"Using design thinking to design software that is useless and unusable."
Saw this under the "What's IBM good at?" post and found it intriguing that it got so many positive votes.
Can anyone name one IBM product resulting from design thinking that was a resounding success? (As opposed to one's I'm familiar with where the designers screwed the project and good developers were laid off?)
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Those sessions were so painful. (Confession: I was a developer...which is drudgery at IBM because any FLM can randomly ruin your day with a single Slack message.) These sessions were quintessentially "group think" with all that is negative about that.
Among the designers there were many true believers which means that we could skip none of the liturgy. After a few hours, the room looked for all the world like a kindergarten class. We had all kinds of colored stickies (with each color signifying something of great importance) and colored star and circles (with each color signifying something of great but different importance.)
More than half of the great ideas defied physics and math. Sadly, those ideas didn't warrant their own color sticky so they hid in plain sight along with the ideas that didn't defy physics but also weren't all that brilliant. Equally sadly, the average designer had no concept of which ideas could be implemented in the universe containing the room with the colored stickies and the captive audience.
After a few hours of relentless grinding I, and most people would glad up vote the idea that "we inject ourselves with coronavirus to help understand the daemons that vex our customers." For one thing, it would have been doable. For another, anything to end the horror of the day.
good design thinking at ibm? sure, the Selectric typewriter
As the products have started embracing Design Thinking, the actual amount of useful features included in a new release / fix pack have declined. It’s as if the methodology sucks the natural innovation out of the team. I’ve seen cases where UX was so poor as it result it got redone multiple times!
Can confirm. Have worked with both and in IBM Design they are robots to “design thinking”. Brainwashed and can’t seem to use their brains. Design thinking at IBM is like agile at IBM….. it’s applied uselessly and just “by the book” without actually using your noggin. Developers are almost as bad… they don’t think to question the id--tic design and experiences the kiddies in IBM Design Austin give them.
What I see in the nowadays IBM is a design minus thinking.
I mean, people labeled as "designers" have no intention to understand the product they are supposed to design. They are just focused on the surface, like having the right font and design template. The rest is "not their job".
The coders take the design and apply it - again without thinking. If the design contained stupid typos, they just copy-paste them over.
And the testers (if even tested) also don't apply thinking - they just focus on isolated use cases.
The legendary SELECTRIC typewriter was a great innovation in it's time, which was ages ago. I recall too the demand for the first ThinkPad computer.
No amount of Design Thinking can save a fundamentally flawed project - unless the outcome is "don't do this", and management is willing to take it seriously.
Too often, Design Thinking is "lipstick on a pig", over-designing in areas of little importance.
HOWEVER - I did use it successfully not to design a complete product, but to address areas of difficulty in specific parts of an existing mature, complex product.
- crickets *
Well IBM used to make some of the best computers in the world if you could get past their arcane user interface design. Now IBM is essentially a failure looking for a problem. They have largely fired everyone who contributed to their success. So now we have Watson which has been a disaster In nearly every application except chess and Jeopardy, and a cloud service that is hopelessly behind AWS, Microsoft or even Oracle. One has to wonder when Wall Street will wake up.