Evolution

The human-centered design thinking process is anything but linear— we have to continually go back and adapt as we gain deeper understanding, and evolve our ideas to match our new knowledge. Our openness to evolution is what improves upon previous development processes. At every stage, we are learning, and our final product should reflect that progression.

Bringing in Business Thinking:

An important part of evolution is knowing when to let an idea stand on its own two legs and enter the world. Using feasibility studies allows us to have confidence in the readiness of our ideas. With a proper market entry strategy, deployment is finally a possibility.

Just because we leave the development phase, however, does not mean that our opportunities for improvement end. Products and services do not become static just because they have been launched into the public eye. Etsy is a wonderful example of this. They have a strategy called continuous deployment, in which they execute over 30 innovations on a daily basis. Changes in coding, scaling, and design happen on a daily, if not hourly basis, and according to an article by Forbes, “by having very frequent releases of small changes, it was easier to spot and fix problems than when a problem emerged.”