or what can go wrong when designing a service
The post is dedicated to the last stage of the service design thinking process - the solution fit!
We know how the theory goes:
start with discovering (design research)
analyse and synthesize the research, gather insights
define the problem
ideate
evaluate desirability, viability and feasibility (or other more crazy criteria, of course)
prototype and test several (at least a few) solutions
And this is how it really happens:
You have a deadline. A budget. A pressure from the stakeholders.
The team should always be diverse, right? Some of the team members have the right mindset - they take time to discover, learn, to assume and prove their assumptions wrong, to start over and explore what the competition is doing and to think about solutions, of course.
But there is often a team member who jumps to a solution too soon and falls in love with it. It’s a love at first sight - you see the shine in their eyes, the butterflies flying around and you know that you have work to do.
Now, this is not something to blame this person for. This is simply how our brains are functioning - they are wired to solve problems as quick as possible in order to free up some disk? Remove disk may be space and operational memory for the next task. It’s only natural for our brains to try and bring order and SHINE light into the darkness of ambiguity.
So, what do you do? You explain wisely about the neuroscience and the modus operandi of the human brain? Hmm. Or maybe you could try explaining why jumping to the first sexy solution is a recipe for a failure? Hmm again.
The best thing you can do is to tell them they are right and this is possibly the best solution ever, but shall we conduct a few interviews and hear it from our customers?
Next trap is the mom tests (The Mom Test by Rob Fitzpatrick: How to talk to customers & learn if your business is a good idea when everyone is lying to you).
Then the serious job start. Help them ask the right questions when interviewing customers. Is that a real customer pain that they are solving or yet another shoe umbrellas (or other useless invention).
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