How Design Thinking Shapes Software Architecture
Design Thinking is a powerful framework for creating astonishing user experiences, tackling and fixing the true business and technical gaps in everyday interaction with systems, organizations, or other people. Imagine easy, intuitive, and hassle-free systems and organizations —they would probably be designed and architected by design thinkers.
Design thinkers obey the human experience. Human experience comes as an inevitable result of doing, seeing, and feeling things, providing a subjective personal viewpoint. The better experience a product or a service provides — the better user satisfaction will be. It’s a straightforward and logical equation, and still — you would be surprised how many people and organizations are not taking care of it.
How design thinking shapes experience and creates aligned architectures is the focus of this article to provide answers.
Intro
Design thinking is around us for some time now. The last decade was definitely a time of adoption and growth, supporting organizations to innovate and disrupt the market. Legacy businesses were disrupted by the challengers creating new innovative business models. One of the best disruptive examples is Dollar Shave Club (at that time, an unknown blade supplier). DSC disrupted big players (e.g., Gillette) by offering the subscription model for such a simple thing — razor blades. The first DSC video went viral, rocketing the business, which ended up as the multi-million acquisition by Unilever.
DSC proved that shifting a focus on the personalized experience and digital marketing are key components of innovation and disruption. Another good example is introducing an iPhone in 2007, which resulted in a fast evolution of mobile experience offering new business ecosystems. Remember, at that time, big touch screens, multi-touch, absence of a physical keyboard, and the internet were more like magic, maybe even misaligned for the current mainstream.
For sure, Jobs knew the power of user experience and human centricity, which rocketed Apple's business into orbit. Check out his thoughts on user experience and technology. He always started with the customer experience and worked backward to the technology.
And do you remember the HP iPaq series? I remember having my own HP iPaq 2210 back in the early 2000s. It was equipped with a large colored screen, Windows CE, stylus, navigation buttons, Solitare, mp3 player — such a magnificent device. And yet, at that time, I wondered how come it doesn’t have GSM connectivity since it would be a natural experience. Imagine a handheld device capable of fitting in the pocket, having significant features of modern smartphones, but without such an important feature — mobile connectivity. You know the rest of the HP and iPaq story, what happens when you don’t innovate on time, or don’t recognize the desired user experience. Disruption comes with a high cost for the ones not willing to adapt.
Should I mention Kodak's bankruptcy affair? More symptomatic is the fact that Kodak was a pioneer of digital imaging back in the 1970s. I could name quite a few cases highlighting the whole pattern on the markets. The disruptive pattern leads us to construct the first theorem of design thinking and innovations:
Diverse team comprised of divergent people works to adapt to and satisfy customer needs, innovate products, shape processes, and evolve business models to fulfil a mission and stay relevant on the market. All others passes by.
Customer needs, ideation, innovation, and evolution are a baseline of a human-centric process called Design Thinking. The human-centric approach in the design of experience creates a strong bond between people, brands, systems, and organizations. Empathy inevitably creates benefits for the user experience. You can hardly design a tailored user experience without being able to empathize and sympathize with the user. Empathy drives the world of user experiences — putting yourself in other’s people shoes.
The Real World
One of the greatest traffic architectural patterns is the roundabout. Roundabout is a self-managing system making cars going in circular paths. By design, it reduces crash collision courses significantly, bringing safety and enabling continuous traffic flow without blocking traffic lights compared to classic intersections.
An unnamed architect got a mission to create a roundabout to reduce traffic jams and speed up the transition to the city. The architect shaped a solution targeting car, tram, and pedestrian routes, as shown in the photo below.
One thing pops out — the architect designed a small inner circle for pedestrians. Do you think people prefer walking in a circle? Or they use the shortest paths in general? The look over the dirty pedestrian's desired path is shaped like a pentagram on the image above. It gives a self-explanatory answer. People's nature is to follow the shortest path, even with the price of getting dirty in the way.
What is the obvious architect’s mistake? Do you think the architect put himself in the shoes of pedestrians? For sure, he didn’t put a big effort into shaping the pedestrian experience.
The roundabout was rearchitected in 2020. Due to the design flaws of the initial rotor design, the city decided to invest and rebuild it from scratch. Desired paths were an obvious opportunity to fix the pedestrian experience.
Nevertheless, the architect still preserved the pathway circular design. The future will show which type of the desired path will be created by erosion. As a matter of fact, there is a large community on Reddit dealing exclusively with this kind of broken experience.
If your architecture doesn’t innovate and evolve, you will still fail in your mission, no matter how good technology you bring. The roundabout case shows what happens when you don't empathize with the targeted persona. An effective architect will always put himself in other people's shoes to create a targeted user experience.
What can be done to improve the pathway experience? Check out Ohio State University desired paths in the photo below.
Design Thinking In Practice?
Not all of us notice experience gaps, or better stated, we are unconscious of the experience gaps simply because we accepted them as normal. I’ve seen clients who were refurbishing the user experience but asking to preserve the old one simultaneously. Yes, exactly. They asked for the new UI. Still, at the same time, they wanted to preserve well-known keyboard shortcuts for navigation and application logic organization (even if it has had a bad user experience). In general, people are slaves of their habits, no matter how odd their habits are.
Sometimes we fail since we are very focused on a narrow niche, ignoring the wider picture. Common engineering practices promote analytical and precise aspects, killing flexibility and empathy as a simple trade-off.
So, how do we spot experience gaps, and more precisely, how do we fix them? Maybe the easiest example could be the vase exercise. Ask people to design a vase. You will get a collection of vases, different by size and shape, but they will still represent the regular vase you already have in your home. And most probably, you won’t find it very innovative. A brilliant industrial designer, one of my trainees, designed a vase during a workshop. It was quite a good one, especially in the context of invested time. See it below.
Immediately after designing a vase, I’ve challenged the group to design a better experience for people to enjoy flowers in their homes. Results were astonishing. The same designer provided me the solution below.
He stated that flowers, glass tubes, and led lights would be the most appropriate way of enjoying flowers at home for him. I’ve asked for some more explanations, and it turned out he doesn’t spend much time at home during the daylight. His proposal is an effective way of enjoying flowers during the nights with zen colors highlighting beautiful flowers. Now you touched on basic design thinking ideas. We explored the targeted user persona (industrial designer), elevated empathy for his problems, figured out day-to-day behavior, and fixed his experience. This is the essence of design thinking.
I’ve spent significant time shaping user experiences using design thinking frameworks. One of the best frameworks I was playing with was IBM’s Enterprise Design Thinking. The core principle of Enterprise Design Thinking is: Divergent and diverse teams observe specific people’s needs and experiences to reflect measurable outcomes that enhance the targeted experience. Following the principle, the idea behind the framework was a pretty simple one. Use all of your skills and empathy to solve other people’s problems. Observe, reflect, make. I’ve also studied core principles on designthinkersacademy.com with a big focus on Observe phase to identify potential users and validate ideas. Academy was a great experience with some of the embarrassment while doing market research over the streets of London, interviewing random people. But I’ve learned that people are ready to help you with your observation, especially if you are doing student research.
All design thinking frameworks share the same baseline. The baseline of a good user experience is empathy for your targeted user. Being able to put yourself in the shoes of somebody is a crucial step in the design of the user experience.
There are many variations and understandings, but in essence, design thinking is a framework for creating user experiences composed of many tools, such as:
- Persona is a tool to visualize and explore target users. It’s a quick way to establish a deep and empathetic understanding of a target user. Persona gives you an archetype of your targeted user representing one segment of your users with similar characteristics. A good persona is a prerequisite to put yourself in his/her shoes.
- Empathy Map helps you to explore multiple dimensions of target users. It gives you a quick way to have a holistic view of a target user that focuses you on thinking about more than just their role. An empathy map is a four-quadrant map giving the overview of persona behaviors, such as says vs. thinks and does vs. feels.
- Scenario Map captures typical behaviors of our persona in the specific timeframe. What are they doing, thinking, and feeling? Based on the scenario, we mark experience gaps fixed, creating to-be scenarios — a better user experience for tomorrow.
- Big Ideas bring ideation on the scale. Thinking 10x, very visually! Focus is on your user’s pain points. Stay away from features; remove details! Keep it stupid simple.
- Hill is a mission statement comprised of who, what, and wow. It’s a true manifest of persona, empathy, scenarios, and big ideas. It’s very complementary to the Vision statement from Agile.
How Design Thinking Helped Jedis
A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away, the Jedi council gathered to figure how to defend from an uprising dark force. Design thinking already gained a lot of popularity across Republic, and Council decided to test it. During the workshop, they selected Jedi's persona, created an empathy map, elaborated daily scenarios. Already a bit tired, Jedis gathered around Big Ideas exercise to build a new personal protection experience, as they have been exposed to deadly risk daily. Among many, Mace Windu wrote, “Use the force” and “Light Saber” on stickers, as shown in the picture below.
All the council members were laughing at his ideas. They saw it as ridiculous since sabers were used as a very primitive weapon in primitive civilizations. Also, using force was more like a buzzword. But Mace Windu was not shaken at all. He knew the power of Big Ideas and thinking big, so he waited a bit more to express the ideas.
In the following exercise, the council created Hills to enhance the Jedi experience, as shown in the picture below. Hill is a mission statement comprised of who, what, and wow. When they combined big ideas: Use the Force and Light Sabe, they constructed the following hill.
Yoda the Jedi, fights enemies of the Republic using a lightsaber while safely defending from a fire power and continuously eliminating threats in the same time.
That’s the true hill and a great wow effect — safely defend and eliminate the threat simultaneously. Only the lightsaber could do it on the scale, no matter how ridiculous it looked at the first moment when they wrote it to the Big Idea post-it. This is a perfect example of how design thinking shapes Star Wars architecture.
Now let’s continue and figure how design thinking shapes software architectures on this side of the galaxy.
Design Thinking and Software Architecture
I’ve performed many design thinking workshops for many clients in different industries. Maybe the best example of how design thinking influences software architecture can be found in the national e-learning landscape.
A few years ago, I was a part of the team exploring education experience in the national educational system. The team performed multiple design thinking workshops respecting teacher and pupil experiences.
First, we developed our persona, Lara, 8ht grade pupil from elementary school, where we defined an archetype persona. Remember, the persona is an anchor for building user experience. Only a good persona makes an emotional attachment to its problems, making the architect thinking from its shoes. Having pupils in the team gives an additional dimension: the architect can validate persona assumptions right in the way. And many assumptions aren't valid, especially if your group is not influenced by the real sponsor users — pupils in this case.
Having the persona stereotype image, most stickers on board were very intuitive and felt as well-known. Naturally, you would say — since we all played pupil role in our lives. One thing came out as a surprise for me. It turned out my sponsor users were pretty confident about rating health as one of the biggest concerns of our persona nowadays. They marked it as important. At that moment, I didn’t know the importance nor how user experience can resolve health issues.
We continue to diverge, and after agreeing on the persona, the team built an empathy map. A balanced empathy map provided a viewpoint of the persona’s internal and external states expressed through the contrast of think vs. say and feels vs. does.
The magic of an empathy map reveals when you examine internal and external motivations. For example, you can easily spot a persona thinking about health, but at the same time, you will notice a smoking sticker in does quadrant. Or feeling pressure, stress, and tiredness, but still studying hard. Yes, this is a real empathy map created and validated by the sponsor users — pupils. Now the architect is attached to the emotional state, starting to converge upon specific focus points.
After a couple of more exercises, the time has come to diverge upon potential solutions of highlighted fields with — Big Ideas. Yes, health was one of the highlighted domains which were eligible for experience makeover. I was very pessimistic about it, convinced we could not resolve such a general pinpoint as health with our workshops. I was suddenly surprised — the magic of the sponsor user arose. One of the sponsor users brought a sticker with e-Excuse. I’ve asked for a bit more details. In case of sickness, pupils go to a primary medical doctor for a diagnosis and excuse letter in paper form. The pupil then passes the paper to school, where teachers mark absence as justified in the e-Diary system.
e-Excuse was forged as integration capability between two independent systems (health and education), making great pupil user experience, removing the burden of bureaucracy from the school system. Sure, the workshop resulted in a complete list of process and system enhancements. Still, e-Excuse highlights the importance of having sponsor users and empathy for your persona.
So how you evolve insights from the design thinking process into real-world architecture and products? Later that year, I created an architectural capability framework for a national educational system based on multiple similar workshops. e-Excuse was an important factor, of course. We enumerated and described all the experience capabilities, together with the maturity index, making a suitable architectural roadmap.
Mentioned capabilities easily map to architecture components. e-Excuse was perfectly mapped to the process in a technical component named Integration (formerly called ESB).
In general, capabilities are transformed into architecture components. Application components are naturally developed using software development frameworks, such as Scrum, considering inputs from design thinking.
As seen from the picture above, design thinking is the heart of the process of product development. User’s everyday activities are clear input into the design thinking process, including UX gaps. Throughout the double diamond process, user experience is sampled and analyzed in multiple phases: discover, define, ideate, and validate. The first diamond in the process detects the real problem for a specific persona. The second diamond searches for a wide range of potential solutions converging to the best suitable. The double Diamond process ensures UX gaps are transformed into UX enhancements. Persona, empathy and scenario maps, big ideas, hills, and prototypes are common design thinking tools for shaping user experience. Each produced hill is then transformed into an epic and user stories. Once the hill is in the product backlog, you know the rest of the story throughout sprints. Each sprint will produce product increment, and you will have UX enhancements in a couple of weeks, depending on gap complexity.
Conclusion
Design Thinking is a powerful framework and discipline for creating astonishing user experiences for your products. It acts as a double-diamond black box, putting people's experiences in focus and transforming experience gaps into a positive user experience. If your product (in any form) serves people, you should probably get familiar with and use design thinking. At the end of the story, the market perceives user experience as a key selling point. So why not use it?
