Design Thinking: visualization tool

Challenge: I work in the innovation department in the biggest cookie industry in Costa Rica.

Usually people ask me about wich new product are we going to launch but in my company

innovation process is more than that. It is about having our clients, consumers and shoppers as

the center of all what we do and create them real value, it is about solving challenges in teams

with different points of views taking risks, it is about changing the mindset of people, that way

you can make innovation a systematic and deliberate process and also linking differents ideas

from diverse persons to generate value.

Design thinking has been a way of changing the mindset in many people in my organization,

included myself.  I chose visualization tool  because I consider that is a really important tool

that can and must  be used during all the process  (Falah & Falah, 2011)

Selection: I am a food engineer, I learned to be analithyc, focused in the result and plan

everything but I dis not learnt to draw to do a better undesrtanding of the problema or

situation. I start working 5 years ago in quality department and  I had never used visulization

tool  before. I used to think that having everthing in control , making a flux diagram and

standarizing everything was the way of being succesfull  and it worked well in the quality

department but I was tired of trying to have everything in control, it was not sustainable.

Working in quality department I started supporting innovation process and realized that I have

a good reppetorie to work in innovation and start working to improve  creativity,  flexibility,

continuos learning and emphaty and visualization was a really good tool that helped me to see

the challenges from different points

I start using  visualization tool to truly understand the problem or challenge, drawing and

linking concepts  allows me to see the challenge from all the posible edges and also identify

the areas where we need to research more. In my company we have worked with Design

thinkin,  solving strategic challenges during 3 years and in our last iteration we had more time

to do a real profunization, contact with stakeholders and emphatize with our target and using

visualization tool helped us to be more creative and open minded and see the whole picture of

our challenge. Einteins says that if he had 1 hour to solve a problema he would take 55

minutes understanding it and just 5 minutes looking for an answer.

During the process of visualitation we learned about the importance of being  empatethic. To

create value to the person you are designing it is necesary to put in his shoes and it would

sound trite but actually is even difficult and important of what you can imagine. Working in

visualization proccess with our target also allowed us to obtain insights for futher stages. With

those excersices we realized that being emphatetic is to going futher than just a conversation,

is understanding the pains of our target and not necessarily agree with them but to

understand how they feel.

From all of the visualization process we were able to built a “Persona” archetype and also built

a emphaty map. Those tools helped us to do a better undesrtanding of the challenge and

potenciate the results. Acording to Curedale 2016, An empathy map is a strategic tool for

capturing key insights into the complex customer interactions that occur across experiences

with a product and service ecosystem. Through because alows to obtain  a holistic user

experience wich is related with the information that you can obtain from vissualization tools.

Insight: Using visualization tools we learned about being open minded and also helped us to

obtain the insghts  and have a better ideation process. Our experience incorporating to our

innovation projects, people who is not related to the  process but was able to draw, link and

connect concepts  has permited us to potenciate  the results.

Approach: From all the process what has been difficult is to  chage de mindset but we are

working on  accept fail and learn from it, we have a principle: Fail often, it is better if you do it

cheaper, in the first stages of the project and always learning from it. This principle involves

also something important that is prototype and creating the MVP, that way you can validate

the biggest hypotesis that you have with your target  and always learn from it. In our

experiences working with design thinking we have had a lot of projects that were taking down

after validating with our target and visualization has helped us to find the best ways to find a

solution. At the beginnig we felt disapointent  but after 3 years working with design thinking

we have change mindsets because we realized that is better to fail in the first steps of the

projects. At last but not less important is to be persistent, focusing in action more than words.

Sometimes the challenges look impossible to be solved but if you are persistent it will be easier

to succeed.

I  finish saying  that Design thinking is more than a process o methodology, it is a mindset that

would change the way you solve your daily challenges and also would make you a better

person and visual thinking allow us to improve all the process.

References

Curedale, R.,  2016. Empathy Maps: Stand in Your Customer's  Shoes. Design Community

College Incorporated

Falah, J. & T., Falah, 2011. Columbia business school.

