Solving tough consumer research challenges with design thinking

What is design thinking?
Simply put, design thinking is a way to solve complex problems in a human-centered way. It starts with a specific goal and goes through multiple iterative stages of diverging and converging. Design thinking typically includes approaches like observation, interviews, brainstorming and prototyping.

Tim Brown, CEO and president of IDEO, gives this definition of design thinking’s role within business: “Design thinking can be described as a discipline that uses the designer’s sensibility and methods to match people’s needs with what is technologically feasible and what a viable business strategy can convert into customer value and market opportunity.”

What consumer research innovation challenges can design thinking help solve? 

• People have a hard time talking about or answering questions about things that do not yet exist. Also, many people are not inherently future thinkers, that is, they have trouble imagining a world different from the one they live in today.
• Asking people directly what they want generally only leads to incremental improvements, not breakthrough innovation. It’s practically impossible for people to tell you what they will need in the future. Consider the quote famously attributed to Henry Ford, “If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.” 
• Teams often wait until too late to engage consumers in the process of innovation because they want to wait to show ideas once they’ve reached a high level of finish, which impacts the ability to iterate or pivot. 

How can researchers apply design thinking to innovation-focused research?1. Observation and interviews. These approaches help build gut-level consumer understanding to allow the team to design solutions that will delight consumers, without asking consumers to predict the future.

• Perform research in context/ethnography: Visit consumers’ homes, usual stores, restaurants, etc., to see them performing relevant tasks and understand their life context. Be on the lookout for compensating behaviors or places where what they say and what they do are inconsistent. If the idea in question doesn’t yet exist (e.g., a brand new technology), explore analogous situations or current substitutions with consumers.
• Build empathy for target users/consumers: Getting to know target consumers on a personal level and hearing their stories is a great way to build empathy. Try walking in their shoes in an anthropological sense. One example might be to wear thick gloves or tape several fingers to open bottles of medicine to empathize with arthritis sufferers. Or, one could try dramatically limiting discretionary spending for a few weeks to gain insight into the lives of low or fixed income consumers.
  

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2. Brainstorming, co-creation and prototyping. These approaches help avoid the trap of waiting for a final or “perfect” product before engaging consumers as well as helping consumers react to something that does not yet exist.

• Co-creation: Consider involving select consumers in the creation process and use prototypes (drawings, skits, 3D models, etc.) to not only bring ideas to life, but also give consumers something tangible to try, use and play with. Don’t wait until the product or service design is final to share with consumers for their feedback. Allowing consumers to actually participate in making the product better while it’s still in rough, or even conceptual, form may give teams completely new directions to pursue (while there’s still time to actually make the changes in the development cycle).
• Prototype to bring learning and insights to life: In addition to using prototypes in the product/service development process, think about how prototypes can help bring research learning to life across a variety of different objectives. For example, to deploy a new segmentation study, create scripts for each segment and engage team members to perform a skit to bring to them to life. Or, create a studio to immerse the team in the target consumer’s world and stock it with artifacts of their life.
  

3. Problem definition and iteration. These approaches can help to both design the most effective consumer research up front and give the flexibility to learn over time, without needing to have everything figured out before ever talking with a consumer.

• Extreme clarity on objectives and actions to be taken: Precise problem definition is always the starting point for applying design thinking and the same should be true for every research project. In order to create the most effective research design, spend time up front getting crystal clear with key stakeholders on exactly what they want to learn and what action they will take as a result of the findings. Through this process, sometimes teams will discover that new consumer research is actually not the right next step!
• Iterative research: Learning is generally an iterative process – meaning, answering one question means walking away with three more – and learning plans should be designed with this flexibility. As a previous colleague used to say, “The only thing we know for sure about our first assumptions is that they are wrong.” It takes many iterations to create true innovation. Operating with the mind-set of getting something in front of a consumer as early as possible and then keep going back after each refinement will help ensure the innovation stays human-centered and can progress quickly.

Building solutions 
Consumer research for innovation brings certain challenges, but through the application of key design thinking principles, researchers can approach the learning process differently to not only help overcome these difficulties, but actually build stronger, more compelling solutions for the consumers they serve.  

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