An independent study reference written by Dr Phuc V. Nguyen. It is not official subject material — for assessment requirements always follow your subject outline and vUWS.
Design thinking
Design thinking organises work around the person who will use the result. It is usually described as five modes: empathise (observe what users actually do), define (state one user, one need and one insight), ideate (generate many options before judging any), prototype (build the cheapest thing that can be reacted to) and test (put it in front of a user and watch). The modes are not a schedule, they are stances a team moves between. For analytics the payoff is concentrated in prototyping, because a sketched chart with invented numbers can test a decision days before any query is written.
Why it matters
Show people something rough and watch what they do with it. That is nearly the whole idea. Asking someone what report they want produces a wish list. Handing them a hand-drawn chart with made-up numbers and asking what they would do differently if it looked like that produces the truth, and it costs about fifteen minutes. If the honest answer is that nothing would change, you have just saved twenty-one days of work.
An analyst sketches the final chart with invented numbers and shows it to the decision-maker, who says their decision would be the same whatever the chart showed. What has the sketch achieved?
Worked examples
Before writing any query, an analyst hand-draws the final chart with invented numbers and shows it to the regional manager. The manager studies it and says the decision would be the same whatever the chart showed.
The sketch has just prevented twenty-one days of correct work with no purpose. This is prototyping working exactly as intended, because a prototype tests the decision rather than the pipeline, and invented numbers are sufficient for that. The conversation continues productively: if that chart would not change anything, what would. The answer, often, is a different unit of analysis or a different time window, which is cheap to discover now and expensive to discover after a build.
In interviews, staff say they read the operations report every Monday morning. Access logs show it is opened roughly once a month, usually by the same two people.
Stated behaviour and observed behaviour disagree, which is normal rather than dishonest. People report their intentions and their sense of what a good colleague does. The empathise mode addresses this by observation instead of self-report: sit with the team on a Monday and watch what they actually consult when they make the rostering call. It is frequently a spreadsheet someone maintains privately, and that spreadsheet, not the official report, is the real design brief.
Common mistakes
- ✗Design thinking is about making deliverables look attractive. It is about who the deliverable is for and what they will do with it. Visual polish sits downstream and cannot rescue a dashboard aimed at the wrong decision.
- ✗The five modes run once, in order. They are stances rather than stages. Teams routinely return to empathise after testing, and a strong define statement often only becomes possible after a first prototype has failed.
- ✗A prototype has to work. In analytics the most useful prototype frequently contains no real data at all, because its job is to test whether the decision would change, not to prove the pipeline can be built.
- ✗Talking to users is the same as empathising. Self-reported behaviour is unreliable, particularly about frequency and about what people consult under time pressure. Observation of actual work is the point, and interviews are best used to ask why an observed behaviour happens.
Revision bullets
- •Five modes: empathise, define, ideate, prototype, test
- •Define produces one sentence naming a user, a need and an insight
- •Ideate defers judgement; the failure mode is settling on the first idea
- •In analytics a paper chart with invented numbers is often the best prototype
- •Test by watching, not by explaining the design first
- •Divergent and convergent phases alternate, as in the double diamond framing
Quick check
An analyst sketches the final chart with invented numbers and shows it to the decision-maker, who says their decision would be the same whatever the chart showed. What has the sketch achieved?
Staff say in interviews that they read an operations report every Monday. Access logs show it is opened about once a month. Which mode addresses the gap?
Connected topics
More in How Analytics Gets Built
Sources
- Brown (2008)Brown, T. "Design Thinking." Harvard Business Review, 86(6), 84-92, 2008.The article that brought the designer's working method into general management language.
- d.school process guideHasso Plattner Institute of Design at Stanford University. "An Introduction to Design Thinking: Process Guide."Source of the five-mode formulation used here, including the point-of-view statement in the define mode.
- Design Council (2005)Design Council (UK). "Eleven Lessons: Managing Design in Eleven Global Brands." 2005.Introduces the double diamond, the alternating divergent and convergent framing referred to above.