I came to Stanford as an eager Product Design major. In my very first class, I used design thinking methodologies to design a better phone case. I went through the whole process: Empathize, Design, Ideate, Prototype, and Test. My final project was a “perfect” product, wrapped in a little ribbon and ready to present to my class.
This is easy! I thought as I sketched up product solutions and ran user interviews. I believed that making products involved a simple framed approach, one that, if you really understood the user, it’s bound to be successful!
My eagerness and desire for wanted to build more products led me to drop out of Stanford and start a company. My background in design thinking made me believe I was bulletproof and that any product I designed with this methodology would be successful. I started out doing the design thinking framework and empathizing with customers. I spent hours and hours each day talking to users to really understand their pain points. However, soon, I realized I didn’t have enough hours in the day, and my other co-founder believed we needed to begin prioritizing other things like the actual build of the product.
Having crunch time pressure from my team and investors, I made my best guess on what the user needed and began designing a product. However, I was always taught to design something quick and simple, a product you could easily iterate on. I insisted with my co-founder that we didn’t need a whole app design yet, rather, we could test our idea by “faking it” by manually doing the interaction our app was supposed to do. Yet, we didn’t have the luxury of time. We wanted to raise another round of funding, and to do that, investors wanted to see a physical product. A little “prototype” that validated the problem was not sufficient.
So, that’s what we did. We built a product and launched it.
Quickly, we realized it wasn’t solving our users’ needs as we thought it would. Yet, we have already spent countless times, money, and energy working on building this product. What would design thinking tell me to do? I thought. Design thinking would say, “let’s iterate again,” and use this launch as a way to understand our users better. That’s when I quickly learned that design thinking worked great in a classroom with no stakes for getting it wrong. But it didn’t work in the real world, where we were on a tight crunch time, and wrong guesses would lead to a lack of funding.
Just like in Gainesville, Florida, you can’t iterate “building a freeway” and high-impact designs. These are real people, real lives, and real communities. Design thinking is super important for empathizing with the user. But to believe this framework is bulletproof is naive.
