This content originally appeared on Level Up Coding - Medium and was authored by Lorenzo B.
Software developers have an obsession with code. It must be efficient, scalable and even pretty. The thing is that sometimes changing the source code can’t be the solution to your problem.
The first years of Airbnb
Joe Gebbia and Brian Chesky founded Airbnb in August 2008. In January 2009, Paul Graham invited the founders of Airbnb to a training session at Y Combinator. He was interested in the company. It was January 2009.
In August 2009, Airbnb was making very little money. The company’s revenue was around $200 per week. The founders, as well as Paul Graham, were based in San Francisco. This amount of money doesn’t pay for the food or the bills there. The ship was sinking.
Looking at New York City listings on Airbnb, the three entrepreneurs found that there was a pattern among them.
The similarity is that the photos sucked. The photos were not great.
- Joe Gebbia
People looking for a place to stay could even see the bedrooms sometimes. Would you rent a room without seeing it? Well, probably not. This is where the problem starts to be clear.
What is the most obvious solution to very bad photos? Taking them again, with a better camera and a good angle. That’s what they did.
They rented a camera, bought a flight to New York and spent time with the property owners to take some high-resolution pictures of the properties.
What if they were wrong? What if the pictures were not the problem? They had no data to prove it. It was a bet. It was intuition. Luckily, they were right.
A week after Airbnb started to earn around 400 dollars per week.
It doubled the income.
The path was right, and this strategy allowed Airbnb to survive that crisis.
The Lesson
Airbnb listed around 40 properties in New York City, at that time. The solution involved going to each one of them to take incredible, high-resolution pictures. What if the properties were 80, or 200?
Yes, the solution was not scalable. It addressed the issue perfectly, though.
If you, as a business owner, empathize with your customers, you get what it’s wrong. If you put yourself in the shoes of the customers, you know what is going on. It might mean putting yourself out of your comfort zone, but it must be done. The problem of having bad pictures couldn’t be solved with programming.
You have to go out in the real world, talk to customers and fix the problem with them.
What is Design Thinking
The Airbnb story has a lot of insights and lessons about designing solutions to a problem. This story is an example of Design Thinking.
Empathize
Design thinking is a human-centred approach to problem-solving. It focuses on the human needs that must be tackled in the solution. The customer must be at the core of each of our business decisions.
Get to know their problems. They are unmet needs.
Empathize, talk and look around. Try to enlarge your vision as much as possible. Don’t focus on the solution yet. Try to get an understanding of what it means to have the needs that your customers have.
Frame the problem
Now, define the problem. Remember, people must be your focus. In the Airbnb case, the problem is not “we are not making enough money”. That’s wrong. This is a consequence of customer unmet needs or dissatisfaction.
This is a problem:
People need to see and be amazed by the flat they are renting.
Yes, because otherwise, they won’t rent it.
Ideate
At this point, you should understand the problem you are facing. You should start thinking about creative solutions to address the issue. Take pen and paper, and start writing everything that comes to your mind. Even solutions that might seem stupid to you. It doesn’t matter. You’ll have time to analyze them later.
Don’t rule out unscalable or not technological solutions.
Write everything.
Prototype
Analyze your ideas, and make prototypes. Don’t focus on building a perfect. Even a rough prototype works. You just have to confirm if your idea goes in the right direction of solving the problem. It will help you improve and build on your idea. While developing a prototype, you might run into issues not considered before.
Test. Test. Test again.
Customers’ needs, do you remember? Gather feedback, and ask your users if the prototype goes in the right direction.
Get insights, and use them to further improve your prototype. Nothing is perfect the first time. It is an iterative process. It takes many iterations to be good. You never know how many though. mean putting yourself out of your comfort zone, but it must be done.
The problem of having bad pictures couldn’t be solved with programming. You have to go out in the real world, talk to customers and fix the problem.
Conclusion
I hope that by the end of this article you are convinced that code isn’t always the solution.
Going out in the real world, talking to people and breaking your assumptions makes the difference.
Resources
[1] https://www.ideou.com/blogs/inspiration/what-is-design-thinking
It’s Not Always About Code, It’s Design was originally published in Level Up Coding on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.
This content originally appeared on Level Up Coding - Medium and was authored by Lorenzo B.
Lorenzo B. | Sciencx (2022-09-20T12:58:52+00:00) It’s Not Always About Code, It’s Design. Retrieved from https://www.scien.cx/2022/09/20/its-not-always-about-code-its-design/
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