IDEO is one of the largest and most important American design and consulting companies. Starting from the industrial design and interaction design (one of the founders was Bill Modgidge) IDEO has extended its consulting services and fell under strategic competence of consulting companies like McKinsey.

What differs IDEO from the others is approach based on using the same tools while designing products, such as user’s observation,analysis of use context, prototyping and iterative process for developing business strategy and marketing.
How design thinking can help building strategy?

Typical tools for strategists such as Excel spreadsheets and PowerPoint slides don’t favor creativity and good communication (as we know, PowerPoint is an evil – seriously, it was responsible for the disaster of the space shuttle Columbia and its use has been banned by NASA.) You can’t properly rethink the whole project if it’s vision is contained in short passwords. PowerPoint slides are boring, and words can be understood differently. Strategy formulated and presented in this way, is trapped in ambiguous abstractions, difficult to clarify and evaluate.

According to IDEO, preparing strategic prototypes is much better solution. Prototype is not the right project, but it is only the presentation of vision engaging emotions and imagination (built to think). The human mind needs to confront some real object or a story to develop an idea and assess its strengths and weaknesses. Prototype can be a mockup of the product, it also can be a comic strip or film, which shows the use of the service in narrative form. An example of such prototype is concept presentation of future web browser Aurora, prepared by Adaptive Path, another company which integrates designing with strategic consulting.

In his article “Strategy by Design” the head of IDEO, Tim Brow, outlines the elements of creating a strategy. At the beginning: hit the Streets. This process of creating a strategy needs to be “human-centered”. To gather interesting insights it’s important to spend some time with consumers, watching their behaviors, personally test the products and services, get know the „user-experience” on which we can often build the whole strategy.

The next step is prototyping:

Design thinking is by nature a process of prototyping. When you are on a promising idea, build it. The prototype is usually a drawing, model, or a video describing the product, system or service. We build these models very fast, they are strict and not very elegant, but they work. The aim is not to create approximations of the finished product, or process, the aim is to gather feedback that will help us resolve the problem. In a sense, we build to think.

Prototype tells the story. Prototyping is simultaneously an evaluation process – it generates feedback, which allows you to put the amendments on the fly – and is the process of telling stories. This is the way of visual presentation and experiencing every strategy. – Tim Brown, CEO of IDEO

Under Brown’s article in form of a dull PowerPoint:

JustProto would like to send special thanks to Maciej Lipiec, who gave authorization for publishing this article. You can find original version of this post written by Maciej on his User Experience Blog – http://uxdesign.pl/