, you have seen how
bad those designs are to users. What can
you do to make your design ethical? Put this
question at the back of your mind when
trying to design a product for your users. As
an ethical designer, you should focus on a
product that gives your users a better
experience.
Conclusion
Key words
In conclusion, VFB is useful in providing
instructions for developing your projects. It
will also help to provide information about
your product. This will enable other people
coming into contact with the project to
understand it. Furthermore, with the
knowledge you have obtained about user
requirements, you can go ahead to specify
the set of deliverables you want for your
system. Remember to let your users
prioritize their requirements so that you do
not design something they will not value.
This will also be a great time to ensure that
Requirements, Dark pattern design, Value
fulfillment Blueprint, Personal Journey
Problem sets
1.
Create a VFB for your project?
2.
What are user requirements?
3.
How will you practice ethical design
in your business venture?
4.
Differentiate between functional
and nonfunctional user requirements?
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CHAPTER 12: WIREFRAMING AND PROTOTYPING
At the end of this chapter, one should be
able to define prototyping, understand the
prototyping process, gain insights on how
they can design a prototype, understand
why it is important to come out with a
prototype for the final product and, be able
to differentiate between a wireframe and a
prototype. Additionally, one will learn and
get to explore the various tools used for
wireframing either manually or using online
apps/tools. Also, one will understand what
to keep in mind while wireframing or
prototyping. How can team members in
different locations prototype or wireframe?
This chapter introduces the topic of remote
prototyping which is suitable for such team
members. Finally, one will understand
which kind of venture or project needs a
prototype or wireframe. And which tools
will be favorable in developing such a
prototype or wireframe.
design thinking process. Prototyping is the
fourth stage of the design thinking process.
After the ideation stage, you have a lot of
ideas and you may like to pursue some of
these ideas. Prototyping is the process of
producing an early, less expensive, and
simpler version of the product in order to
reveal any problems with the current
design.
Closely linked to prototyping; wireframing.
A wireframe creates the structure and
backbone of your entire project making it
easier to, later on, build individual parts. In
simple terms, a wireframe is a low-fidelity,
simplified outline of your product stripped
of any visual design or branding features.
Wireframes can be compared to skeletons;
they loosely shape the final product thereby
giving you a fair idea of how the final
product will be. A wireframe is like a
blueprint in the design process that should
not be skipped, just as you would not build
a house without a blueprint (Yadav, 2019).
Introduction
Prototype
Imagine after your intensive research
process, you design an amazing product and
send it to the market absolutely positive
that it is going to satisfy the needs of your
users only to realize that they do not like
the product features. That will be a lot of
time and resources wasted! This loss would
have been avoided by Prototyping.
Remember we saw prototyping in the
A prototype is a simple experimental model
of a proposed solution used to test or
validate ideas, design assumptions and
other aspects of its conceptualization
quickly and cheaply so that the designer/s
involved can make appropriate refinements
or possible changes in direction.
A common characteristic of most
prototypes is tangibility. They can take so
many different forms. They can be just
Chapter Description
157
about anything. Examples could be simple
sketches or storyboards used to illustrate a
proposed experiential solution, rough paper
prototypes of digital interfaces, and even
role-playing to act out a service offering an
idea. They need not to be complete
products: You can choose a part of your
solution and prototype it (like testing the
steering wheel of a car alone) to test that
specific part of your solution.
Prototyping comes in here to provide a set
of tools and approaches for properly testing
and exploring ideas before too many
resources get used. Most people can trace
the art of prototyping back to childhood, we
replicated real-world objects with simple
materials such as paper, card, and
modelling clay or just about anything else
we could get our hands-on. This is the same
as the early rough prototypes we come up
with at the early stages of testing (Dam &
Siang, 2019).
“If a picture is worth a thousand words,
then a prototype is worth a thousand
meetings.”
(Kelley, 2018).
Prototypes can take two dimensions:
1.
Quick and rough - Usually used for
early-stage testing.
2.
Fully formed and detailed- This is
commonly used for pilot trials or testing
towards the end of the project (Dam &
Siang, 2019).
Importance of Prototyping
1.
To back up early research
You may be wondering why you need to do
a prototype when you already did research
at the early stages of design thinking. The
truth is research carried out at the early
stages of your Design Thinking project does
not inform you enough in order to create
the optimal solution. Irrespective of
whether you have researched thoroughly
and gathered a large body of information,
or whether your ideation sessions have
resulted in what many perceive as a mindblowing solution, testing is still important
for success. Design teams may become too
focused on the research artefacts they have
gathered during the earlier phases of
exploration thereby creating a bias towards
their ideas. Creating and testing your
prototypes can reveal assumptions and
biases you have towards your ideas and
uncover insights about your users that you
can use to improve your solutions or create
new ones (Dam & Siang, 2019).
2.
Test
To Empathise, Define, Ideate, and
You can and should prototype at various
stages of the design thinking process.
Prototyping can serve as an ideation
method since it allows you, as well as users,
to explore alternative solutions.
This is because prototypes are physical
representations of your solutions, and thus
prototyping allows you to think by doing.
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“Thinking by doing” helps in deriving more
value from research, ideation, testing
among others (Dam & Siang, 2019).
Purposes of prototypes:
●
Exploring and Experimentation
Prototypes can be used to explore
problems, ideas, and opportunities within a
specific area of focus and test out the
impact of little and progressive or radical
changes (Dam & Siang, 2019).
●
Inspiring and Motivating
Prototypes help you to sell new ideas,
motivate internal or external stakeholders
to buy-in or agree with your idea, or inspire
markets toward radical new ways of
thinking and doing (Dam & Siang, 2019).
●
Engaging, Testing, and Experiencing
You can use prototypes to engage with endusers or stakeholders, in a manner that
opens you up to deeper revelations, insights
and more valuable experiences, to inform
design decisions going forward (Dam &
Siang, 2019).
●
Learning and Understanding
Prototypes can help you better understand
the complexities of a problem, product, or
system by physically engaging with them
and identifying what makes them work or
fail (Dam & Siang, 2019).
How Prototyping Works
Bias Towards Action
Design Thinking Bootcamp Bootleg Toolkit
lists bias towards action as one of the
essential mindsets for Design Thinking.
“Design thinking is a misnomer; it is more
about doing than thinking. Bias toward
doing and making over-thinking and
meeting.”– d. school
With design thinking, you cannot over
analyze or over think the problem because
it requires that you investigate each
assumption through active testing, instead
of theoretically thinking it through.
Controlled experiments help to prove or
disprove your assumptions (Dam & Siang,
2019).
Creative Serendipity
In their book Creative Confidence, David
and Tom Kelley, founders of international
design firm IDEO discuss the importance of
cultivating creative serendipity. They
encourage the adoption of approaches that
help create an epiphany-friendly
environment within oneself. What happens
is this: when you deeply immerse yourself
within your subject of interest, you open up
opportunities for happy accidents. The
Kelleys bring out instances of people who
made breakthroughs not by thinking
through solutions but by trying things and
figuring them out. One of the best ways to
learn about the positive and negative
dynamics of your solution is to take physical
action, by experimenting with and exploring
components of the potential solutions.
Prototyping helps you bring your ideas into
159
a tangible plane, which will help you and
your team to see and discuss the
advantages and disadvantages, to learn
from users’ feedback, and to create
opportunities for creative serendipity
(Kelley & Kelley, 2013).
the form of sketches on a napkin, roleplaying or anything that allows turning your
ideas into tangible and testable (Dam &
Siang, 2019).
Learning by Doing
According to Dam & Siang (2019), Design
Thinking allows you to explore unknown
possibilities and uncover unknown insights.
As a result, design thinking emphasizes the
importance of learning using activities that
increase the learning potential of the team.
It will help you boost action-oriented
learning by experimenting and exploring
the proposed solutions in order to
understand what problems may exist with
the assumptions behind those solutions. As
such, your team can iterate rapidly,
modifying your test models and moving you
closer and closer to the goal.
There are basically two types of
prototyping.
Types of Prototyping
Low Fidelity Prototyping
This involves using an incomplete model of
the final product with just a few features
that will be found in the final product. It
may be made out of materials not intended
for the finished product like wood or paper.
Examples of low fidelity prototypes are
storyboarding, Sketching, card sorting, and
wizard of Oz. Low fidelity prototyping has
the following advantages
●
It is easy to make.
●
It is inexpensive.
●
The Take-Away
Sometimes we forget to establish a
connection between our ideas and the user
and only focus on brainstorming, planning
and implementing our ideas. We then
realize that the assumptions upon which we
based our solutions might have been
wrong. This leads to significant wastes of
time and resources. Prototyping helps
prevent this. Prototyping quickly, and
frequently, is the best way to test your
assumptions, learn about users, and
improve on your ideas. Prototypes can be in
Enables the designer to get an
overall view of the product using minimal
time and effort.
●
Users find it easier to interact with a
low fidelity prototype.
Disadvantage
Since Low fidelity prototyping lacks more
features of the final product, it may not
properly inform the designer (Dam & Siang,
2019).
High Fidelity Prototyping
High fidelity prototyping involves using a
prototype that has most of the features and
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functionality of the final product. It allows
users to interact with the prototype in a
similar way they will interact with the final
model. An example of a high-fidelity
prototype could be creating a 3D model of a
car (Dam & Siang, 2019).
High fidelity prototyping is advantageous in
that
●
It is engaging because users can
have a feel of exactly what the final product
will look like, and the designer will be able
to judge how well it meets the wants,
needs, and expectations of the user.
●
It also allows the designer to get
feedback with a high level of validity and
applicability.
High fidelity prototyping is disadvantageous
in that
●
It is expensive to create.
●
Coming up with a high-fidelity
prototype is time-consuming (Dam & Siang,
2019).
What to Avoid During Prototyping?
Avoid diving into the first promising idea
you come up with during prototyping.
Test many options within your idea, do not
throw away any ideas until you have tested
them. This gives you room and inspiration
to create more ideas or merge a few
solutions into a better and more successful
one, by testing alternative ideas and making
quick and dirty prototypes.
Avoid getting too attached to your
prototype.
Do not place too much value on your
prototype so that it becomes difficult to
change its features or discard it when
necessary. Remember it is just a prototype
and not a final version of the product. It is
subject to changes and even thrashing. To
avoid this, it will be better to start with
cheap and fast prototypes. Preferably low
fidelity prototypes. This reduces the
chances of you putting a lot of value on the
prototype.
Avoid wasting time on pitching your
prototype
Avoid explaining a lot when presenting your
prototype. If you have to explain a lot of
things about your prototype, your user will
not be interacting well with the product
because you will be interrupting their
interaction. As a result, you will not be able
to get the insights that you had to get from
the user's interaction with the prototype. If
you find out that you have a lot of
explaining to do about your prototype, then
that should already tell you that the
prototype has issues. Have a bias towards
action, instead of telling them what to do,
create a prototype that allows them to do
what they want to do.
Avoid Prototyping without a purpose
Even though the overall objective of
prototyping is to test the viability of a
product when it is important to ask yourself
“Why am I creating this prototype” during
prototyping. Have a purpose. It may be to
test an assumption, test the usability of
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your product or some other purpose.
Having a purpose for your prototype
informs you about what kind of prototype
you will be making.
Stages of Prototyping
Now that you are all warmed up to build
your prototype, find below some steps you
can follow to help you come up with a good
prototype
Create a sketch of your concept on paper
Sometimes, you may get amazing ideas but
because you failed to write them down, you
realize that you later forget what you had in
mind or maybe you will not be able to
remember all about it at a later date. It is
therefore important to visualize your ideas
on paper. It gives you room to put down as
many ideas as you want and at a faster
pace.
Develop a virtual prototype
Now that you have your paper prototype,
transfer and create a digital sketch of the
same concept. A digital representation of
your prototype makes it look more real and
makes it easier for you to have a better
view of what the final prototype will look
like. You could do this by sketching your
prototype on the computer or creating a 3D
print of it.
Build a physical prototype
Now you are ready to build your physical
prototype. This is the most exciting part of
the process because it gives you the
opportunity to see exactly what your final
product will look like. If you cannot build
your prototype on your own, you may seek
professional help to do it. Remember it is
okay to make mistakes and correct them
along the way.
Remote Prototyping
This refers to creating prototypes by teams
who are in different locations and are not
able to meet physically. Working remotely
has become the new norm because of the
COVID19 pandemic. Team members who
are in their respective homes because of
situations like COVID19 can prototype by
following the steps below.
●
After coming up with the idea for
your prototype. Discuss and assign among
team members who will be responsible for
building the various parts of the prototype.
●
Each team member should
physically build the assigned part of the
prototype and take pictures to share with
the group.
●
Photoshop all the images of the
different parts of the prototype together to
create a complete design. Use platforms
like; online collaborative tools like Google
Slides, Mural and Miro, design online tools
like SolidWorks and AutoCAD and also,
remote applications like TensorFlow for
JavaScript using Lego Mindstorms and
TechViz. These platforms can both be used
on laptops and mobile phones if given
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access to the camera, accelerometer and
other sensors.
WIREFRAMES
Similarly, to a prototype, a wireframe is a
low-fidelity, simplified outline of your
product stripped of any visual design or
branding features.
The three main Purposes of
Wireframes
●
Presents the information that will be
expected on the page
●
Gives an outline of the structure and
layout of the page
●
Conveys overall direction and
description of the user interface
(Fanguy,2018).
Examples of Wireframes
It will be helpful to look at some examples
of wireframes before you start designing
your own wireframe. This will give you
some inspiration for your own wireframes
and also open you up to a variety of ways of
creating them. Some people draw their
wireframes by hand, others feel more
comfortable using software like
InvisionApp, or Balsamiq. You should
choose whichever works for you. However,
keep the following in mind when deciding
on your wireframe creation process
(Allabarton, 2019):
●
If you want to easily make changes
to your wireframe, then it is advisable to
draw it with paper and a pencil, or at a
whiteboard. This helps you to make early
adjustments after feedback is given.
●
Paper-prototypes can help you test
with end-users at every stage of ideation
and design because it is easier and cheaper
to make changes at this stage than changes
whose necessity is first discovered after
coding is underway.
●
After using paper wireframes,
progressing to software wireframes enables
you to keep track of more detailed actions
(Allabarton, 2019).
Deciding on your Wireframe Process
Different UX designers approach the task of
wireframing in different ways. Some use
online apps or tools while others draw by
hand. Most times, the decision to either use
hand or online apps and tools depends on
requirements of a particular approach and
not the UX designer’s individual preference
(Allabarton, 2019).
Below are steps different designers
structure the wireframing process from
design to implementation (Allabarton,
2019):
1.
Wireframe - Interactive Prototype Visual – Design
2.
Sketch – Code
3.
Sketch - Wireframe - Hi-Def
Wireframe - Visual – Code
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4.
Sketch - Wireframe - Visual -Code
Which Tools Are Best for
Wireframing?
According to Allabarton (2019), there are so
many free tools for creating wireframes and
prototypes. Try out as many as you can to
find the ones that will work for you.
Remember you can also use a pen and
paper. Below are examples of these tools
UXPin
It has a wide range of functionalities and
facilitates the creation of responsive
clickable wireframes directly in your
browser.
InVision
It allows you to get feedback straight from
your team and users through clickable
mock-ups of your site design.
Wireframe.cc
Provides you with the technology to create
wireframes quickly within your browser, the
online version of pen and paper.
●
The intended user and business
goals when interacting with this page?
●
How can the content be organized
to support these goals?
●
Where should your main message
and logo go?
●
What should the user see first when
arriving at the page?
●
Where is the call to action?
●
What will the user expect to see in
certain areas of the page? (Allabarton,
2019).
Filling in The Details
Now that you have got blocks of your
wireframe in place, it’s time to key in the
details. We would advise working from top
to bottom and then left to right.
It is also important to define the following
elements in your wireframe:
●
Usability conventions, such as
putting the navigation at the top next to
your logo, having a search box on the top
right, and so on.
●
Spacing and layout.
●
Building the Blocks of Your
Wireframe
If you are wireframing with an online tool,
the same principle applies, get the blocks of
your wireframe on the page first before
thinking about anything else.
To do this, think about:
The hierarchy of the information:
What’s more important than what?
●
What are your calls to action?
●
●
Images: Where and what size?
Trust-building elements: What do
you need to build trust in your customers
and where would be the best place to put
these elements? (Allabarton, 2019).
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Key principles of wireframing
●
The wireframe should provide clarity
on what the what that site page is about,
what the user can do there, and if it
satisfies their needs.
●
Easy navigation through the
wireframe. The calls to actions should be
clear on your wireframe as it will help users
build confidence about your brand.
●
Avoid too much noise on your
wireframe. It can be distracting to have too
much information, copy, links among others
(Allabarton, 2019).
Difference between a wireframe and
a prototype
If you have already done prototyping, you
might be tempted to think that there is no
difference between a wireframe and a
prototype. Both of them are parts of the
design process but they are not the same.
They both serve unique and distinctive
purposes in the design thinking process.
The difference often stems from how much
they resemble the final product (Fanguy,
2018). A wireframe is a skeleton of your
final product. It is the base that provides
you with a general idea of what you are
building. A wireframe makes it easier to
transition to a prototype. Prototypes, on
the other hand, are a more visual
representation of your final product. Think
of them as nearly formed bodies with
moldable skin and facial features. They are
not the final product but may be shown to
the public, unlike the wireframe which is
most often used by the designer (Hannah,
2019).
Conclusion
How you prototype/wireframe or what you
choose as your prototype/wireframe
depends largely on the kind of venture you
are operating or on the kind of project you
are working on. Most times, your
prototype/wireframe will provide you with
valuable insights which will go a long way to
inform the features of the final product.
When in doubt about any feature of your
desired final product, make it part of the
prototype/wireframe to test it. Remember
not to limit yourself to any tools, try as
many as possible to achieve a good
prototype/wireframe for your idea. While
doing this, keep in mind the needs of your
user.
Key Words
Prototyping, Prototype, Low-fidelity, Highfidelity, wireframing, wireframes,
Problem Sets
1.
What do you understand by the
terms prototyping and wireframing?
2.
Do you think prototyping and
wireframing are important or not and why?
3.
What do you understand by the
phrase “If a picture is worth a thousand
words, a prototype is worth a thousand
pictures?”
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CHAPTER 13: BUSINESS MODEL CANVAS (BMC) AND
MINIMUM VIABLE PRODUCT (MVP).
Introduction
By this stage, you have developed a BMC
and have been able to or trying to figure
out if it makes money (or is sustainable if it
is a social venture) or not. If not, you have
been able to innovate your business to find
the optimum revenue over cost. Now, you
are ready to test the underlying
assumptions for your VFB and the BMC you
have made from the start.
Here, the emphasis is on identifying
assumptions across the VFB and canvas and
developing a set of hypotheses for the
assumptions. This is relevant because
bringing a new product to the market is
always risky. You do not want to waste time
and money building a product no one will
want to buy. So, to reduce the risk, you can
first develop a minimum viable product
(MVP) to test your assumptions.
The process of developing an MVP and
testing it to reduce risk is couched in a
broader concept of Customer Development
developed by Steve Blank, Silicon Valley
educator and serial entrepreneur. Blank
realized how, not just start-ups, but big
companies with a lot of funding and wellestablished identities also failed at
launching products because they used
wrong approaches in taking new products
to the market (Blank, 2005).
Business Model
The Business Model refers to how firms
create/deliver/capture value. Imagine you
start growing tomatoes and you want to
innovate a business model selling tomatoes
directly to consumers bypassing retailers or
wholesalers. Which of the business models
will you be able to apply to yourself from
other businesses? There are several
business models like; Direct sales model,
Loyalty business models, Monopolistic
business model, Multi-level marketing
business model, Bricks and Click Business
model, Online auction business model,
Professional open-source model,
Subscription business model among others.
The concept of Business model focuses on
“how” How will you sell your tomatoes?
Which of the business models or
combination of business models are you
going to acquire to the selling of tomatoes?
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How will you differentiate yourself from
others?
The mission- why
The model- how
The plan- what?
You have to step outside the box and bring
the how that creates value for your
customers. Steven Blank came up with the
Business model. According to Blank, (2005),
when you’re a startup you have a lot of
unknowns, you can run straight to business
plan, you need to develop a business
model, test it, validate the unknowns about
Image 13:1: Hausa Koko
customer needs, future services and the
model itself. You do this by iteration.
Example
Taking an example of Koko King in
Ghana. From having Hausa koko in a normal
rubber bag, Koko King brought a new
packaging to Hausa koko. It helped to target
a different set of customers who would not
consume the one in the rubber bag. For
example, the guy in the picture below
would most likely not buy the one in the
rubber bag because it would be disastrous if
it spills on him.
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Image 13:2: Business Model Canvas25
The Business model Canvas has 9 building
blocks as seen in the above image. These 9
Building blocks were developed by Alex
Osterwalder. These blocks can help you
design any business model. A good BMC is
one where the revenue streams are higher
25 Source: https://diytoolkit.org/tools/business-model-canvas/
than the cost structure. After validating
your BMC, you now have the data to
develop the Business plan. The Business
plan structure is provided by Business
Model Canvas (Cowan, 2017).
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Image 13:3: Business Model Canvas for Social Impact 26
Innovating the Business Model
Canvas
Talking about the business model canvas, it
is important to look at the 10 types of
innovation related to the business model
canvas. Usually, what comes to mind when
most people hear about innovation is
changing the features of a product or
service to fit current market trends.
26 Source: https://www.slideshare.net/suneesermsiri/social-businessmodelcanvasexample
169
However, it goes way beyond that. There
are several aspects of an organization that
needs innovation as the organization
progresses. Focus on innovating only some
core parts of the business may lead to
business failure. In response to this, Doblin
consultancy came up with the teninnovation framework. This framework
helps to ensure that innovation cuts across
all aspects of the business and not just
some of its core elements. These ten
innovations can be divided into three which
include
●
Configuration
●
Offering
●
Experience
Configuration
This type of innovation is related to the core
activities of the business. Elements of
configuration makeup the backend of the
innovation process and act like the
foundation of the business. It involves
innovating the internal elements of the
business and its business model. There are
four types of innovation under
configuration.
●
Profit Model
This is one of the most important
components of an innovation especially forprofit making companies. Usually, firms
acquire a cost when providing goods and
services to customers. Also, innovation
requires that a business incurs certain costs.
It is therefore important for small
businesses to innovate its business models
to be able to make profit to sustain the
business and also to innovate all other
aspects of the business.
●
Network
The focus here is on the business creating
connections that can help the company
take advantage of some resources that
other firms or partners can offer.
Globalization and the internet have made it
possible for people and businesses to
collaborate beyond barriers of distance and
time. Now, firms can tap into the processes,
technologies, channels, products and
brands of other firms to improve on their
innovations.
●
Structure
Another important aspect of the
organization that needs innovation is the
organizational structure. Organizational
structure involves everything from
organizational design, competencies and
assets to incentives and management
structures. A business has to continually
improve on its internal assets and human
resources to create more value. The way a
business will innovate its organizational
structure will depend on the nature of the
business and the goal the business seeks to
achieve.
●
Process
This type of innovation focuses on
improving the internal processes of the
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company to create more value. Such
processes may include activities relating to
supply chain and logistics. Improving a
firm's internal processes helps to speed up
the flow of activities within the firm. This
will improve the firm's ability to provide
better goods and services and also help the
firm scale up and grow faster.
Image 13:4: Types of innovation under configuration27
Offering
There are two types of innovation under
offering.
This type of innovation has to do with the
products or services the business is offering.
●
27 Image10:4,10:5,10:6 Source: Visual capitalist.com
Product Performance
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This is what comes to mind first when
people hear about innovation. It involves
improving the ability of a product or service
to provide value to its target market.
●
Product system
This type of innovation is mostly for
products that cannot be used alone. That is,
complimentary products and services. The
focus of this type of innovation will be to
continually improve the businesses’
offerings, so that products that are
complementary to one another work well
together to provide value to the customer.
Image 12:5: The types of innovation under offering
Experience
The innovation types under experience,
have to do with the customer experience. A
business has to pay careful attention to
innovations that involve customer
experience because the experience of each
customer will be subjective hence the
business has to make sure that they are
satisfying every member of the target
market when innovating. There are four
types of innovation under experience.
●
Service
A service refers to the non-visible
components of an offering. A business may
be focused on offering a product service or
a tangible product. Even if the business is
offering a tangible product, it will require
that the business offers some kind of
service to ease the customer's engagement
with the product. Whatever the kind of
service may be, it will be important for the
business to continually improve on their
service offering to guarantee satisfaction in
the customer experience. Chances are that,
if a business offers a mediocre product but
with a better customer experience, the
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customer is likely to be satisfied. Some
service innovations include free trials or
after sales services.
●
Channel
Channel has to do with how the product or
service will get to the final consumer. It is
part of the innovation process that will
connect the final product or service to the
final consumer. It may be physical channels
like wholesalers and retailers or maybe
digital channels. The channel type will
depend on the product or service being
offered. Businesses have to continually
improve their channels to make sure that
consumers receive the final products or
service through the best possible means.
●
Brand
This has to do with the perceptions
customers or consumers have about a
company or its products relative to that of
Image 13:6: Types of Innovation under experience
competitors. Innovating a brand means
looking for ways to position a company and
its products as the best in the consumer's
mind relative to that of the competitors. A
business can improve its brand through
advertising, design, corporate social
responsibility, co-branding among others.
●
Customer Engagement
Customer engagement has to do with how
customers feel about using a product or
service. What customers want from a
product may go beyond just functional
needs. The focus here will be on finding
ways on making the user experience
memorable. For example, a business may
decide to customize a product feature to
suit a particular kind of customer. This may
leave the customer happy after using the
product and they may want to use it the
next time they need it.
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The ten types of innovation prove that
innovation in a business goes way beyond
improving just the core product or service
the business is offering. Innovation has to
cut across every part of the organization to
ensure sustainability and also provision of
maximum value to consumers.
What does the Minimum Viable
Product Test on the Business Model
Canvas?
As we would see subsequently,
A Minimum Viable Product is “that product
which has just those features and no more
which allow you to ship a product that early
adopters see and at least resonates with a
number of them, sometimes pay you money
for, and start to give you feedback on.”
A minimum viable product allows the
business to test some of the assumptions it
made on its BMC. In effect, a minimum
viable product can serve as a type of
prototyping. The MVP tests for the
following on the BMC.
Feasibility
The MVP allows the business to test if the
current capabilities of the business allow
the business to develop and roll out a new
product or idea into the market. Feasibility
tests if the business idea adds value to the
business or if it will strain the resources of
the business to develop. If the solution adds
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more value to the business then it is
feasible but if it requires that there be a
strain on the resources of the business,
then the solution is not feasible.
Desirability
Here, you ask yourself the question, is this
what my customer really needs? Here the
MVP tests if the product or service or
solution you are offering really solves their
problems. Most times, people develop
solutions that they feel are nice for the
customer to have or that they think people
will like. However, people are looking for
solutions that meet a particular need and if
that need is not met, then the solution the
business is providing is not desirable.
Viability
Viability tests if the solution or business
idea is sustainable. A viable solution has to
be sustainable the moment it is developed
and in the nearest future. The MVP gives
the business an opportunity to test if the
solution being developed will still have the
same impact it has now and in the future.
It is not enough to test only one of these
components. The sweet spot exists at the
intersection between these three points. An
MVP must validate all these three
components of the BMC.
MVP testing Protocol
There are four steps involved in testing the
MVP
Identify assumptions on the BMC (a
minimum of 9 as there are 9 blocks)
Remember that all the building blocks of
the BMC are based on assumptions. It is
therefore important to identify the key
assumptions embedded in each block of the
BMC. After identifying these key
assumptions then you can proceed to the
next stage of the MVP testing protocol.
Develop hypothesis on the assumptions
After identifying the key assumptions on
the BMC, the next step is to develop
hypotheses on assumptions for MVP
testing. This involves identifying specific
hypotheses for testing those assumptions
(better if it's one to one). This will help
validate the key assumptions made in the
BMC.
Develop metrics for testing the hypothesis
After developing a hypothesis, the next step
is to test the hypothesis and validate
assumptions. This step involves developing
metrics that will validate or invalidate the
hypothesis. This can be done by developing
key performance indicators based on the
assumptions tested and the hypothesis
developed.
Develop the MVP for conducting the test
The last stage of the MVP testing protocol
will be to develop the actual MVP and take
it out to the customer to validate all
assumptions about the solution on the
BMC.
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Customer Development and The Flow
of Thought
Customer development allows a business to
discover and validate the right market for a
business idea or solution. It is a four-step
process that enables the business to build
the right product features that solve
customers’ needs, test the correct model
and tactics for acquiring and converting
customers, and deploy the right
organization and resources to scale the
business.
Under the Customer Development model
are what Blank outlines as the four steps to
Epiphany. These include Customer
Discovery, Customer Validation, Customer
Creation and Company Building.
In this chapter, we will briefly discuss the
Customer Development model, what an
MVP is, why we use it, how to build one,
the various kinds there are, and then learn
from great examples on how MVPs have
been used by reputable companies to
validate business concepts.
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Image 13:7: Example 1
Auntie Muni Waakye
Auntie Muni’s product, Waakye (brown rice and beans), is a staple for the country. Although
the product consists of boiling rice and beans, some variants may include tomatoes, chilli
pepper, other spicy ingredients and fish, prawn or meat. As Auntie Muni described her
product: “I tried the white rice for about three months, but it did not sell well. The customers
complained that they ate white rice in their homes and, therefore, did not patronize that.”
From the above, it is evident that Waakye is a popular Ghanaian food not particularly often
eaten at home, as it requires some special preparation. Indeed, Waakye can be eaten anytime
of the day – either as breakfast or lunch and sold by vendors on the streets in big and small
cities alike in Ghana. It has been hailed by the United Nations (African Foods.com), as a
combination that can help stamp out malnutrition from the world! Waakye is rich in protein,
essential vitamins, magnesium, and other micronutrients for a healthy lifestyle. It is also a lowfat meal, too much oil is not included during preparation. Like any other food, if prepared in a
clean environment and eaten within minutes or a few hours of preparation, it will remain a
healthy choice in terms of bacterial contamination.
The example above is an excerpt from
research conducted on Auntie Muni, the
famous Ghanaian Waakye seller. The
research found that, despite her popularity,
Auntie Muni could not sell her white rice as
much as she sold her waakye. She probably
assumed that her popularity with waakye
could be transferred to white rice - which
was not the case. She only found out it was
not a good idea after selling the rice and
stew for three months. She could have run
a smaller and less involving experiment to
test her assumptions about white rice
before starting to sell in large quantities.
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Image 13:8: Example 2
Adinkra Pastries; Barima Osei Mensah
Barima Osei Mensah explained that his initial plan was to produce class rings, graduation rings
engraved with one’s school, graduation year, name, and other information. He indicated that they
were popular in the US, something he felt he could replicate in Ghana, “but it did not take off”.
“I made a lot of effort but because it’s not our culture, it was difficult for people to buy into the idea,”
he said of the failed ring business. According to him, his next option was “to try something else, which
was a restaurant in 2011 at Kumasi, but it was not doing so well so I decided to start a pastries outlet
in front of it with the hope that it would be able to attract people to the restaurant”, adding: “When
we started with the pastries, I used to go to the market to sell myself with some boys. During that
stage people were laughing at me, some family members did not support the idea because I was going
to the market to sell. It really didn’t bother me because I knew what I was aiming at. I was focused.”
Mr. Mensah has aspirations of establishing assorted pastries outlets across the country in the next
few years.
The article above depicts the journey of Mr.
Barima Osei, which includes instances
where he may have used the customer
development process and instances where
he did not. Osei wanted to start by making
graduation rings. He was at the first stage of
the development process, where there was
no market for his product. He attempted a
restaurant business, which also failed.
Neglecting the customer development
process, he mostly jumped right into the
company building when he got a new idea.
His current business, which is the Adinkra
Pastries was aimed at attracting people to
his restaurant. Adinkra Pastries is now a
successful business, not as a product in a
restaurant but one sold at almost every
traffic light to people in traffic. One can say
that if Osei had taken advantage of the
customer development model it might have
saved him from some of the losses involved
in starting the previous businesses which
did not flourish.
Building a Minimum Viable Product
The proposed right approach when it comes
to validating products or testing
assumptions about a business model is
usually to build a Minimum Viable Product.
According to Thompson. T. (2013), in an
article on Building Your Minimum Viable
178
Product, when creating an MVP,
entrepreneurs choose between
experiments that can validate or invalidate
their assumptions about a business model.
Thompson further explains that, if the
entrepreneur’s MVP is a worse version as
compared to the final product, success
validates the idea. However, failure does
not necessarily invalidate it. On the
contrary, if the MVP offers a better
experience, then failure invalidates the
business model and success does not
necessarily validate it.
Unfortunately, entrepreneurs usually pick
the wrong kind of MVP. They tend to
choose validating MVPs, even though most
businesses fail because they spend too
much time solving the wrong problem,
which is what MVPs are designed to
prevent.
The Two Kinds of MVPs
The first approach employs validating MVPs
with a worse product than what the final
version will be, such that success proves the
model, but failure is inconclusive.28
28 https://hbr.org/2013/09/building-a-minimumviable-prod
Selling a product even before it has been
built is the classic of validating MVPs. This
involves selling the idea to potential
customers to see if they would be willing to
pay for the product. If customers pay the
entrepreneur today to deliver a solution a
month from now, and they can build a
profitable business from that revenue,
according to Thompson, the company has
been validated. However, the failure of this
test does not invalidate the business model.
This is a great way to check if the product
has any real demand.
For the second approach, Invalidating
MVPs, involves the use of a better product
than the final business model, so failure
means the business model is doomed but
success is inconclusive (Thompson, 2013).
This category includes many “concierge
MVP” approaches, where the entrepreneur
builds a better product at an unsustainably
high cost by customizing it for every
customer. Where its potential customers
are unable or unwilling to pay a realistic
long-term price for the improved product,
this means the business model has failed
and it is time to move on.
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Image 13:8: Example 3
#1 Concierge MVP
Instead of providing a product, you start with a manual service. But not just any service! The service
should consist of exactly the same steps people would go through with your product.
Koko King; Albert Osei
“Hausa koko caught my eye because it was a basic thing to cook and deliver to customers. It was also
something that I loved, and I used to buy it every morning, just like everyone else. So it struck me that
this was something that we could do. We could change it and make it better. I am sure I was not the
first or only person to think that. I believe thousands of people have looked at Hausa koko and thought
that the delivery could be improved. So, I think the most important thing I did, was to try it; it was to
have a go and see whether the market was ready.” In October 2007, Koko King was registered.
November to January 2008 was spent on market and production research. A firm believer in
standards, Mr. Osei had to be sure that he would be available to deliver and exceed the current
standards in the market. The result was the assembling of a three-man team – a cook, a
driver/salesman and the King himself operating out of a backyard that they had fitted out to fit the
required health and safety standards. Soon, it was time to actually hit the market.
“We did a trial at Millicom from an ice chest in an open car booth. We didn’t have branded cups, then.
We did that for a month, selling at a cedi for a cup and some bread. We saw the interest in Tigo.
People were buying it. We’d sell 20-30 cups a day. From there we moved to Amal Bank [now Bank of
Africa] at Adabraka. That took off, too and they referred us to other companies, and we moved on
from there.” Koko King was born and it has never looked back.
Naturally, the early years were challenging. Mr. Osei says the company only broke even sometime
into its third year. This has required perseverance that he believes is critical to the survival of not only
his business but businesses, generally. “There is a strong desire to make it work so we find solutions
to all the issues. Our mission is to build a brand. We didn’t come to it with the view to just sell koko;
we knew we were building a complete brand.
Which approach should you use first?
It makes business sense for start-ups with
significant market risk to run an invalidating
MVP first, to test whether customers will
buy a better product. An invalidating MVP is
a better version of the final product. This
gives the business the opportunity to test
all the features of the solution and more. If
the idea is not accepted in the market, it
means doom. If you are currently offering
something better than the final product and
people do not want it means the solution
will not survive in the market. However, if
people approve of an invalidating MVP,
then it means there is hope for that solution
or business idea in the market.
In some cases, especially when product
performance results from scale, as in multisided platforms, where the value
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proposition depends entirely on network
effects, it becomes nearly impossible to run
an invalidating MVP first. In this case, it is
critical to define failure from the outset.
Thompson explains failure as the
entrepreneur’s inability to convince early
adopters to buy the product, which is a
reasonably good product yet an inferior
version. This process usually takes much
more time than an equally effective
invalidating MVP.
Testing a Minimum Viable Product
Christopher Bank, a Growth Lead at UXPin,
the UX Design App, writes about the 15
ways to test your minimum viable
product29. In this article, he explains that,
though the MVP provides a means to test
hypotheses as a starting point, it does not
imply that it is easy to build. The idea
behind this exercise is not to see if the
product can be built in terms of technical
feasibility, rather, it is to see whether the
29 Accessed Nov 21st, 2017
https://thenextweb.com/dd/2014/11/12/15-ways-testminimum-viable-product/
entrepreneur should be building it in the
first place, and, more importantly, whether
it is solving a problem other people find
worth paying for.
He further points out that MVP tests are
designed not only with the aim of
answering technical questions about the
product, but also to test basic business
hypotheses about the viability of the
market it exists in. For example, a company
wants to see if unmanned drones would be
valuable for collecting data on crop health.
This may be considered as a technically
viable project, but the MVP could ultimately
fail because it does not test the viability of
the business by verifying the market and
company capabilities (Bank, 2014).
Depending on the type of product the
entrepreneur is building, the MVP could be
complex or simple, ranging from vague tests
(For example, AdWords tests) to early
prototypes. Testing begins once hypotheses
are ready.
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Ways of testing your MVP
1. Customer Interviews
Customer interviews are a good way of testing and validating your MVP. It involves
getting customer views on the problem your product is trying to solve through a series of
unscripted interviews with your customers (Blank, 2005).
Image 13:8: Search Execution Diagram30
2. Landing Pages
When visitors and potential customers
interact with a product for the first time,
the first thing they set eyes on is the landing
page. It is a means through which the
business can offer explanations about
product features to potential customers
and have them sign up. Usually, people
mistake a landing page for email sign up
30 Source: Steve Blank (2005)
pages. However, they can be used to test a
product. For example, Joel Gascoigne, a
successful entrepreneur and CEO of Buffer,
fleshed out his first landing page and used
that to gauge demand for various features
and price plans, rather than to build up a
mailing list. This was as easy to do as adding
an extra page between the features page
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and the signup form; the interstitial page
showed a pricing table, and the visitors
could select the plan that appealed to
them. These extra clicks not only showed
the visitor’s interest in the product, but also
gave the team real-world data on what kind
of pricing would be appropriate for the
market.
Image 13:9: Buffer Landing page
The objective of testing an MVP is validated
learning, so collecting visitor analytics with
tools like Google Analytics, Kissmetrics or
CrazyEgg is the most important part of
operating a landing page. Also, an effective
value-proposition and call to action
contribute towards attaining this objective
(Bank, 2014).
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3. A/B Tests
When changes are made to a product, it is important for the business to find out if these
changes were effective. This is exactly what A/B tests do. It is also used to compare and
contrast the results of versions of your product. Analytics tools can be used to test how
potential customers react to the changes made to the MVP. This helps the business make
customer-desired improvement to the product or service (Bank, 2014).
Image 13:10: A/B Tests 31
4. Ad Campaigns
These can be used to run market
validation surveys. Social media platforms
like Facebook can aid in narrowing down
the demographics of your target customers.
With this, you can find out the most
appealing features of your products
31 Source: Smashing Magazine
through running low-fidelity tests on your
target customers. This will help in gathering
data and testing your hypothesis (Bank,
2014).
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5. Fundraising.
6. Explainer videos
Kickstarter and Indiegogo are some
of the Crowdfunding websites that provide
a great platform for running MVP tests. The
contributions to the campaigns show the
interest the people have toward that
particular product/service. This does not
only help in validating your MVP, but it also
helps with fundraising for product
development (Bank, 2014).
“If a picture is worth a thousand words,
then a video demonstrating your products
user experience is worth a million.”
Dropbox used an explainer video to validate
the market and sell their MVP. The 3minute video explained Dropbox’s intended
functionality. This resulted in having 70,000
sign ups overnight (Bank, 2014).
Image 13:11: Explainer video32
7. Concierge MVPs
This involves delivering a customized
product or service to a selected group of
customers. An example of this is illustrated
below.
Rent the Runway tested its online dress
rental business model by providing an in-
person service to female college students
where anyone could try the dress on before
renting them. This validated its riskiest
hypothesis that women would rent dresses
and served as a great concierge MVP that
32 Source: https://thenextweb.com/wp-content/blogs.dir/1/files/2014/11/dropbox-video.png
185
put the business in front of customers and
got the feedback.
Image 13:12: Rent the Runway
8. Digital Prototypes
This involves demonstrating the user
experience digitally. Digital prototype MVPs
can either be screenshot previews, lowfidelity sketches or “dummy” applications.
Platforms like UXPin allow you to digitally
collaborate with your team on building
ideas.
9. Paper Prototypes.
Paper Prototypes are similar to Digital
Prototypes, except these are physical.
These are sometimes in the form of
sketches on paper or paper cut-outs.
These can be used by anyone however for
advanced product development, this
technique may not be the best.
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Image 13:13: Paper prototypes33
Application: Let's Apply the concept
Developing assumptions from VFB and
BMC for MVP testing
As noted at the beginning of this chapter,
you have built a VFB and a BMC and they
both look good. However, all of your
building blocks and the connections
between them are assumptions! Some
backstage employee actions in the VFB
might be assumptions that you may find are
not feasible or could be done differently.
The channels you identified in your BMC
may actually not effectively help you reach
the customer segments identified. Hence
these assumptions do need to be tested.
They need to be tested. The variety of MVP
tests show us that we can be very
successful in creating and running great
experiments for the test. In the following
section, we provide practical steps to help
you get started in applying these concepts.
Developing hypothesis on Assumptions for
MVP testing
Once assumptions have been developed,
the team needs to identify specific
hypotheses for testing those assumptions
(better if it’s one to one). Doing this will
help the team validate the key assumptions.
33 Source: https://thenextweb.com/wp-content/blogs.dir/1/files/2014/11/paper-prototype.png
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The following are hypothesis formats from
Eric Ries who created the Lean Start-up
Methodology.
Basic hypothesis format: This should be the
format used by FDE teams
[Specific and repeatable action] will result
in [expected measurable outcome]
Examples:
- More than 60% of the potential users in
the identified user group will provide more
than average ratings for the extent to which
they agree to the way the problem is
captured.
- Running Speed boat with personal trainers
will result in at least 75% identifying client
schedule management as their #1 or #2
anchor.
- Telecommuters playing Buy a Feature with
our MVP feature list will result in free VOIP
calling being purchased in all games.
Advanced format: This format should be less used by FDE teams
We believe that __________________________
We’ll know this is true when __________________________
We’ll know this to be false when _________________________________
Example:
We believe amateur multirotor buyers value their drones as camera accessories
We will know this to be true when photography features are central to >80% Product Box
pitches.
We will know this to be false when photography is central to fewer than 50% of Product Boxes
or more than 2 Product Boxes do not reference photography at all
Developing Metrics for Evaluating Hypotheses Tests on Assumptions for
MVP testing
After developing hypotheses, it's time to test them. To test them, the team needs to develop
metrics that will help validate or invalidate hypotheses. The team can develop their own
metrics or key performance indicators based on the hypothesis developed. The appendix
following the Summary provides examples and ideas you could pull from to develop your
metrics.
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Summary
In summary, according to Thompson’s
article on “Building a Minimum Viable
Product”, MVPs have two main goals:
learning what problems the entrepreneur
should be solving and driving risk out of the
current (hypothetical) business model by
testing fundamental assumptions.
The focus here is mostly on the second goal
but invalidating MVPs also tends to be more
effective at the first, since those “better”
initial products tend to resemble concierge
MVPs that sacrifice unit cost and scalability
for performance and flexibility. These tests
substitute human labour for technology,
and the human component means we can
gather more information from potential
customers about their problems and our
potential solutions.
As a result, you should usually begin your
company with an invalidating MVP. Then, if
it is inconclusive, you should switch gears
and focus on MVPs that validate your
business model.
Metrics to Inspire you
The following are KPIs for sales, not so
much for MVP testing, but has a number of
examples from which MVP test metrics
could be drawn.
The top KPIs We Use for Sales
●
Conversion rate – the ratio of people
who convert from the total number of
proposals we sent out.
●
New leads per month – how are our
lead generation efforts going? Do we need
to diversify our lead sources? Are we
getting too many unqualified leads? Are our
lead prospectors doing a good job? This will
help give some insight to questions like
that.
●
Total bookings or revenue (broken
out by “New Business,” “Add-On Business,”
or “Renewal Business.”)– sales cures all.
How is your sales team doing in terms of
meeting quota? How is your upsell process
looking? Is your product so good that
customers are consistently renewing?
●
A common mistake is to use
bookings and revenue interchangeably, but
they aren’t the same thing.
Bookings is the value of a contract between
the company and the customer. It reflects a
contractual obligation on the part of the
customer to pay the company.
Revenue is recognized when the service is
actually provided over the life of the
subscription agreement. How and when
revenue is recognized is governed by GAAP.
Letters of intent and verbal agreements are
neither revenue nor bookings.
●
Number of qualified sales
opportunities per month – generating leads
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is nice, but you need to have qualified leads
that fit your ideal customer profile.
●
Total dollar amount of new qualified
pipeline generated – is your prospecting
team generating enough revenue potential
in the pipeline?
●
Gross Profit
While top-line bookings growth is super
important, investors want to understand
how profitable that revenue stream is.
Gross profit provides that measure.
What’s included in gross profit may vary by
company, but in general all costs associated
with the manufacturing, delivery, and
support of a product/service should be
included.
So be prepared to break down what’s
included in — and excluded — from that
gross profit figure.
●
Total Contract Value (TCV) vs.
Annual Contract Value (ACV)
TCV (total contract value) is the total value
of the contract and can be shorter or longer
in duration. Make sure TCV also includes
the value from one-time charges,
professional service fees, and recurring
charges.
ACV (annual contract value), on the other
hand, measures the value of the contract
over a 12-month period. Questions to ask
about ACV:
What is the size? Are you getting a few
hundred dollars per month from your
customers, or are you able to close large
deals? Of course, this depends on the
market you are targeting (SMB vs. midmarket vs. enterprise).
Is it growing (and especially not shrinking)?
If it’s growing, it means customers are
paying you more on average for your
product over time. That implies either your
product is fundamentally doing more
(adding features and capabilities) to
warrant that increase or is delivering so
much value to customers (improved
functionality over alternatives) that they are
willing to pay more for it.
The Top KPIs We Use for Operations
●
Net promoter score – though there
is a lot of debate on the viability of this
metric, it’s a good feeler on whether
customers are overall satisfied/dissatisfied
with our services. Of course, you need to be
surveying and talk to your past/current
customers to get feedback as well.
●
Revenue churn – what % of revenue
we lost for the month. Keep in mind that
each industry varies so this is very general.
There are all kinds of churn — dollar churn,
customer churn, net dollar churn — and
there are varying definitions for how churn
is measured. For example, some companies
measure it on a revenue basis annually,
which blends upsells with churn. Investors
look at it the following way:
Monthly unit churn = lost customers/prior
month total
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Retention by cohort
Month 1 = 100% of installed base
Latest Month = % of original installed base
that are still transacting
It is also important to differentiate between
gross churn and net revenue churn —
Gross churn: MRR lost in a given
month/MRR at the beginning of the month.
Net churn: (MRR lost minus MRR from
upsells) in a given month/MRR at the
beginning of the month.
The difference between the two is
significant. Gross churn estimates the actual
loss to the business, while net revenue
churn understates the losses (as it blends
upsells with absolute churn).
●
Client churn – what % of clients we
lost for the month
●
Gross Margins (broken out by
“Team” and “Overall”) – what’s our overall
margin? What are the margins per team?
●
Revenue Growth Rate – calculating
revenue growth rate is helpful for any
business but it’s not that helpful when you
look at things on a month to month/week
to week basis because things can be highly
variable in such a short amount of time.
Instead, we calculate a growth rate over a
6-month period. To do this, we use a
formula for calculating compound growth
rate.
Investors more highly value companies
where the majority of total revenue comes
from product revenue (vs. from services).
Why? Services revenue is non-recurring, has
much lower margins, and is less scalable.
Product revenue is what you generate from
the sale of the software or product itself.
ARR (annual recurring revenue) is a
measure of revenue components that are
recurring in nature. It should exclude onetime (non-recurring) fees and professional
service fees.
ARR per customer: Is this flat or growing? If
you are upselling or cross selling your
customers, then it should be growing, which
is a positive indicator for a healthy business.
MRR (monthly recurring revenue): Often,
people will multiply one month’s all-in
bookings by 12 to get to ARR. Common
mistakes with this method include: (1)
counting non-recurring fees such as
hardware, setup, installation, professional
services/ consulting agreements; (2)
counting bookings (see #1).
●
Month-on-month (MoM) growth
Often this is measured as the simple
average of monthly growth rates. But
investors often prefer to measure it
asCMGR (Compounded Monthly Growth
Rate) since CMGR measures the periodic
growth, especially for a marketplace.
Using CMGR [CMGR = (Latest Month/ First
Month) ^ (1/# of Months) -1] also helps you
benchmark growth rates with other
companies. This would otherwise be
difficult to compare due to volatility and
other factors. The CMGR will be smaller
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than the simple average in a growing
business.
●
Active Users
Different companies have almost unlimited
definitions for what “active” means. Some
charts don’t even define what that activity
is, while others include inadvertent activity
— such as having a high proportion of firsttime users or accidental one-time users.
Be clear on how you define “active.”
●
Burn Rate
Burn rate is the rate at which cash is
decreasing. Especially in early-stage
startups, it’s important to know and
monitor burn rate as companies fail when
they are running out of cash and don’t have
enough time left to raise funds or reduce
expenses. As a reminder, here’s a simple
calculation:
Monthly cash burn = cash balance at the
beginning of the year minus cash balance
end of the year / 12
It’s also important to measure net burn vs.
gross burn:
Net burn [revenues (including all incoming
cash you have a high probability of
receiving) – gross burn] is the true measure
of amount of cash your company is burning
every month.
Gross burn on the other hand only looks at
your monthly expenses + any other cash
outlays.
Investors tend to focus on net burn to
understand how long the money you have
left in the bank will last for you to run the
company. They will also take into account
the rate at which your revenues and
expenses grow as monthly burn may not be
a constant number.
●
Gross Merchandise Value (GMV) vs.
Revenue
In marketplace businesses, these are
frequently used interchangeably. But GMV
does not equal revenue!
GMV (gross merchandise volume) is the
total sales dollar volume of merchandise
transacting through the marketplace in a
specific period. It’s the real top line, what
the consumer side of the marketplace is
spending. It is a useful measure of the size
of the marketplace and can be useful as a
“current run rate” measure based on
annualizing the most recent month or
quarter.
Revenue is the portion of GMV that the
marketplace “takes”. Revenue consists of
the various fees that the marketplace gets
for providing its services; most typically
these are transaction fees based on GMV
successfully transacted on the marketplace,
but can also include ad revenue,
sponsorships, etc. These fees are usually a
fraction of GMV.
●
Unearned or Deferred Revenue …
and Billings
In a SaaS business, this is the cash you
collect at the time of the booking in
advance of when the revenues will actually
be realized.
As we’ve shared previously, SaaS companies
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only get to recognize revenue over the term
of the deal as the service is delivered —
even if a customer signs a huge up-front
deal. So, in most cases, that “booking” goes
onto the balance sheet in a liability line
item called deferred revenue. (Because the
balance sheet has to “balance,” the
corresponding entry on the assets side of
the balance sheet is “cash” if the customer
prepaid for the service or “accounts
receivable” if the company expects to bill
for and receive it in the future). As the
company starts to recognize revenue from
the software as service, it reduces its
deferred revenue balance and increases
revenue: for a 24-month deal, as each
month goes by, deferred revenue drops by
1/24th and revenue increases by 1/24th.
A good proxy to measure the growth — and
ultimately the health — of a SaaS company
is to look at billings, which is calculated by
taking the revenue in one quarter and
adding the change in deferred revenue
from the prior quarter to the current
quarter. If a SaaS company is growing its
bookings (whether through new business or
upsells/renewals to existing customers),
billings will increase.
Billings is a much better forward-looking
indicator of the health of a SaaS company
than simply looking at revenue because
revenue understates the true value of the
customer, which gets recognized ratably.
But it’s also tricky because of the very
nature of recurring revenue itself: A SaaS
company could show stable revenue for a
long time — just by working off its billing
backlog — which would make the business
seem healthier than it truly is. This is
something we therefore watch out for
when evaluating the unit economics of such
businesses.
●
Downloads
Downloads (or number of apps delivered by
distribution deals) are really just a vanity
metric.
Investors want to see engagement, ideally
expressed as cohort retention on metrics
that matter for that business — for
example, DAU (daily active users), MAU
(monthly active users), photos shared,
photos viewed, and so on.
Marketing KPIs
●
LTV – the lifetime value of a
customer. You’ll want to look at this
numbers for all of your marketing channels.
Lifetime value is the present value of the
future net profit from the customer over
the duration of the relationship. It helps
determine the long-term value of the
customer and how much net value you
generate per customer after accounting for
customer acquisition costs (CAC).
A common mistake is to estimate the LTV as
a present value of revenue or even gross
margin of the customer instead of
calculating it as net profit of the customer
over the life of the relationship.
Reminder, here’s a way to calculate LTV:
Revenue per customer (per month) =
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average order value multiplied by the
number of orders.
Contribution margin per customer (per
month) = revenue from customer minus
variable costs associated with a customer.
Variable costs include selling, administrative
and any operational costs associated with
serving the customer.
Avg. lifespan of customer (in months) = 1 /
by your monthly churn.
LTV = Contribution margin from customer
multiplied by the average lifespan of the
customer.
Note, if you have only a few months of
data, the conservative way to measure LTV
is to look at historical value to date. Rather
than predicting average life span and
estimating how the retention curves might
look, we prefer to measure 12 month and
24-month LTV.
Another important calculation here is LTV
as it contributes to margin. This is
important because a revenue or gross
margin LTV suggests a higher upper limit on
what you can spend on customer
acquisition. Contribution Margin LTV to CAC
ratio is also a good measure to determine
CAC payback and manage your advertising
and marketing spend accordingly.
●
CPA/CAC – the cost to acquire a
typical customer (cost per acquisition or
customer acquisition cost). Same thing here
– look at this number for all of your
marketing channels. Customer acquisition
cost or CAC should be the full cost of
acquiring users, stated on a per user basis.
Unfortunately, CAC metrics come in all
shapes and sizes.
One common problem with CAC metrics is
failing to include all the costs incurred in
user acquisition such as referral fees,
credits, or discounts. Another common
problem is to calculate CAC as a “blended”
cost (including users acquired organically)
rather than isolating users acquired through
“paid” marketing. While blended CAC [total
acquisition cost / total new customers
acquired across all channels] isn’t wrong, it
doesn’t inform how well your paid
campaigns are working and whether they’re
profitable.
This is why investors consider paid CAC
[total acquisition cost/ new customers
acquired through paid marketing] to be
more important than blended CAC in
evaluating the viability of a business — it
informs whether a company can scale up its
user acquisition budget profitably. While an
argument can be made in some cases that
paid acquisition contributes to organic
acquisition, one would need to
demonstrate proof of that effect to put
weight on blended CAC.
Many investors do like seeing both,
however: the blended number as well as
the CAC, broken out by paid/unpaid. We
also like seeing the breakdown by dollars of
paid customer acquisition channels: for
example, how much does a paying
customer cost if they were acquired via
Facebook?
Counterintuitively, it turns out that costs
typically go up as you try and reach a larger
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audience. So, it might cost you $1 to
acquire your first 1,000 users, $2 to acquire
your next 10,000, and $5 to $10 to acquire
your next 100,000. That’s why you can’t
afford to ignore the metrics about volume
of users acquired via each channel.
Individual Teams KPIs
Do/say ratio – this is simply the number of
things done versus the things we said we
would do. So, if we said we would do 10
things and actually completed 8 of them for
a client, it would be 80%.
Presenting Metrics Generally
Cumulative Charts (vs. Growth Metrics)
Cumulative charts by definition always go
up and to the right for any business that is
showing any kind of activity. But they are
not a valid measure of growth — they can
go up-and-to-the-right even when a
business is shrinking. Thus, the metric is not
a useful indicator of a company’s health.
Investors like to look at monthly GMV,
monthly revenue, or new users/customers
per month to assess the growth in earlystage businesses. Quarterly charts can be
used for later-stage businesses or
businesses with a lot of month-to-month
volatility in metrics.
Chart Tricks
There are a number of such tricks, but a few
common ones include not labelling the Yaxis; shrinking scale to exaggerate growth;
and only presenting percentage gains
without presenting the absolute numbers.
(This last one is misleading since
percentages can sound impressive off a
small base but are not an indicator of the
future trajectory.)
Order of Operations
It’s fine to present metrics in any order as
you tell your story.
When initially evaluating businesses,
investors often look at GMV, revenue, and
bookings first because they’re an indicator
of the size of the business. Once investors
have a sense of the size of the business,
they’ll want to understand growth to see
how well the company is performing. These
basic metrics, if interesting, then compel us
to look even further.
As one of our partners who recently had a
baby observes here: It’s almost like doing a
health check for your baby at the
pediatrician’s office. Check weight and
height, and then compare to previous
estimates to make sure things look healthy
before you go any deeper!
Problem Sets
Using the hypotheses format from Eric Ries
stated above
1. State 2 hypotheses used to test for
Problem-Solution fit pulling from what your
stated as your POV.
2. State 2 hypotheses used to test your key
assumptions during your MVP testing
3. Research protocol: Please report on the
assumptions and the rest of the actions on
the assumptions.
195
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About the Authors
Dr. Gordon Kwesi Adomdza, an Associate Professor of Business
Administration at Ashesi University and Adjunct Professor at
CEIBS Africa. Dr. Adomdza teaches courses that use designthinking in the development of innovative new idea concepts and
business models. His pedagogical philosophy of experiential
entrepreneurship leads him to continuously develop learning and
teaching materials that support experiential learning. Dr.
Adomdza encountered design thinking in 2009 working on
projects led by Craig McCarthy at Design Continuum, the
inventors of the award-winning Swiffer cleaner. Hence, prior to
Ashesi University, Dr. Adomdza taught courses that used the design thinking pedagogy he codeveloped with McCarthy, at the D'Amore-McKim School of Business, Northeastern University in
Boston for 7 years. As a researcher, he has written a number of teaching case studies and also
published papers in leading journals exploring the nexus between the entrepreneur and
opportunity, through the lens of the discovery and exploitation process for new ideas and
business models.
Craig McCarthy was the Director, Design Strategy Fidelity
Investments. Carig is a highly effective Design Strategy and
Innovation Leader with extensive multi-industry experience. He
has an exceptional record of success leading multi-functional to
highly profitable results by focused, actionable consumer-led
strategies grounded in consumer insights derived from a deep
understanding of the customer. He is recognized as a
collaborative and creative business partner with excellent
storytelling and problem-solving abilities with executive
presence. He is inspired by a curiosity of people to help clients
understand the world from their customer’s perspective to drive change in how businesses
interact with their customers. Craig is also an adjunct lecturer at the D'Amore-McKim School of
Business, Northeastern University where he teaches a course in innovation, that he co-created
with Dr. Adomdza, and which has grown from an experimental elective to a requirement of all
business majors at the business school. As part of his teaching, he explores design thinking, lean
startup and agile approaches to innovation and implementation.