Tivix Guide


to Design Thinking
What you will learn

from this ebook

How to apply Stanford’s d.school Design Thinking and

Google Ventures’ Design Sprint methodologies to actual
projects.

Why empathy is at the core of design thinking methodology,

and how to use it to build better software products.

Our proven 5-step approach for applying design thinking

when building software with a client.

Why focusing heavily on your users’ needs is key to building

successful B2B and B2C software products.

Intro 2
 Nick Kelly, Software Engineer at Tivix
At Tivix, when we’re developing a new digital
project for our clients, there’s one crucial question
we’re always seeking to answer:

Are we providing a valuable solution to a problem?

The best way to approach any project, to ensure that we’re delivering the
best possible end result, is to use a methodology known as “design thinking”
right from the beginning.


Fundamentally, this is an approach taken from the world of design, which is

applicable across a broad range of use cases, and is focused above all else
on truly understanding the needs and concerns of the end user, and building
a solution to fit.

Instead of taking direction from the boardroom, a team that uses design
thinking will focus heavily on listening to its (potential) customers, and
design a solution to fit their needs through an ongoing, iterative process that
involves taking in and responding to feedback along the way.

This often results in surprising, innovative approaches to problem-solving

that meet business goals in unique ways.

Intro 3
Apple is a stellar example of
design thinking in action
When the company catapulted to success in the late 1990s, it was largely on
the strength of their streamlined focus on a few key products, while
shuttering 12 other product lines that weren’t meeting its customers’ needs.
In developing their bestselling iMacs, the company focused on simple,
user-friendly products that provide a stellar experience for users at every
stage, from purchase through to daily use and customer service.

Tivix Guide to Design Thinking 4

Their products soon became renowned for clean, elegant lines; simple
interfaces; and a minimum of buttons. Even people who’d never used
computers before could understand, intuitively, how to turn on an Apple
computer and open a software program within its user interface.

In contrast to the clunky, complex Windows OS, Apple had a modern,

minimal approach that consumers found hugely appealing.

Steve Jobs
Simple can be harder than complex: You have to
work hard to get your thinking clean to make it
simple. But it’s worth it in the end because once
you get there, you can move mountains.

Tivix Guide to Design Thinking 5

What is 

design thinking?
At its essence, the practice of design thinking is about a human-focused
approach to developing new products. Rather than simply updating an
existing model, design thinkers ask what good the updates will serve to its
users.

They’ll ask whether, rather than simply modifying an existing solution, there
is an entirely new approach that may solve the users’ needs. And instead of
assuming to know what the user needs and how she might interact with her
environment, they’ll spend time observing and talking with their target
market, so that they can genuinely visualize a solution that might fit their
needs.

Tivix Guide to Design Thinking 6

This approach thrives on empathy and experimentation, rather than simply
historical data and business metrics. Instead of making small tweaks to
existing products, it’s about embracing creativity to come up with
out-of-the-box, novel solutions that meet users’ needs in a way that you’ve
never considered before.

The Stanford Methodology

Stanford University’s Institute of Design offers a five-step model that we
have embraced at Tivix. In a nutshell, here are the five stages of a design
thinking practice:

1. Empathize
Building a useful solution begins with clearly understanding the audience
you’re working to serve. It’s essential to step into their shoes and see the
world through their eyes in order to build a solution that will resonate with
them. Elements of this that we try to include are:

Observation

Watch the subject in his environment, and focus on how he interacts with his
surroundings. For instance, when we’ve been tasked with building a solution
for inventory management for a company, we begin by spending time with
employees who are responsible for tracking the inventory to learn how they
currently handle the process—quite often, it’s a manual system involving
nothing more than a spreadsheet and a pencil.

Tivix Guide to Design Thinking

 Engagement

Next, talk to the person you’re observing. Ask questions about why she
handles the process in a certain order, or what’s going through her head as
she completes each step. Find out what she likes about the current system,
or what bothers her. She may already have a sense of what the current
solution is lacking, which will be invaluable in your ideation process.

Combining both of these steps at once—in the context of interviewing

someone as she engages with her environment, and becoming an active
participant in her story—is an incredibly powerful way of gaining the
empathy you’ll need to define the problem and begin brainstorming a strong
solution.

2. Define
Once you’ve taken the time to truly understand how your audience feels,
your team can begin to define the problem that you’re aiming to solve. In our
previous example, it might be along the lines of creating an automated,
replicable process for data entry to streamline the amount of labor your user
needs to participate in—freeing up her time to engage in more valuable
strategic initiatives for her company. When defining a point of view, focus on:

Users

Tivix Guide to Design Thinking 8

 Needs

Insights

3. Ideate
Next, you’ll work with your team on a wide-ranging brainstorming project,
quickly coming up with ideas that aim to solve the problem you’ve just
identified. At this point, the ideas need not be practical—you don’t need to
validate them by exploring the technology used or determining the ROI.

It’s simply a process of working as a team to get as many concepts on the

table as possible, which you’ll then be free to explore in more detail.
Practices such as mind mapping, sketching, and brainstorming are often
useful in this exercise.

Tivix Guide to Design Thinking 9

4. Prototype
Armed with ideas, it’s now time to choose several to move into the
prototyping stage. Stanford suggests winnowing down your possibilities by
choosing voting criteria for your team such as “the most likely to delight,”
“the most rational,” and “the most unexpected”—allowing for both innovative
and more practical solutions. 



As you move into prototyping, use low-res materials to bring your ideas to
life. This could be as simple as a sketched-out storyboard, but ideally should
be something that a user can interact with to get a sense of the experience
your solution would deliver.

Tivix Guide to Design Thinking 10

5. Test

Once you have working prototypes, you can bring them to your target

audience to solicit feedback. Give your users the opportunity to play with the

prototypes, and evaluate how they interact with them—are they intuitive to

use without instruction, or do your users need additional support? 



Once you’ve observed your target market working with the prototypes,

question them about their experience and what features they ’d like to see.

From here, you should be able to get a better sense of whether your

prototype is successful—and, if so, what features to prioritize as you build

your product.

Tivix Guide to Design Thinking 11

Planning a 

1 week sprint
Google Ventures (GV) - the venture-capital arm of Google’s parent company,
Alphabet; is also a strong proponent of design thinking.

In fact, GV has also developed the “design sprint,” a five-day, highly focused
ideation process to quickly test out ideas before investing heavily in them.
GV calls it a “‘greatest hits’ of business strategy, innovation, behavior
science, design thinking, and more -- packaged into a battle-tested process
that any team can use.”

Tivix Guide to Design Thinking 12

GV’s 5-day sprint uses the following structure

Monday - A structured discussion focused on aligning on a long-term

goal, mapping the challenge, collecting expert insights, then picking a
short-term target that can be accomplished in five days

Tuesday - Iterate and improve on existing ideas, and sketch out

proposed solutions independently

Wednesday - Choose winning solutions from your team’s ideas, and

weave them into a storyboard

Thursday - Create a prototype and write an interview script for your

customer test

Friday - Watch customers use your prototype and interview them about
the experience

With this rough guide to a design sprint, a team can develop a strategic plan
for building the right solution in just one week by listening to each other and
to your customers.

Tivix Guide to Design Thinking 13

Working with a partner:

Our approach
While companies can, and should, incorporate design thinking into their own
strategic initiatives, it’s also valuable to understand how a creative partner
might approach the discipline in a shared collaboration. To that end, we’re
sharing our own design thinking process to illustrate how we can support
our clients with design thinking-engineered product development.

While our approach is heavily informed by both Stanford and GV’s

methodologies, our process is flexible -- first and foremost, we focus on
problem-solving, not on following a particular framework. Our end goal is to
develop a user-friendly product on time and on budget, that both our
customer and their end users will fully embrace.

Tivix Guide to Design Thinking 14

While our approach is highly adaptive to our clients’
circumstances, in general, our team follows these five
steps:

Workshop

We begin with a full-immersion workshop that brings in stakeholders from

our client company. The primary goal here is to understand what the core
problem that we’re solving for is -- in other words, what is their “why”? What
does success look like for them? Learning from their team of experts, we’ll
work to understand their core goal in coming to us for help.

Define high-level roadmap

Once we understand what the stakeholders want, it’s equally important to

focus on what the users want. We’ll listen to customer feedback and build
out user stories to clearly visualize how and when they might use the
product, and what features will be essential to make it successful and simple
for them to use. We’ll align with the company on what’s realistic to begin to
build out as a starting point, which we can then iterate on.

Tivix Guide to Design Thinking 15

 Rough prototyping

At this stage, we’ll create low-fidelity wireframes to document the user

experience and the product “flow”. This might be as simple as a sketch on a
whiteboard that illustrates the path a user might take within the product: For
instance, the act of logging into an online financial dashboard to check on
their monthly spending. The sketch can show the user’s path from clicking
on the app on their phone through to viewing the budget dashboard. How
many steps will it take to get from start to finish, and how simple and
intuitive will the process be?

Once we have the flow defined, our design team will begin to experiment
with the look of the product. We’ll document the user interface, using digital
tools like Sketch and Invision, focusing on both integrating the company’s
existing brand identity as well as the needs of the user.

Testing

At this point, we’ll go into the user community -- whether that’s employees
of the client company for an internally-facing product, or their own consumer
market for a customerfacing product -- and solicit feedback on our
prototype. We’ll study how users engage with the product, and how intuitive
they find it. Is it easy for them to move through the process to complete their
intended goal? Where do they get confused along the way? Do users clearly
understand, at a glance, what the product is for? Are there features that they
are ignoring?

Tivix Guide to Design Thinking 16

We’ll not only watch them in action, but ask them questions about their
experience, both before they begin and after they’ve engaged with the
product. Their feedback will be invaluable in continuing to build out a map of
features, and ultimately creating a final product that genuinely meets
customer needs.

Build to requirements

At this stage, after gathering user stories and requirements, completing our
initial prototype, soliciting user feedback, and communicating again with
project stakeholders, our team should be prepared to begin building out a
set of features. 



We’ll then embark in two-week development sprints, defining what features

we will be able to include within each stage. At the conclusion of each sprint,
we’ll be able to work with the internal product team to evaluate progress,
solicit additional feedback, and iterate as needed to ensure that we are still
on the right path.

As a Digital Product Development firm, we are always conscientious of our

client’s budget and timeline constraints. We ensure that we build out a
realistic scope of work and time frame for what can be delivered at each
stage of the project.

Through our 2-week development sprint cycles, we can regularly keep our
clients aware of potential trouble spots, demo (however trivial, non-user
facing or technical) progress on the engagement and ensure that we are
reducing engineering risk and validating ideas that will meet our clients’ and
their end users’ needs.

Tivix Guide to Design Thinking 17

Design thinking 

as a discipline
Design thinking is not solely about product design - the concepts can be
applied across any discipline. Regardless of what problem you are trying to
address, it’s crucial to take the time to listen to the feedback of the people
who’d actually be using the solution that you put into action - whether that’s
factory workers in a manufacturing plant, or healthcare patients evaluating a
new pharmaceutical drug, for instance.

Tivix Guide to Design Thinking 18

Regardless of industry sector or company size, every business can begin to
solve problems by building a more empathetic approach to developing
solutions for their target markets. While background research and historical
data can be helpful in informing a solution, your company will find it far more
useful to spend time in action with your target users. Learn what challenges
they face in an ordinary day, find out what their priorities are, and learn what
available solutions are lacking in their eyes.

By taking in feedback from your target users, without presupposing any

judgement of the type of product they should or could look for, you’ll be able
to step back from the situation to embrace a far more creative approach.

As you focus on the user perspective, you’ll gain a strong understanding of

how to bring about a solution that will work for them - and, by iterating
frequently and seeking ongoing feedback along the way, you’ll be able to
clearly grasp when your ideas are resonating with your users.

Why make this extra effort to focus so heavily on your

users’ needs?

Well, it will delight your users, for one -- but it will help your bottom line, too.
The Design Management Institute conducted a study of design-led
enterprise organizations including Nike, Apple, and Whirlpool -- and
discovered that they outperformed the S&P overall by an astonishing 219%.

Today, even if you’re not a designer, it’s becoming more critical to think like
one. Embrace the tenets of design thinking, and your organization will be
primed for ongoing success and innovation.

Tivix Guide to Design Thinking 19

Tivix Guide

to Design Thinking
Tivix is a digital product development firm headquartered in San Francisco,
with additional offices in New York City, Europe (London & Wrocław), and
Portland. Our focus is the agile development of web, cloud, and mobile
applications - and helping organizations create and sustain digital innovation

Need Help with Design Thinking?

At Tivix we help businesses large and small build better software using
design thinking principles. To learn how we can help you find innovative
solutions to complex software problems click here to get in touch

[email protected]

www.tivix.com

600 California Street, San Francisco, CA 94108