From Love (to the Solution) and Other Demons…

A song lasts three to four minutes and you have probably never wondered why. The reason is that a hundred years ago, the famous 78 records (so named because of their 78 RPM speed) only had the capacity for that much music. As a user of any product or service, you undergo customer experiences that very often depend on the limitations of the company or technology, and not on a design that responds to your tastes and preferences.

Design is usually associated with brilliant minds that receive divine inspiration to create a product or hit the nail on the head with consumers’ needs. The reality is that creative people, whatever they design, find their inspiration in two places: the user’s daily life and the many attempts to achieve something worthwhile.

Even though companies understand the importance of thinking about design when they conceive a new product or their e-commerce website interface, in general, they don’t relate it to a creative process that applies to all the areas of the company. They wait for an innovation team or a group of senior managers (that’s what they are paid for!) to come up with new, fresh ideas. This contrasts with the thousands of successful startups and products that rapidly invade the market using design thinking as a weapon.

Design thinking is based on a hypothesis,  from a new way of attracting customers to a new internal process to grow the business’ productivity. Client behaviors are explored, ideas proposed (none are ruled out), nimbly producing a prototype that can be turned into a product made of recycled materials or a wall covered in Post-it notes describing a new process, for example. A design-thinking exercise can involve members from every area and level of the organization, and can be carried out in person or using Mural.  

An ideal starting point would be the information we already have on our clients: what they buy, how they buy, what needs they have, what path they follow to reach our products.  

A case I use in innovation sessions to illustrate the power of design thinking is customer churn. This university starts with the hypothesis that an improvement in mathematics performance strongly influences student retention. The temptation here is to increase the number of tutoring hours and professors. However, by focusing on the customer experience, we detected that the students are frustrated because they do not receive feedback, attendance reports, or exam and assignment results until the end of the semester.

Based on this problem, the solutions proposed range from an app where teachers record students’ attendance, to a technological platform that automates the correction of or feedback on assignments and exams. A prototype could involve a data proxy such as monitoring campus attendance through sensors installed in the turnstiles or a pilot scheme to measure the effectiveness of an interactive platform with a few students.

Many of these exercises end up as good intentions for change or solutions that are impossible to implement. One of the reasons why we might fail in generating ideas is that we always think about the company and not the customer, we grow fond of the potential solution (probably the one that the boss has in mind) and not the problem. As Benjamin Converse, winner of the Nobel Prize in Economics in 2002, says, we humans are not rational when selecting a solution, preferring something that is quick and good enough

Another great design lesson is that, very often, less is more. An article recently published in The Economist refers to a study by the University of Virginia on how the human brain tends to add things on every time we are asked for an innovative idea.

Your website or app users prefer the shortest, most intuitive path, but we are frequently more interested in obtaining all the data needed for our billing system and are not willing to make the site less glamorous ,or we simply do not have sufficient data to contradict the boss who ideated it. In the case of dropout, we could have added math tutoring and hours when the problem was, in fact, something else.

Customer experiences cannot be the result of beliefs or expectations, but rather the effort to explore their behavior and trying over and over again. Your clients may not want a song that is six to 10 minutes long (unless it’s Bohemian Rhapsody), but you can be sure that their expectation is that your service should come increasingly closer to what they want and think. Happy clients, by design.

Originally published in Forbes.