The world’s largest hotelier refreshed its mobile application to follow guests through their stay

Marriott International has overhauled its mobile application to emphasize personalization and guest services, underscoring the fact that millennials are driving companies to put digital natives at the forefront of their software development process. The hotelier has embraced design thinking for the digital era, a key strategy in a competitive industry loaded with choice, including Airbnb and other home-sharing startups.
"Where you're going to win the game is in the stay itself," says George Corbin, the hotelier's senior vice president of digital. "You can do the best job you can to build a great website and great app for the booking experience but the stay is going to be the arbiter on whether you come back or not."



Marriott is playing from a strong position after acquiring Starwood Hotels & Resorts Worldwide last year for $13 billion. As the largest hotel chain worldwide, Marriott now operates 30 brands, including 6,000 hotels and 1.2 million rooms in 110 countries worldwide. Yet the hospitality industry has reached a crucial inflection point as purchasing power from millennials (Generation Y) and later generations is gradually eclipsing that of Generation X and Baby Boomers.
Our (upwardly) mobile millennialsCorbin says that many millennials, which Boston Consulting Group says will constitute 50 percent of the U.S. workforce by 2018 and account for half of all travel purchases by 2020, prefer to book travel online or through their smartphone. And whether it's classic rival Hilton Worldwide or new challenger Airbnb, competition remains only a click away, as Corbin and his digital team know full well.
To curry favor with millennial travelers, Marriott has personalized its mobile application so that its home screen content changes to reflect a guest's stay journey. A mobile app user with no trips booked will see the booking bar on his or her home screen. But the content gets interesting after you book a stay.
[ 30 CIOs share their strategic focus ]In the run-up to a trip, the home screen will display any reservations you have made through the app. And the content offerings expand on the day of the trip, with the home screen showing content related to the hotel, including a map and directions, as well as buttons to check-in and make service requests. For example, a simple thumb tap will allow you to request more towels or extra pillows, for that hotel location.
When you check in using the app you can request room upgrades and receive notification it has been fulfilled before you arrive. The app is currently available for iOS devices; Marriott plans to release an Android version later this year.
If the approach sounds like how you would want a hotel app to service you that's by design. Design thinking, or human-centered design, places the user at the heart of product development and meshes it with the potentials of the technology to achieve the desired business outcome. Corbin says Marriott has embraced design thinking as a way to make its mobile app more of a "warm embrace" for guests.
Ideally, such service-oriented changes will resonate for a guest base that has already proven willing to book Marriott stays through smartphones. In 2016, $1.7 billion of Marriott's $13.4 billion ingross online bookings came through the mobile app, up 70 percent from $1 billion in 2015. And while Marriott mobile app users have historically used the app purely to book travel, Corbin says that two-thirds of the application usage stems from services unrelated to bookings. For example, guests have logged more than 20,000,000 mobile check-in and check-out requests through the mobile app to date.  
[ Download the State of the CIO 2017 research report ]"It used to be about the booking but the lines crossed in 2015 and people started to use the app for more than [the] commerce component," Corbin says. "Based on research on what customers want, we need to make sure we're building out features and services to support them in each of those moments."
‘Alexa, are you spying on me?’Eventually, those mobile "moments" could extend beyond the app on your phones to your voice, which thanks to the burgeoning success of Amazon.com's Alexa has become a focal point of consumer-oriented companies. Corbin says Marriott, which allocates a small group of employees who focus on emerging technologies, is exploring how voice recognition might work in the context of the guest stay experience.
[ Related: 10 mobile marketing trends to watch in 2017 ]
Questions Corbin is considering: What data sources would such a solution draw from? When a guest checks out, does it clear the record after they are gone? And the big consumer privacy dilemma: How do guests feel about something listening in on them when they're in the room?
Moreover, issuing service requests from a global hotel chain isn't like using ordering a pizza. Take room service, for example. Ordering a burger sounds straightforward until you get into the permutations, including questions such as these: How do you want that cooked? Cheese or no cheese? What kind of bun? Hold the onion.
[ Your guide to top tech conferences 2017 ]Marriott would have to train the voice assistant to recognize the various vocal patterns and idiosyncrasies associated with human speech. The complexity grows exponentially when you consider the full complement of booking services Marriott offers. "There are a lot of factors that come into play and you've got to figure all that out before you go out at scale," Corbin says. "It's early days but there is tremendous promise."
As Marriott explores these options it will lean heavily on data generated from guest feedback, which contributed to the mobile app relaunch. While Marriott relies on web analytics tools and social media, it also checks consumers' pulse through 20,000 in-application survey response a month and application store reviews. And while employees have spirited debates about what they think is cool or what the user would want, the customer-driven metrics win out. "Metrics are our lifeblood," Corbin says. "Our mantra is, 'data over opinion.'"
While digital "owns" the customer experience, including the website and mobile app, employees from both digital and IT are co-located and build software in agile scrum teams. When issues arise, such as the API problem and UX booking path snafu that darkened the mobile app relaunch in February, members of each team tackled the challenge together and rolled out updates over the next several days. There was no finger-pointing, no digital versus IT, Corbin says.
Ultimately, products are developed, fixed and polished with the customer in mind. "The customer is the ultimate arbiter of where we want to focus," Corbin says. "Once you share that with everybody in the organization, people get aligned quickly."

​Source: http://www.cio.com/article/3188724/mobile/how-design-thinking-drives-marriotts-digital-strategy.html

Design thinking is the idea that we can solve problems by practicing human-centered design—putting people at the centre of the problem solving process.
Core to the idea of design thinking is that we focus on an overall goal, rather than say a specific problem to solve. While it can help us solve some of the world’s most complex problems (think global warming), we can also use it every day in the web industry, to help us solve our own complex issues.
For example, a product manager may come to you and say ‘we need to improve our web traffic this month by 50%’. The traditional way of solving this maybe to increase advertising spend, to run a social campaign, or purely look at methods that are for traffic building.
The design thinking approach to this problem is to ask ‘why?’—maybe the 50% increase in traffic is expected to yield an increase in leads. Well, rather than going down the costly process of paid advertising to boost traffic and leads, maybe a better solution is to improve the conversion rate of the already existing traffic.


HOW DESIGN THINKING LOOKS IN PRACTICEAIRBNBA great example of design thinking in practice comes from the early days of AirBNB. Very early on, they realised that their apartment listings tended to have poor quality of photos—often from older camera phones. They believed that if more apartments had better photos, they would receive more bookings.
So what did they do? They flew out to New York (where the majority of listings were), rented a camera, visited some users and dramatically improved the photo quality of those listings. Straight away they doubled their weekly revenue, the biggest improvement they’d made in a long time.
How is this design thinking? Well, AirBNB knew that it was impossible in the long term to be able to treat every single user like this and fly to every destination. But, knowing how critical it was, they chose to employ a short term solution that wouldn’t scale, because if it worked, the outcome was overwhelmingly positive for the company.


NORDSTROMAnother great example of design thinking in practice came from the Nordstrom Innovation Lab. Nordstrom, a top US retailer, hired a team of people to mine data that they gathered from sources like Facebook, Pinterest and Twitter to create curated experiences for customers based off their preferences and in-store activity.
One of the activities that they undertook, was to go into a retail store and create a sunglasses iPad app on-site in the store. Rather than take a typical approach of collect data, design in their offices, and test the product on users, they physically brought designers and developers into their store and setup shop. This allowed them first hand access to real customers (not recruited users to study), and meant that at every step of the way they were able to test with real users. Rather than just the user researchers getting up-close access to customers, project managers and developers also had access and ideas could easily be tested and validated with customers in real-time, as they developed the app.
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This ‘lean’ approach is central in design thinking. As with the AirBNB example, this idea doesn’t necessarily scale—not everyone can go on-site and build an app in this method—but Nordstrom used their resources to get close to their customers and to get something built, based on the direct feedback they received. Whether the app worked or not long term, their approach meant that they had something to test much quicker than if they had of taken a more traditional design approach.
‘WIZARD OF OZ’ TECHNIQUEAnother great example of design thinking in practice, using a ‘lean’ approach, is the ‘wizard of oz’ technique. The term originates from the field of experimental psychology in the 1980’s. As ‘Universal Methods of Design’ puts it, the Wizard of Oz is “a research experiment in which subjects interact with a computer system that subjects believe to be autonomous, but which is actually being operated or partially operated by an unseen human being.”
It’s so-called because the user or test participant may think they are interacting with a computer or system, while in fact there’s a human ‘behind the curtain’ operating the computer (the operator is ‘the wizard’). While this specific employment of the approach originates in the field of psychology, there are many ways in which we can employ it in our web designs today.
Essentially the idea is for us to test if a feature is worth building, before we build it. This is the same reason we prototype, we want to build something quickly so that we can validate it with users. The ‘Wizard of Oz’ approach is different to prototyping, as prototyping tends to be something we build before we build a real product, whereas the ‘Wizard of Oz’ tends to be more of a minimum viable product (MVP) for an idea. 
So how does that work? Well, the ideas can range from simple to complex. On the simplest level, let’s say you want to add a newsletter to your website. You’ve heard this is a good idea, but maybe you’re worried that you’re going to have to sign up to an email service, like Mailchimp or Campaign Monitor, you’ll need someone to design your newsletter, someone to code it and then someone to create content—could be a costly exercise.
Well, one way of approaching it would be to strip that all back—use a free plan with MailChimp or Campaign Monitor, start with a basic template and focus on the content. However, how we could really strip it back is to use the Wizard of Oz technique—have an email signup and collect emails in a database, not attached to any service. Just collect email addresses to see if there’s actually a desire for this email list. If no-one signs up, you can divert your attention elsewhere. If a few people sign-up, you can manually send them emails and see if it gains traction. If a lot of people sign-up—well maybe you can afford to spend that extra money on implementing the feature properly!
The startup ‘CityPockets’ employed this method to come up with their MVP. In order to validate their idea (collecting users’ coupons for various stores in one central location), they told users to forward them emails so that they could do the sorting out. Rather than use back-end logic to implement this feature, Cheryl, the company’s founder, spent hours manually entering the coupons into a database herself. This meant rather than spending time and money on creating the back-end for her app, she was able to get a working product much sooner by doing some ‘heavy lifting’ herself.
Sure, this idea wouldn’t scale, but it let her find out very quickly what kind of changes she needed to make to her app, and therefore when she did get to creating a back-end, there was a lot less wasted effort.
True design thinking means putting people at the centre of your design experience. While people say they want things, using techniques like the ‘Wizard of Oz’ it’s easier to see if they actually will use the thing that they say they want, and makes it easier for us to design the right things for our customers.


WHY DESIGN THINKING?As in the examples above, it’s clear that by applying design thinking, we’re solving the real problems of our customers, rather than focusing on business goals exclusively. The idea of a small company with not a huge amount of money flying to New York to take a few photos may not have floated in a lot of corporate board rooms, but there’s no doubt this decision changed the direction of the company. Not everyone can go into stores and build apps on the fly, but adding an email field to collect users’ emails for a particular feature is pretty doable.
Part of the reason this idea of design thinking is so good, is that we can look at problems in a different way—often reframing the problems, where maybe the traditional approach tends to prioritise the wrong things.
It also allows us to be agile and lean. It means that rather than spending a whole lot of time building a product or a website, then launching and seeing what happens, it allows us to build something smaller and launch earlier. Test it, pivot as needed. Analyse as we are building the product, not waiting until the end.
These benefits are endless. A design thinking approach means involving the users in the process. Not only does this provide better solutions, but it means that the users feel part of the process. They feel loved, like someone is actually caring for them. This will cause them to forgive potential issues more readily and in turn become promoters, who will encourage their friends and others to use our products and websites. This effect, is of course more popularly known as the ‘halo effect’.

We need to ratchet up from targeted innovation and apply design-thinking principles to one of the biggest social issues of our time: global poverty itself.

There’s been a lot of hype in recent years about the power of design to solve social problems. Companies like IDEO, frog, and Smart Design—as well as numerous foundations, design schools, and nonprofits—have set out to tackle tough issues with innovations that make use of social and cognitive science, focus on systemic analysis, and pay attention to emergent patterns. They are advocates of design thinking for social impact, and they’re making serious progress in areas such as improving voter registration and education programs for people stranded in refugee camps.
But what if we were to ratchet up from this level of targeted innovation and apply design principles to one of the biggest social issues of our time: global poverty itself?
The world’s most powerful governments and international institutions are working hard right now to convince us that global poverty has been cut in half since the 90’s. More and more analysts, though, are pointing out that this claim is little more than an accounting trick: UN officials have massaged the numbers to make it seem as though poverty has been reduced, when in fact it has increased.

When the more reasonable poverty level of $5 per day is used, we see that global poverty has increased since 1990. (Image courtesy of /TheRules)
What this means is that the bulk of the well-meaning development projects that have been rolled out in the Global South over the past 65 years—costing hundreds of billions of dollars—have had very little positive impact on poverty numbers (with a net negative effect when ecological degradation is added to the equation). How has this happened?
The answer is that the preferred development model suffers from severe, monumental design flaws.
The first of these flaws is in how the development industry defines the problem itself. Einstein captured the challenge crisply when he said, “If I had 60 minutes to solve a problem and my life depended on it, I’d spend 55 minutes determining the right question to ask.” Right now, the question development organizations ask is, “How can we eradicate poverty?” Good design thinking, on the other hand, would tell you to start with the more fundamental question, “Why does mass poverty exist?”
The first question leads you naturally and logically to things like improving health care and education, and transfers of money in the form of foreign aid and charity. All valid in their own right, perhaps, but are they designed to address symptoms or causes? If you start from the question, “How can we eradicate poverty,” that distinction doesn’t really matter. The interventions that come to mind all address glaring features of the problem as we see it in front of us today, and therefore seem legitimate and sufficient.
If you ask the more fundamental question, you will come up with a more fundamental answer. To start, you won’t focus your initial enquiry on describing every facet of the problem you see in front of you today—poor health care, insufficient aid—but rather on the causes and conditions from which the overall reality emerged. In other words, the question will guide you to understand the processes that have created poverty over the past few centuries and continue to create it today. Now you’re looking at things like the Enclosure Movement, slavery, colonialism, resource plunder, structural adjustment programs, and financial crisis and austerity.
There is a vital current surging beneath this perspective: power. In all of these examples, active, deliberate, human decisions have been at play. Some people have been more powerful than others, and small groups have been powerful for extended periods. There has been a deep and systemic bias in the profile of who makes seminal decisions.
This brings us to the second design flaw in the standard development model: a built-in blindness to power dynamics.
Because the question, “How do we eradicate poverty?” focuses attention on what we see around us today, it doesn’t much care what decisions or what people may have benefitted from bringing it into being. This is a very handy thing politically, because it means we don’t have to examine or treat anyone or anything as culpable, past or present. It means that the wealth that many acquired through processes that produced mass impoverishment is irrelevant. It means we can comfortably usher modern organizations whose very operating logic has long required impoverishment—including political parties and their ideologies, corporations, and indeed whole industries—into high places of political power, and then believe and trust what they do there. All of this creates more than enough room for a deeply flawed assumption to reign supreme: that we are most likely to solve our problems using the very logic that created them in the first place. And we’re back to the now politically inconvenient Einstein and his much-loved truism: “We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them.”
To understand how such self-defeating logic manifests itself and manages to pass largely unchallenged, we need to look to a third design flaw in the mainstream development model—one that has to do with language. Every designer worth their salt knows that metaphors matter—they activate deep frameworks that guide the way users respond. Get the wrong metaphors, and design won’t work, plain and simple.
We studied the language used by development practitioners on Twitter to describe poverty and found that its metaphors are, at best, confused. Some talk about it as a disease that needs eradicating, some describe as an enemy to combat and destroy, and some as a prison that cages people in. We can see very different logics at play in just these three metaphors. Do we “solve” poverty by searching for a cure that inoculates people, as if against a germ or virus? Do impoverished people need an army to fight for them here and now, or a liberator to spring open their prison doors?
Each of these common metaphors evoke the idea that poverty is natural or inevitable. They can even imply moral judgment on those who are poor. Thus, the underlying logic of these metaphors excuses us from caring much about the root causes. In other words, the basic language we use to talk about poverty is a cognitive barrier to understanding the problem in a way that all good design thinking demands: at the cause level.
All of these flaws are on display in the development industry’s latest Big Plan—the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)—which promises something wonderful, almost irresistible: the total eradication of poverty by no later than 2030.
Unfortunately, the underlying design of the SDGs—like the development industry from which they are emerging—is too unsound to make this ambition a reality.  For one, the goals rely entirely on the same-old, one-dimensional “solution” to poverty that has failed for the past 65 years: GDP growth. The SDGs would have us believe that we can eradicate poverty by 2030 through the sort of undifferentiated, consumption-based growth that GDP measures. This is ridiculous on two counts: basic economics and system design.
Economist David Woodward has shown that even if we assume the fastest rate of growth in the developing world we’ve seen in the last half century, it will take about 207 years for everyone currently living on less that $5 per day to break above that line—the minimum necessary to achieve normal human life expectancy. GDP masks the fact that, in our present system, 93 cents of every dollar created accumulates in the coffers of the top 1 percent. Trickle-down on a slope this skewed takes a really long time! In this case, 14 times as long as they are promising in the claim that all the world’s poverty will be gone by 2030.
Then there’s the system design. GDP growth on the scale required for wealth to trickle down enough to eradicate poverty means multiplying the size of the global economy by 175 times. It’s worth stopping to think about this. To eradicate poverty using a plan designed around GDP growth means extracting, producing, and consuming 175 times more commodities than we presently do. This is guaranteed to cause climate catastrophe sufficient to make our planet uninhabitable.
So what’s the alternative? Design thinking—which, if applied, would completely up-end the priorities of the SDGs.
An approach based on whole system design would demand that we focus our greatest attention on our economic system and the root causes, rather than individual issues (such as health care and education) and immediately apparent symptoms. Practically speaking, it would place the question of how we understand (and therefore measure) progress at the very top of the priority list, rather than burying it away and leaving it as a problem for the next generation—the tired old concept of GDP growth would be laid to rest in the political graveyard, alongside apartheid and formal empire. It would demand that we examine and address the historical patterns of both sides of the economic coin—wealth and poverty—so that we can challenge the forces that create poverty.
These are not easy things to achieve, which is one reason why we seldom attempt them. They require that we challenge entrenched power and the systems that sustain it. But we must challenge them on the grand stages of global development if we are to honor not just humanity and the earth system within which we have evolved, but also our very best knowledge.
A place to start—and one that we can all build on from today onward—is to use our voices and words, creativity, skills, and compassion to demand that the international development industry change its central premise (and promise), from eradicating poverty to eradicating poverty creation.

​Source: https://ssir.org/articles/entry/using_design_thinking_to_eradicate_poverty_creation

Design sprint experiences can often feel more like a marathon for participants learning to work in a new way. By thinking of a sprint as a ‘design learning cycle’, it can be seen as a more fluid and iterative process that becomes ‘business as usual’…
Design Thinking can help business leaders address their organisation’s most important challenges and deliver the ultimate prize – creating customer utility.
To achieve the re-imagining of existing products or services and the invention of new ones, a design sprint shouldn’t be a one-off experience engineered to confirm an existing assumption or develop a new fail-safe initiative.
While no process offers a silver bullet for companies wanting to eliminate risk, by treating design sprints as a continuous design learning cycle, Design Thinking can become a routine mechanism that works directly with your customer to solve their most pressing needs.
The true purpose of a design learning cycle is to move with speed so that each stage of a Design Thinking process fail-safes the last. For example, your ability to frame up a human-centred problem is dependent upon the quality of your research.
Your ability to ideate is dependent upon the quality of problem framing. Participants should be prompted to iteratively move through a design learning cycle at an almost unreasonable pace. Put simply, many smaller design cycles (iterations) are safer to apply than long-drawn-out projects.
Pace brings other benefits too. Shorter and faster learning cycles reduce risk within your business. Effectively, you are committing fewer resources towards exposing a flawed concept or strategy.
Smaller, routine cycles also create a safer landing pad for teams to fail or for them to learn to recognise and acknowledge when they are failing. A smaller, scaled cycle will reduce anxiety within the team and help them take the necessary bold steps towards realising an innovative idea.
With routine application, the effectiveness of design learning cycles will accelerate dramatically. Each cycle usually provides a diversity of lessons learned for the wider business and, over time, familiar patterns will begin to consistently emerge regardless of the starting design challenge and context.
Companies should take serious notice of such themes and patterns. They could be indicative of a serious issue in need of attention.
What else might prevent your forays into Design Thinking from stalling at the first hurdle?
First, always begin with research where you seek to understand the genuine needs and problems experienced by your customer. Don’t believe ‘we already have all of the answers in the room’. You don’t.
Avoiding meeting with your customers at the start of a sprint process might initially feel like the path of least resistance, but that will give you an output of least surprise. Sprinting without research will lead to incremental step-change at best and likely just resurface familiar ideas already available to your business.
Also, consider investing time in designing the right challenge for your design thinkers. An overly tactical focus or working on routine ‘hygiene’ projects with too narrow a field of focus tend to exhaust themselves quickly in a design learning cycle.
A challenge which is too wide open might be devoid of the requisite constraint to focus your designers towards delivering a useful outcome. An appropriately scaled challenge will instead allow teams to negotiate their way ‘to the puck’ and be directed by real customer need.
When operated as a continuous routine process with your customers, design learning cycles will help inform your fundamental business strategy. Take time to scale challenges the right way and be prepared to operate cycles at an almost unreasonable pace.
With the right formula in place, you will soon discover how design learning cycles can help you get it right by rapidly getting it wrong.
Simon Holbrook is Principal Consultant of Assurity Consulting’s new Design Thinking team. Simon and Olivia Wilson will be hosting a live ‘How can Design Thinking help you?’ Q&A session on Assurity Consulting’s Facebook page to introduce people to the power of Design Thinking. Tune in on Friday 21 April at midday. You can submit your questions before the event via this link. We’ll aim to answer as many questions as possible in the 20-minute Livestream. Please ‘like’ Assurity Consulting’s Facebook page for all the latest event notifications. 

​Source: https://itbrief.co.nz/story/making-design-thinking-always-activity/

Since Cooper lit the torch with a basic process construct that started at approval and ended at launch, elegance has been added. The early 1990s brought in a product definition phase which was preceded by a concepting activity. The late 1990s saw improvements for technology-push products, rapid commercialization, and the formalization of portfolios at every phase of the pipeline.

The early 2000s ushered-in advanced development processes and innovation skunk-works organizations which were separated from product development and added refinements for technology-push. The late 2000s integrated intellectual property (IP) to generate, protect, and monetize it through licensing and sale. In the early 2010s, we made it lean. Many are still working on IP and lean. But—never a dull moment—the IoT is arriving faster than many had imagined.
Currently, few companies have gone through their product development process from stem to stern to prepare for the IoT. Modifying business and technical processes, and using them until they become the norm, takes several years. IP is a great example of this. There is urgency, however. If predictions that there will be hundreds of billions of connected devices by 2025 are true, it would stand to reason that the companies that design "IoT-ready" products would have an advantage.
What then are the implications of IoT-ready products on the product development process? Let's use a bit of design thinking to look for places to tailor the product development process for the IoT. Right now, the value of the product is largely about the product itself. In the future, the value of the product will also be its information content and its ability to aggregate vertically and horizontally in the cloud. A well-designed process can go a long way to enabling "IoT capability." My previous column discussed the importance of sensors. The better the source data and the less it costs, the better the resultant value. That is a good starting point.
One of the first considerations for a new product is its portfolio fit. Does the product fit with the company's IoT goals for the portfolio, product line, or family? Has the company established IoT goals at these levels yet? From a technical view, do architectural rules and guidelines exist for incorporating sensors, wireless, flash, and other possible "IoT enablers" in a systematic way?
For project plans and approval decisions, do business plans address "IoT ability" in a consistent manner as is done for other variables that have become part of every business plan? Are there implications for bills of material, design reviews, and other structural and checklist documentation? Chip and PCB designers have been provisioning for magnetic fields, cross talk, and current surges at the micro level. In the future, fully connected products touting 100% up-time will have many of these same design considerations at the macro level—and associated safety issues.
Alpha and beta testing with customers and focus groups is sure to bring in a whole host of new types of inputs, slowing down products that are well along in development. As one nears product launch, technical literature and marketing promotional materials will have to address IoT capabilities in a consistent way. My guess is that many companies will soon develop an "IoT branding" strategy. These branding strategies will mature with time, ultimately emanating from architectural principles early-on in the process, as enabling the IoT also approaches its own day-to-day norm with product developers.
The IoT will be no different than other product development process improvements. They all had their "what does it all mean?" beginning. Companies that eagerly addressed early-market uncertainties were the first to become proficient. Other companies then copied their practices. But, the eager ones got a three- to five-year head start.

​Source: http://machinedesign.com/contributing-technical-experts/design-thinking-iot-product-development-process

IBM IS NOT a design company. Of its nearly 400,000 employees, few could rightly be described as aesthetes; of its assorted products, many seem to be of the “function over form” variety. And yet, if you look past its pocket-protector reputation, there’s little doubt that IBM is angling—more aggressively than any corporation of its size—to become a leading design company in the most literal sense of the phrase.
For going on four years now, IBM has been working to reinvent itself as a design-led business. In 2012, the computing behemoth employed just one designer for every 80 coders. Today, that ratio stands at 1:20. By the end of 2016, the company hopes to narrow it to 1:15. All-told, the company is investing more than $100-million in an effort to become a design-centered corporation. Charlie Hill, chief technology officer of IBM Design, says the plan is to completely overhaul IBM’s corporate ethos. For years, he says, “our teams had a very engineering-centric culture.” But in 2012, everything changed. “We wanted to shift that culture towards a focus on users’ outcomes,” Hill says.
IBM is best known by its super computer Watson, but a good chunk of the company’s business is making software for enterprise applications for analytics, security, and increasingly the cloud. You might rarely see the IBM logo, but it’s behind much of what powers your day-to-day interactions with technology. And just like you and I want a seamless, intuitive experience when we take money out of an ATM or pay at a grocery store, it stands to reason the people creating that software do too. “To do their work really expertly across industries, it has has to be just as intuitive as what they use in their personal lives,” Hill says.
That plan hinges not only on the company-wide implementation of design thinking—a framework for conducting business that puts users’ (i.e. customers’) needs first—but the establishment of IBM as a leader in the growing ecosystem of design-conscious companies. To that end, IBM today published its very own set of design thinking guidelines—a selection of best design practices the company hopes other big businesses will look to as they seek to remain relevant and profitable in a rapidly evolving corporate landscape.

Of course, IBM is far from the originator of the corporate trend in design thinking. The movement’s watershed moment, as a business methodology, came in the late 1980s, when David Kelley of Ideo popularized the idea of “user-centered design.” But Kelley’s strategies seemed best-suited to smaller, creativity-focused companies—not corporate titans. Hill explains that when companies the size of IBM adopt traditional design thinking theories wholesale, they quickly begin to break down. IBM’s guidelines take those canonical theories and adapt them for implementation across a sprawling, complex business such as itself. “When you look at a lot of the established representations of design thinking, we found that in practice they feel a little bit ‘waterfall-y,’” he says.
What Hill means by “waterfall-y is that even though design thinking champions nonlinear thought processes, big companies often find themselves mired in the methodology’s suggested phases (empathize, define, ideate, prototype, test). Ultimately this defeats the purpose, which is partly to build agility into the product-creation process. This trap is particularly prevalent at a company like IBM, where product teams are often very large and geographically spread out. “Generic design thinking doesn’t really tell you how to manage that situation,” Hill says. “And what happens is you very easily go off the rails because of the complexity of your environment.”
Design thinking is nothing if not a jumble of buzzwords artfully arranged into a business plan, and IBM has created its own glossary of terms for its scaled methodology. The company’s version of design thinking centers around something it calls “the loop.” Visualized, the loop is an infinity symbol punctuated with four dots—the yellow dot representing the user, the green dots representing the various actions of “observe,” “reflect,” and “make.” Explained simply, the loop represents the entire product-creation process, beginning with user-centered research all the way through prototyping (“everything is a prototype!” says Hill), to building and launching a product. The loop becomes a loop when you realize that the iterative process is never actually done; perhaps the loop’s most important requirement is reflecting on what’s been created and constantly improving it. This, of course, is most applicable in the world of software, which allows IBM to deploy updated versions as needed.
So far, more than 10,000 employees have gone through the IBM Bootcamp where they learn about the loop and other tenets of IBM’s design thinking framework. In total, the company has developed around 100 products using design thinking (the most well-known being Bluemix, its cloud platform for developing apps).
And the loop is just one part of IBM’s plan to recast its corporate culture as design friendly. Its entire design thinking manifesto is now online, and if you’re interested, it’s certainly worth a read. If nothing else, it provides fascinating insight into how a massively successful corporation plans to stay relevant amidst the rapidly changing worlds of computing and business. In many ways, IBM’s newfound focus on design is an admission that a good user experience isn’t always as simple as slapping on a new user interface—it can take a total overhaul of corporate culture to get it right.

​Source: https://www.wired.com/2016/01/ibms-got-a-plan-to-bring-design-thinking-to-big-business/?utm_content=buffer42125&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter.com&utm_campaign=buffer

Disregard your industry and consider why thinking like a designer, or using ‘Design Thinking’ could make you more influential in what you do. It’s a style of strategy that originated from architecture and interior design however reaches worlds far beyond these disciplines.   
We live in an era where more so than ever the need for creative solutions is imperative. Industries are becoming interwoven through technology and people are more closely connected than ever before. The world has become a tiny place with an abundance of opportunity whereby anybody has a potential platform to engage society and solve problems.
A common misconception is that because one does not operate in a creative realm, that one is not capable of having a creative solution. This is due mostly to creativity becoming an industry which more often than not governs it as a profession as opposed to a way of being or style of thinking.
The truth is though, creativity is embedded in our DNA, much like work-ethic and passion. There are creative accountants, bankers, lawyers and doctors in the world, who rely on creative solutions to make the world a better place. If we understand the system to unlocking that style of thinking then we stand to better service the people who need our services the most.
This is essentially the premise behind design thinking and it can drastically transform the ways in which we design products, processes, strategies and services. It’s the act of putting the human-being first and designing around the experience.
In recent interviews with Boyana Popvassilev (interior architect and director of 26 STREET) and Angela Luna (CEO of ADIFF), The Urban Developer delved into how this style of thought is attributing to improving lives and creating better services. The conversation will be driven by Popvassilev who has an in-depth industry experience utilizing this style of thought and Luna’s ‘ADIFF x Goodgood-for-good reversible reflective jacket’ as the exemplar, which is the complete epitome of design thinking.   

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What Is Design Thinking?Popvassilev:
‘Design Thinking’ is a buzz phrase you may have already heard.  It’s not exactly what some of you imagine, I’m not here to teach you how to be more trendy or show you the latest architectural blogs and products.
Instead let’s talk strategy.
We are all in admiration of companies that changed the way we live such as Uber and Apple, but do you ever wonder how they approached the making of their service or product?
‘Design thinking’ is a fairly new problem-solving method being embraced by global leaders, start-ups and established businesses, governments and individuals alike.  The core principles of this method originated from the interior design industry, however can be applied to any field or discipline.  It allows us to come up with entirely new ways of doing, using, and living that have not necessarily been explored yet. It allows us to resolve issues, see alternatives options and be innovative at the core of our practices.

​STEP 3 OF DESIGN THINKING:  Ideate.
Popvassilev: The brainstorm and design phase of our new solution. This is the point where you really start to ‘think outside the box’ in order to create solutions for the problems you’ve identified through the earlier stages.
Luna: After learning more about the crisis and feeling the overwhelming desire to offer support in some way, I really had no idea what I could do to provide any assistance. With a background in fashion, it wasn’t like I could change political policy or go be a social worker. It was my last year at Parsons, so I really had no other choice but to try to find a way to use my skills in design to find a way to help. It was never about making a charitable concept fashionable, it was finding a way to propose solutions via design and to communicate awareness about the refugee crisis itself through the medium of clothing.

STEP 5 OF DESIGN THINKING:  Test.
Popvassilev: Try again and keep testing for feedback. The results that are generated from this stage will allow you to redefine flaws in the product and create iterations of design that better solve the problem.  
Luna: I’ve mostly tested the products personally and within refugee camps. When I tested the products in Greece, I actually didn’t bring along any of my own jackets and just wore the collection everyday. I slept in the sleeping bag jacket for two nights on the 13-hour ferry to Lesvos – and it definitely made the floor much comfier. Within the camps, we received a 100% positive response to the collection from refugees, and an explicit need for such products. We have enough testing to move forward with production of our first jacket, but will continue to visit the camps with new products to get feedback from refugees.



Popvassilev: So, how can we as designers and developers impact new communities through our upcoming projects?
It starts at the core of our practices.  Want to change the way your company approaches innovation?  Here’s an idea. Use the ‘Design thinking’ method to redesign your business.
Shift your loyalties towards the very people you are servicing, anticipation is the only way towards modern response behavior. 
The Urban Developer aims to drive conversations that in turn make cities better places. Homelessness and displacement is an issue every city faces and a cause that deserves deep contemplation and consideration. Angela’s endeavours to bring this product to life will aid in making lives more comfortable for displaced people, a cause that aligns with our values at The Urban Developer. Click to see more of Angela’s campaign.  

​Source: https://www.theurbandeveloper.com/design-thinking-can-change-the-world-and-you-dont-have-to-be-an-interior-designer-to-do-it/

The term design thinking gets bandied around a lot these days, but what does it really mean?
For many people, it can almost seem meaningless, a buzzword that helps mystify meaning rather than help sharpen it. Ironically, that’s the opposite of what design thinking should be.
Design thinking is about simplicity in the middle of chaos. It’s about creating as much value as possible for your customers. It’s about serving your users in an intelligent and empathetic method. Most importantly, it’s the idea that innovation has a structure and a rhythm to it, a discipline that can be managed to deliver great results for every stakeholder involved.
Creating new solutions to enduring problems can be difficult, especially if you don’t know where to start. Design thinking gives you the tools and processes you need to focus your efforts where they will add the most value.
“Design is the action of bringing something new and desired into existence—a proactive stance that resolves or dissolves problematic situations by design. It is a compound of routine, adaptive and design expertise brought to bear on complex dynamic situations.” —Harold Nelson
It can take years to become a professional designer, but there are resources out there that teach the basics of design thinking in a fraction of the time. If you wanted to get a view on the fundamentals of design thinking, you can’t go wrong with the following list of resources. Here are six resources that will help you understand and implement design thinking in every facet of your life.
7 Resources For Better Understanding Design
1. Design Thinking as Strategy for Innovation
Let’s start with the basics. What is design thinking?
This guide from Creativity at Work will help you think of innovation as a methodology. You’ll find out that design thinking is a framework that you can use to solve complex, open-ended problems with well-instrumented solutions. It’s how you can create solutions that add value to users through empathy and rapidly adapting to any feedback.
As you read through the guide, you’ll realize that design thinking is indeed something you can apply to any problem–but you’ll also have a much more precise definition of the steps required to get there.  
2. Teaching Empathy Through Design Thinking
Learning design thinking can seem like reading through an endless series of steps and processes. Edutopia breaks down the process into five concrete steps, from applying empathy to testing solutions. It’s an easy read that helps really nail down the methodology of innovation.
3. Springboard Learning Path on User Experience Design



Springboard is an online school where you can learn UX Design (among other subjects) with mentorship from industry experts. They’ve created this free curated learning path that can help you learn all of the tools and principles behind design thinking. Designed by an experienced UX’er, it contains tangible lessons in how to emphasize with your users and build solutions for their needs. They also allow you to upgrade and get a mentor in the field who can help crystallize these insights into real projects.  
There’s a section in this learning path devoted specifically to design thinking, among other valuable design resources.
4. Harvard Business Review: Design For Action
Tim Brown, the founder of IDEO, has had a lot to do with the popularization of design thinking. In this long-form reflection, him and Richard L. Martin, the former dean of the University of Toronto Rotman School of Management, discuss how design thinking first expanded from physical products to abstract ideas. They then dive deep into several real-life examples of design thinking in action.
The authors weave the story behind the genesis of design thinking into its current strengths and weaknesses. You’ll learn that design thinking can be dangerous: not everybody benefits from radical change. You’ll also learn that it can completely reshape systems and help build innovative and strong businesses that will last.
By storytelling through the journey of a Peruvian entrepreneur dedicated to bolstering the middle class in Peru, the authors help evoke how complex, seemingly unsolvable problems, can be broken down and processed through design thinking into elegant solutions.
5. 9 Real-Life Examples of Design Thinking from WeThinq
Sometimes design thinking gets fuzzy because it seems like you can apply it to just about anything, and there are few real-world examples that can make it seem tangible. We’ve seen some examples interspersed in different stories, but maybe you want more tangible examples. This list of 9 real-life examples of design thinking in action from WeThinq will give you just that.
These projects, all of which create positive social impact, show how thinking and acting with empathy and deliberate innovation can help change fields as vast and different from each other as education and mobility issues.
6. Stanford Design School Crash Course on Design Thinking
The Stanford Design School is one of the best places in the world to start looking into the fundamentals of design thinking. We’re going to finish off with this resource because it offers a practical DIY exercise that will immerse you in the process of design thinking. Get a partner and start applying this theory to real-life problems!
This video course and guidebook from Stanford will help you refine your innovation thinking and it will consolidate all of the theory of design thinking into action. You will start changing how people experience gift-giving–and you’ll be able to apply that line of thinking anywhere else.
Armed with all of the theory of design thinking, practical examples of how others are implementing it, and an immersive exercise that will turn your design thoughts to action, you should have a better idea of how design thinking can help you create more novel ideas and better experiences.
7. 45 Resources For Teaching Design Thinking
From TeachThought!
Hopefully this article serves as a spark for your learning. If you find any further resources, or if you think we missed anything, please join the discussion below!

Source: http://www.teachthought.com/pedagogy/7-resources-for-better-understanding-design/​

When it comes to creating a startup, two methodologies for products and customers have become prominent: design thinking and the lean startup. Question is, which one should entrepreneurs adopt for their company?
In an article sent to Ventureburn by the MTN Solution Space, the organisation breaks down the methodologies in order for startup founders to figure out which version is best.
“Both approaches take an idea to product in the fastest way possible, but the key difference is where the product appears in the innovation cycle,” writes the director of the Hasso Plattner Institute of Design Thinking at the University of Cape Town, Richard Perez, in the piece.
What is design thinking?These days, looking for customers after you’ve designed a product is a risky business model. Instead, design thinking focuses on finding the underlying need for the product, researching it, and then creating it for your customers.
This allows entrepreneurs to validate the product before going to market and gives the consumer the product they asked for and not something unneeded that is forced on them.
“The discovery phase is critical in design thinking. Most of the work is focused on developing a human-centred understanding of the problem before going into solution mode,” says Perez.
“Design thinking helps to break down silos across corporate departments. With multiple disciplines around a table, it’s possible to bring new perspectives to a problem within a structured framework for working together,” he adds.
What is the lean startup?The way the lean startup methodology works is to create a minimal viable product all the while making incremental changes to it through feedback from users. It meshes customer and product development in order to grow relationships and develop research.
“The lean startup approach is about reducing risk, which sometimes requires changing an idea on the spot,” says the co-founder of Afrolabs and Lean Iterator, David Campey.
This method was popularised by The Lean Startup, a book written by Eric Ries, which describes the startup process as “build, measure, learn”.
“Lean startup is about minimising waste, so you’ll have say two or three founders working to develop a product. They will work to prove an idea. Hopefully this leads to investment, which will allow them to prove other ideas. Through this validated learning, the team grows over the time as the product and business develops.”
So which method is best?This may be a bit of a cop-out, but there is no definitive answer. Why? Well, each and every startup and entrepreneur is different and therefore has different needs.
In fact, choosing between the lean startup and design thinking methodologies is very much up to what the founder wants to do: would they like to build a product, test, and then pivot, or let the problem take lead before the product exists?
There’s a bit more to itThere is another aspect to consider, which is the innovation cycle. According to the MTN Solution Space, it has “developed a Solution Lifecycle Framework, which helps founders better understand their approach to building new solutions, based on where they are in the innovation cycle”.
While it includes desirability, feasibility, and viability, which is adapted from CEO of IDEO, Tim Brown’s diagram for the three successful criteria that a startup needs, also adds in reliability as the fourth factor.
“Founders need to be honest in their self-assessment of whether they are in love with the problem or the solution. We often see entrepreneurs who are in love with their solution focusing on the technological feasibility of the product, but who ignore the user feedback that is critical to establishing whether the customer wants their product at all,” says manger of the MTN Solution Space, Sarah-Anne Arnold.

​Source: http://ventureburn.com/2017/03/design-thinking-vs-lean-startup-one-use/