This 5-Step Method Will Tell You If Your Product Solves A Real Human Need- Valutrics

Design has quickly evolved from an aesthetic choice to becoming a revolutionary way to differentiate companies. Design thinking is now a proven approach to solving problems and producing innovations with a wide range of entrepreneurs and product creators. But it’s not a slam dunk. The risk is that design thinking could become another theoretical distraction from getting the real work done if it doesn’t produce practical outcomes.

How then do we take the cognitive exercises of traditional design thinking and make it practical for innovators? The answer is to learn by doing. Our brains are superbly designed to think creatively when we are actively involved in the making process. Whether it’s sketching, crafting or prototyping, our brain’s learning centers light up like a Christmas tree.

Here’s a list of practical steps that any entrepreneur or team can use to fast-track innovation and unearth new insights.

1. Develop a Human-Centric Product Vision

Great product vision starts with a purpose to improve people’s lives. Making tons of money for your company is not a good vision. Market share or share price is not a vision. A great vision must excite your customers. It should paint a picture of a brighter future for your customers. It’s not about you. It’s about them. The most famous, and possibly one of the best, customer-centric vision was Disney’s original “Make People Happy.” Simple and easy to use as a lens for what needs to be done each day. One the other end, be cautious of using temporal visions like Microsoft’s “putting a PC in every home”. That served Microsoft initially but after a while, it’s difficult to see how it helps the end user. Furthermore, this goal was achieved a long time ago leaving Microsoft without a true north to orientate towards. Disconnecting your future outcome from time and trends is essential to creating a bulletproof long-term vision.

2. Your Solution Must Solve a Real Human Pain

Creating a product purely because you have a cool new technology is not a solution. I’ve heard this described as an elegant solution looking for a problem. Who will be the humans that delight in exchanging time, money or energy for your solution? Have you really listened to them? Have you immersed yourself in their world to truly understand their pain? The best advice here is to not only listen to them but watch what they do. Consumers sometimes say one thing but do another. Seeing those gaps up close helps you understand what their true needs or pains might be.

3. Design an Experiment To Test Your Value to Your Customer

You might have the best product team in the world. You might even have a few wins under your belt. But sooner or later being smart and lucky aren’t going to guarantee success. Your conformational biases and blind spots will ambush you when you least expect it. Prototype like your life depends on it. Take those prototypes into the wild by creating lightweight examples of your solution and asking potential customers to use them. If you’re designing an app, then a prototype might be something as simple as a collection of screens sketched onto paper. Remember, you don’t need to build the entire product, just the elements that convey your solution.

4. Get Feedback From The People That Count

Make sure you go out and test these prototypes in the context they will be used. You’ll get far better data and insights than if you just tested in your office or via a screen share. Get your ideas and products in front of the people that will be using them. Testing against yourself, friends or employees is the worst way to achieve good feedback. Don’t just test your product with internal users and friends–get your products in front of the people that will be using them. Internal stakeholders have biases and blind spots. Get out of the building. Find out what real customers like, and what they don’t like. Listen to them. Really listen. When they say things you don’t like, ask them for more detail. The answers that make you uncomfortable are the best answers. Then go make improvements and come back for another conversation.

5. Make Outcomes, Not Just Outputs

Prototypes, experiments and the feedback they produce for our analysis are the outputs of design. To ensure we are delivering value to our customers we need to also determine what outcomes those artifacts will produce. For example, a car is the output of the auto manufacturing process, but the outcome is to provide a consumer with the ability to get places quickly and safely. Your goal with design is to understand what experiences will be created with your work. The design thinking work isn’t complete until you can describe this outcome and ensure it is something of value to your customer.

The Hardest Part of Design Thinking is Also the Best Part

The real hard work for any design thinking process is the people part. We can keep iterating on the prototyping and testing but if we’re not talking to stakeholders and customers then no amount of process improvement will matter. Collaborating with humans can be messy, complicated and often time-consuming. You have to educate people as to what you’re going to be doing and they won’t always be open to new things. You have to invite the people you don’t want to invite — the sales people, the marketing people, and the operational people. You have to invite all the people that have opinions that you don’t like to hear. You have to carefully listen to their concerns and their perspectives. It’s possible you’re going to hear a lot of things you don’t like.

People will say your ideas and process won’t work, but the only way to succeed is to do what’s been described above anyway. Do it anyway because taking the time to do the right research can be ridiculously rewarding. Doing the hard work will save you heartache and financial ruin down the line. Following these steps will make your product or service better and more valuable to all involved. It’s established that innovators that stay close to their customers are better at delivering value to their companies.

Do the hard work. Talk to people. You’ll be glad you did.