Category: Design thinking for start-ups

My journey to Kingston University and subsequently, the class on Design Thinking sought to answer one question for me; “how might I help youth owned-startups in Nigeria succeed against the odds they face on a daily basis?” This was important for me because I wanted to build a reputation in startup coaching or business advisory. I realized the first step to doing this was gaining a foundational and theoretical understanding of what a startup is, how they are built and what the keys to their successes are.

I looked forward to taking the module on Design Thinking because according to Ursrey, 2014, design thinking has to be the core of any business strategy or organizational change so as to be able to build a culture on solving problems using this approach.

Introduction to Design Thinking

My learning experience began with the startup weekend hackathon. We worked in groups on re-imagining community engagement in Surrey using Design Thinking principles as summarized by Razzouk and Shute, 2012. We engaged in the process of surgically identifying the problem and coming up with a solution by sourcing and understanding information, analyzing it and applying creativity to experiment, rapidly prototype models, gather feedback, and redesign”. The outcome of this process was a product called Surrey Connect!

Figure 1: Product flier for team innovation’s surrey connect

Building Teams

According to De Mol, 2019, “stellar teams have the right combination of hard and soft skills”. In teaming up to set up our real-world business, it was crucial for the team to be heterogeneous and have the right balance of skills, knowledge, and experience (Brenner and Uebernickel, 2016). Understanding our personas was a critical step to identifying and striking a balance in the team as we identified who we wanted to work with. Several materials were introduced to assist us with this process which includes personality tests and the “about me” tool. We also found out about ten different persons that are categorized under learning, building, and organizing and how each of these characters bring value to the team through creativity and innovation – the Ten Faces by Kelley and Littman, 2008.

Figure 2: Team Dt4 members’ individual strengths

Empathy in Design

 “Empathy, integrative thinking, experimentalism and collaboration” are the various characteristics that design thinkers should have as explained by Brown, 2008. Empathy is also the first stage in the design thinking process, and it helps us, as designers, do away with preconceived notions of and gain insights into the thoughts and values that people hold on to.

Source: Adapted from Interaction-design.org 

Empathy for target users of any product or service is key to its success. We were shown that a great way to better understand and map out the needs of extreme users was by using the empathy map by Gray, 2017. In trying out the tool in class with a simple toilet-trip experiment, I experienced first-hand, how a “routine” toilet trip (to me) was experienced differently by a visually-impaired person, a mute person and a robot.

As we attempted to solve challenges faced by shoppers with their shopping bags, the empathy map was a helpful tool for understanding why people preferred one bag above the other. This understanding was gotten through observation, direct engagement with users and listening. To deepen our understanding of the problems, we used the 5 Whys technique developed by Toyoda Sakichi Ohno (1993, cited in Brenner and Uebernickel, 2016, p.14), while maintaining a curious and open mindset.

Figure 3: Empathy Map by Team DT4

Design Inspiration

Every good designer draws inspiration from somewhere, something or someone, and to inspire our creative juices, we were given the opportunity to visit the design museum as a team. Our task was to identify three-major designs that stood out to us, identify the setting for it and speak on it. My major takeaway from that trip was that innovation did not necessarily always mean “radical” change; great innovations could also be incremental. The latter relates to doing what we do but better while the former deals with wildly transformational concepts or ideas. To further expand on my learning on this, I read the book- Managing Innovation by Tidd and Bessant, 2015.

This helped us during our ideation process as we developed our second and final product for our business-experience.

Failing and validated learning

We spent a lot of time, resources and effort developing the prototype of our first idea – a collapsible shopping trolley. We had gone taking dozens of pictures of shoppers’ bags at different malls in the town centre. We had spoken to a lot of people about their experience with their shopping bags; some persons worried about the environmental impact of the bags; some were concerned about the attractiveness while others worried about portability. At the end of the day, we had defined the problem, ideated and developed a prototype. We were saddened to find an almost exact replica of what we had designed on Amazon as we carried out an analysis of existing products.

Figure 4: Prototype of the collapsible shopping bag

It was a good learning point for us as it taught us the importance of failing fast. According to Ries, 2011, the top reasons for startups’ failure are – “the allure of a good plan, a solid strategy and thorough market research”. He opined that because startups face so much uncertainty, the traditional business management processes cannot be applied to them. Ries encourages startups to look at failure as “validated learning”. He went on to define it as “the process of demonstrating empirically that a team has discovered valuable truths about its present and future prospects”. Validated learning helps to prevent “wastage” for startups as resources such as time, funding and skills are relatively scarce.

This approach helped us understand that our current idea was not feasible in its current form. We moved on to identify and attempt to solve a different problem. As we worked on this new problem using the build-measure-learn feedback loop, we were able to quickly move past some stages faster than our previous product because we now knew what went wrong and at what point.

To get validation for a business idea, we learnt that having a minimum viable product was essential as it gives your target customers something tangible to interact with – a visual representation of your idea. By observing how  people interact with your product/service, how often they use it, you are able to gain some useful insights on what iterations you need to make.  

I believe this approach can be adapted to suit services as well and in the future, I intend to use validated learning to quickly eliminate approaches to delivering entrepreneurship training at scale to young people in remote communities in my country. I will acquire knowledge chunks through research on what training methods could be implemented,  test the method with a small group (minimum viable product), come up with key metrics for evaluating the efficacy of that service, gain validated learning through the measurement of internal and external feedback.

Value Proposition Canvas

Our experience was completely different when we approached potential customers during our first trade fair and as we engaged with staff and residents of care homes to talk about our products as they were not interested in numbers but rather the value that expected to get from the product. One of the tools that helped us identify the value we were offering was the value proposition canvas (Thompson, 2013).

Customers have problems, desires, needs and wants. To be successful as a business, it is important that you create value for your customer group by addressing those concerns. Prior to this class on value proposition, I had focused more on the novelty of the solution. In developing the value map for your customers, there is a tendency to want to subscribe “pain relievers” for every pain identified in your customer group as we observed in the course of developing our product but Osterwalder et al,  2014,  explain that no value proposition can effectively address all the needs and pains. They further explained that the goal of the value mapping was to focus on those needs and pains that mattered the most to the customer and strive to effectively alleviate those pains.

In utilizing the tool to solve the issue of loneliness among the elderly in care homes,  we arrived at a 53-week interactive journal that helped to stimulate the recall of happy memories for the elderly. It addressed the needs of social interaction, the fears of isolation.

Figure 5: First version of our value proposition canvas for Journal of Memoirs

Photo credit: The Author

Investor Pitch

Throughout the module, we had opportunities to talk to judges, coaches and business experts about our product. It was a bit intimidating at first because we were not exactly sure of what area of the business would be most focused on. After our first dragon’s den, we realized that the elevator pitch is what determines if people want to hear the rest of what you have to say. The elevator pitch could make or break any opportunity you have, to talk about your business.

One material that helped me understand what I needed to work on is the book “Here’s the Pitch” by Martin Soorjoo. I understood that there was a fine line between making your business idea appear desirable and appearing desperate. The most important thing to do is to state the facts of the problems you are trying to solve and give numbers to support your facts. Janiszewska and Insch, 2012, explain that “brand positioning determines the framework of visual and communication-related execution”. So, in pitching to your investors, you want to be able to clearly articulate your brand position.

As an entrepreneur, it is pertinent to have the numbers for your business at your finger-tips. These include but are not limited to demographic information, market size, pricing, and number of products sold to break-even. For example, we received questions such as “how many people live in care homes” “how many books will you need to sell to break even and at what price?

Our approach to mastering investor pitch:

1. Understand the problem by applying the techniques on empathy.
2. Research the industry
3. Watch pitching videos on youtube
4. Script the presentation and have everyone practice their lines.
5. Practice with a timer.

Bonus point – In one of the competitions, we researched the judges to find out what experiences they had in our industry and assigned team members to address questions on specific topics. We won the golden ticket at the Bright Ideas Competition with that approach.

Summary

Team Collaboration: Could we have improved on our product? yes,  but as a team, we experienced a lot of challenges on this journey; some of those challenges can be attributed to variance in personality types, differences in opinions, approach to work and scheduling issues. I do not believe that these challenges were only peculiar to our team, however, I do believe that it was our collective responsibility to resolve these issues.

Along the line, we found a way to leverage technology to solve major challenges we had around decision making through an anonymous voting system. Doodle was a useful application for voting on most suitable times, product names and preferred designs as it helped us move speedily on certain key decisions.

Figure 6: Team DT4 celebrating winning the Golden Ticket at the Bright Ideas Finals

Photo credit: Hamza Bajwa

Product Development: Some of the mistakes we made in product development stemmed from trying to appeal to a larger group of people as opposed to appealing to our target demographic. We embarked on a lot of design interations and colour schemes in the process of developing our journal. Looking back at it now, we could have saved our selves a lot of time by doing less “desk-top” research and asking the question – “what does the customer want?”.

Self-Awareness: Prior to this module, I have been quite “traditional” in my approach to businesses. I had previously associated business growth with the addition of offerings, added benefits instead of looking at it through the customers’ lens. I have come to realize that a little imperfection is okay and that not getting it right the first time, is also okay. One of the characteristics of an entrepreneur is the desire to have capacity, so as to act independently  (Gasparski  et al, 2011 p.14) ; this trait has influenced my work style for the longest time, but I now understand that a variance in the personalities of team members is good for creativity.

References

Brenner, W. and Uebernickel, F. (2016) Design Thinking for Innovation – Research and Practice. Switzerland: Springer International Publishing.

Brenner, W. and Uebernickel, F. (2016) Design Thinking for Innovation: Research and Practice. Illustrated edn. Switzerland: Springer International Publishing.

Brown, T. (June, 2008) Design Thinking. Available at: https://hbr.org/2008/06/design-thinking (Accessed: April, 20).

Dam, R. F. and Yu, S. T. (2019) 5 Stages in the Design Thinking Process. Available at: https://www.interaction-design.org/literature/article/5-stages-in-the-design-thinking-process (Accessed: April, 21).

de Mol, E. (2019) What Makes a Successful Startup Team. Available at: https://hbr.org/2019/03/what-makes-a-successful-startup-team (Accessed: April, 19).

Gasparski, W., Ryan, L. and Kwiatkowski, S. (2011) Entrepreneurship Values and Responsibility. Re-print edn. New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers.

Gray, D. (2017) Updated Empathy Map Canvas. Available at: https://medium.com/the-xplane-collection/updated-empathy-map-canvas-46df22df3c8a (Accessed: April, 20).

Janiszewska, K. and Insch, A. (2012) ‘The strategic importance of brand positioning in the place brand concept: elements, structure and application capabilities’, Journal of International Studies, 5(1), pp. 9-19.

Kelley, T. and Littman, J. (2008) The Ten Faces of Innovation: Strategies for Heightening Creativity. Main edn. London: Profile Books.

Osterwalder, A. et al. (2014)   Value Proposition Design: How to Create Products and Services Customers Want. illustrated, reprint edn. New Jersey: John Wiley & Sons.

Razzouk, R. and Shute, V. (2012) ‘What Is Design Thinking and Why Is It Important?’, Review of Educational Research, 82(3), pp. 330-348.

Ries, E. (2011) The Lean Startup. Re-print edn. New York: Crown Business.

Soorjoo, M. (2012) Here’s the Pitch: How to Pitch Your Business to Anyone, Get Funded, and Win Clients. New Jersey: John Wiley & Sons.

Thomson, P. (2013) Value Proposition Canvas. Available at: https://www.peterjthomson.com/2013/11/value-proposition-canvas/ (Accessed: April, 21).

Ursrey, L. (2014) Why Design Thinking Should Be At The Core Of Your Business Strategy Development. Available at: https://www.forbes.com/sites/lawtonursrey/2014/06/04/14-design-thinking-esque-tips-some-approaches-to-problem-solving-work-better-than-others/#4e8c4d911627 (Accessed: April, 18).

In the course of developing our product, we first had to protype the idea – this is fourth stage in the design thinking process. Prototypes are important as they help the entrepreneur stay lean by helping them “fail cheaply”. It’s also great because as we design, there is the tendency to settle on an idea whereas when your user groups are shown options, they tend to pick something different. Often times, the development process is a complex one, requiring a lot of moving parts but with prototyping, you are able to cut down the process into manageable chunks and then leverage feedback to incrementally improve the product.

This was a new experience for me as I had never had the opportunity to prototype anything but with this business experience, I realized how critical it was to the concept of value creation for the entrepreneur. In designing for the customer, we never get things right on the very first try. In designing our product, we had an idea of what basic “features” we wanted the product to have. For example, we knew we wanted enlarged fonts, graphical illustrations of tasks and we wanted the user to have plenty of space on the journal to fill out the activity sections. However, when we developed the first version, the feedback we got resonated around the illustrations not being “artsy” enough, whereas we thought it looked great.

Source: Adapted from interaction-design.org

We had engaged the services of a graphics designer to help design the layout of the journal as well as all the illustrations and as we went through the prototype cycle, we realized that for at every point, we kept going back to the designer to make same changes. These changes were often implemented 2-5 days later, often leading to delays and at our first trade fair, we did not have the protype ready.

As a team, we suddenly realized that it was okay to not have a finished product right from the start and that failure did not have to be so expensive, neither did the development of a prototype have to be so  time consuming. We could have sketched out the pages ourselves using pen and paper quickly so as not to lose some of the insights we gained in the ideation process.

After the sad experience of not having a prototype ready, we resolved to change our approach. Using the Stanford Design Institute process guide for design thinking, we started making prototyping the top three versions of an agreed upon design and showing representatives of our user groups to determine which ones they were drawn to the most. This was a faster and more efficient way of iterating.

The process guide also helped us improve on our testing approach; we moved from telling people what the product was supposed to do, to showing them the product and allowing them come up with what purpose they thought the product was supposed to solve. We asked people to compare this a similar product to see if we our value proposition was clear. It was a very useful strategy as we got a lot of ideas from the users on what the end-product should look like.

Branding is critical in today’s business world whether you run a large company or manage a  startup. This is because the world is radically changing and some of the drivers of these change include the internet, globalization , social media and internet of things. The internet is helping make customers, smarter and savvier Globalization on the one hand, is increasing competition as you no longer must deal with those in the local, home environment but also on the international scene. Social media is built around interactive communications, often between two or more people while the internet of things is making our buildings, cars, plumbing smarter through the integration of technology.

What these means is that the entry barriers to running a business is becoming lower and lower. Getting  access to global communication is relatively easy and the barriers to reaching customers via communication channels has been significantly lowered. This means you do not have to spend so much money running advertisements on traditional media channels such as television and print newspaper. Even manufacturing has become a lot easier as countries such as China have found a way to make low-cost manufacturing available to business owners. The video by Mauro Porcini provides further insights on this.

Brands have now become the topic of communication and part of the conversation going on online about them relates to their values or feedback about what their customers experienced either with the products or with engagement. In class we were made to understand that people don’t buy products anymore , they much prefer experiences. People make purchase decision based on how they feel and what stories they would become a part of if they were to associate with a brand.

As entrepreneurs, my team and I struggled a bit with the image and values we wanted associated with our brand. I have learned that there is so much content being generated daily – these range from new product launches, to negative stories about celebrities, All these variety of information is competing for the attention of the consumer and so businesses can no rely on the traditional methods for attracting and retaining customers.

What all these means for as an entrepreneur, is that for my business to rise above the noise and succeed, I have to find a smart way to become relevant in the conversations going on and to the people my business is targeting. One of the ways that I can achieve this is by being up-to-date on the latest trends in my industry. Accenture reports an estimate of $1 trillion as the potential revenue that businesses lost to competitors in 2017. So in development of my products and developing my business strategy, I have to ensure that the customers are always at the centre of the design.

According to Mckinsey, one of the ways I can do this is through data-driven insights. Data can help with understanding business trends and investing in the right marketing strategy. For example, when working on the marketing strategy for our journal, we realized that not all social media channels were useful for marketing our products. We did some research, comparing information from Statista and the Passport database and found out that facebook and Instagram were much preferred by our customer group as opposed to twitter or Linkedin. This information was important for us as it not only allowed us to prioritize scarce resources but helped us narrow down what channels we needed to start building relevance in. This was a key takeaway for me.

In my previous post, I talked about how the team settled on the current colour palette of our journal for our product and how it was important for us to connect through our choice of colours to the target market. The second aspect of the product which we looked at was content. Finalizing on what activities made the cut for our journal was also quite difficult as we had to come up with a list of tasks that served as prompters for the recall of happy memories. These activities had to be appealing to the following types of emotions – happiness – as they looked back on some of the best days of their lives, warmness – as they talked about a loved one, or excitement – when asked to describe their childhood crush.

In terms of our social media content, we used statistics about loneliness, mental health and depression to create a sense of urgency for potential customers who visit our page. We celebrated our win at the first trade fair event as we wanted our potential customers to feel they were part of the journey and that every win for us was also a win for them. It was important for them to see the diverse composition of the team which helped to communicate the fact that the problem we were solving was a universal one and not just one unique to one geography. Through our posts, we wanted our potential customers to feel like that they were part of the team, part of our journey and we let them know this through appreciation posts for visiting our stands.

During our trade fair at the Kingston town centre, we printed out little notes that either reminded everyone who visited our stand about “how unique they were” or assured them of “how much they were loved” or simply gave them a word of encouragement. The goal of this activity was not only to keep with the objective of the product but to also show our customers that we also “walked the talk” by ensuring our behavior reflected our mission.

We also understood that it was possible for people to come in contact with the product as a gift without coming into contact with any customer touch-points such as a store, website or social media channels. It was therefore, necessary to look at ways we could evoke emotion through the product as well. This we did in two ways; we used abstract images that matched the theme of the task for the week such as a candle to represent activities that revolved around holidays or a dice for activities that revolved around games. At the beginning of each page was also a pick-me-up quote or message that was specifically chosen to match the themes.

In summary, as a team we learnt that creating emotional connections was a continuous process and one that was an external as well as an internal activity and that the key to this was ensuring that every decision taken about the product had to have emotional connection as the backdrop.

This post was inspired by some feedback I got during Kingston University’s Bright Ideas Sprint Weekend and the final competition. When pitching our product to people, some people gave us some interesting and useful feedback, while some persons asked these questions; “after someone buys the book, what’s next?”, “and so what?” These sort of questions, came directly or indirectly in the form of a “hmmm” or “did you think about this or that?’’. I began to wonder if we were creating enough value for our target market.

The team had a good idea of what the expected outcome of the product was, we wanted to be able to connect to our customers emotionally so we could be able to create just the right value for them and ultimately convert them to life-long patrons. This is important for every business as the inability for the target market to connect with any product or service emotionally could mean either zero purchase or a one-time-only purchase. In simple terms, emotional connections translate to profitability for a business.  One Harvard Business Review article talks about the importance of businesses approaching emotional connections as a science or a strategy and even went further to state that the first step will be to identify “emotional motivators”.

We were targeting a very specific user segment of over 70  but we also needed to appeal to the target customer who would most likely be a generation apart and what these two groups identify as key values will vary. We came to understand that while the user could see our product as one that they could serve as a “prompter for the recall of happy memories” or a “storage book for memories” or “simply a fun way to pass the time”, the much younger customer could be looking for “ a perfect gift for grandma” or the carehome volunteers could be looking for “ a tool for engaging elderly residents meaningfully”.  At the end of the day, we still wanted to be able to solve the issue of loneliness amongst the elderly populace.

We started by looking at colours because we wanted to be able to evoke the right emotional response to our product from a visual point of view. We found out from some desktop research that the colour orange was identified with “good value” or according to another research “cheap”. Therefore, we included it in the pages of our journal but not on the front or back covers to prevent the cheap look but still communicate good value. We found further research that validated the first finding that blue was the most acceptable colour, and so that was used for the title on our cover page, as well as the alternating page inside the actual journal itself. The process of colour selection was a draining and painstaking one for the team because we wanted the product to be able to stand out, appeal to all genders and while making sure the line between a family oriented activity book and a child’s activity book was not crossed.

For more on creating emotional connections, look out for my next post.