All About Design Thinking, All of the Time

Compared to many major online publishers Edmunds is small in terms of employee count. We're about 400 strong.

One of the many advantages of being small is that when the time comes, we can turn on a dime. And we have. We're moving in a new direction in which Design Thinking is becoming core to the way we do business.

Over the last 6 months we've been all about Design Thinking, all of the time! We've established a group of researchers that go out into the field to find out as much as we can about the people that use Edmunds.com and how they use Edmunds.com.

We're reaching out and we're reaching in. The company has organized Challenge Teams. Each team has a particular focus on improving how Edmunds experience for its users, both external and internal. Now, before we put our nose to the grindstone to make something, we talk to the user first. It's becoming more common to go past a conference room and see a group of Edmunds employees in a video conference call with an end user on the other end of the conversation. Or, if we're developing an internal tool, the development team will run a paper prototype past the internal group requesting the work.

The month of January has been an exciting month. All the employees went through formal training sessions to learn the particulars of Design Thinking. Also, all of the Edmunds Challenges Teams had to walk the talk. We ran a month long exercise in which each Challenge Team had to use the Design Thinking process to create a product or service.

The culmination of these creative efforts was a company wide Design Thinking Trade Show. Each Challenge Team presented its product/service in our company's common room following a trade show format. (We call the common room, The Great Room.)

Each Challenge Team set up a booth. Employee walked from booth to booth to get sold on the Challenge Teams idea. And, as an added kicker, each both had a "vote sheet" upon which a wandering employee graded the booth, as Best Booth, Second Best, Third Best. At the end of the Trade Show a winner was determined by a tally of the votes given.

We shot video and photos of the event. Below we've posted the photos of some of the Challenge Teams at their booths with a brief description of the idea they developed. Enjoy!