The Importance of Design Thinking and Teamwork

For the past couple of weeks, we have being doing a design sprint in class. Our end goal was to create a product or service that helps young Type 1 Diabetes in their everyday lives. In groups of five, we used design thinking to do research, concept thinking, prototyping, and testing to come up with our best idea to help this target audience.

What is Design Thinking?
Design thinking is a method that teaches individuals new strategies to solve problems. There are five steps to design thinking: Empathize, Define, Ideate, Prototype, and Test. I used our sprint process to explain how each of these five steps works below.

Empathize

To begin our design thinking process, we knew we had to empathize with our target audience. We each researched Type 1 Diabetes, because none of us knew that much about it. To combine and condense our research, we did concept testing. This included throwing all of our questions and ideas onto a whiteboard and sorting them into groups and categories that made sense to us.

Define

Next, we refined our question. We wanted to find a category that we felt would be most beneficial to a young Type 1 Diabetic. We came up with: How can someone with Type 1 Diabetes discretely test their insulin levels without having to carry around something that is foreign to people without diabetes? Our end goal was to create a product that could allow diabetics to test without having to make a big scene or having to leave the room. 

Ideate

In the ideation stage, we brainstormed as many possible solutions to this problem as we could think of. After looking at multiple solutions, we finally decided as a team that we wanted to create a type of watch as our final solution.

Prototype

We created two prototypes. First, we created an ugly prototype and then a final prototype. Below are pictures of both.

Ugly Prototype 

Final Prototype

Test

To test our idea, we talked to people in the Bozeman community. We were fortunate enough to talk to four young adults who actually have Type 1 Diabetes. They all loved our idea, and were impressed that we had come up with the idea ourselves in the past two weeks.

Design thinking helped us be empathetic towards our target audience. If we had not completed this sprint using design thinking, I do not believe that we would have come up with as great of a solution as we did. The design thinking process forced us to pivot and iterate multiple times, and continue to repeat all the steps of the process when we did. It's amazing how working in groups stimulates creativity. If we were to complete this design sprint individually in the time given for this assignment, the final products would most likely not be as impressive. Design thinking is one of the best methods to use as an entrepreneur.

The Blank Canvas of StandTALL

Ever since I was a little girl, shopping for clothes has been a nightmare. I am 6'3", and everything that I try on doesn't fit right. Any type of pants become high waters, waistlines are too high, and skirts are too short. My mom and I struggled all through my adolescence trying to find a place where I could find clothing that fit me correctly. Unfortunately, no place like this exists. We always dreamed of making an website that would make shopping for tall women more convenient.



Before this semester, making this dream into a reality seemed impossible to me. Along with Consumer Behavior, I am also in an entrepreneurship class. We were required to come up with a new venture to present to the class, and I used my idea of creating a tall women's shopping website. The class loved the idea, and it ended up being one of the ideas used for our final venture concept. With two of my classmates, we used the whole semester to pivot and iterate off of this idea.

By the end of this semester, we had created an entire business canvas around the idea of StandTALL. We decided to make StandTALL a search engine for tall women. This search engine will include customizable toggles that users can insure their height and exact measurements into. The site will then search all online stores and aggregate the results, making them customized to each and every customer. We will use a pay-per-click revenue model, and will also sell advertising space. We had an idea of blogging for the website as well to increase its awareness. We even had a logo designed like the one below.

I also had the chance to read Creative Confidence this semester. Written by Tom and David Kelley, this book emphasizes how creativity and innovation are not just for the "creative types", but rather anyone can do it. I loved what David and Tom wrote in Chapter 2, Dare, From Fear to Courage:

"Fear of failure holds us back from learning all sorts of new skills, from taking on risks, and from tackling new challenges. Creative confidence asks that we overcome that fear"

In order to conquer that fear, we must take action. My favorite saying of all times is "action cures fear". If we are fearful of something, the best way to cure that fear is to take action. The worst that could happen is we fail. But failing is often a good thing. Failing fast and often is what makes some of the greatest entrepreneurs of all time who they are. They didn't get to where they are without may pivots and iterations. Although it is scary because it's the unknown, I will continue to work on StandTALL, because it is something that I'm passionate about. By simply taking action and turning my blank canvas into a business model, I am that much closer to making my childhood dream become a reality.