Design Thinking for Enterprise: Business Origami
Written by Alina Balean & Esther Sportello — September 2018
For the past two years Alina and I have been joined at the hip as a Product/Design duo on the Commercial Innovation team at Capital One. As a result we’ve eaten a lot of ice cream, gotten lost in a few cities (Melville, Austin, and Richmond to name a few) but most importantly, became friends.
As a product/design duo we have lots of techniques in our tool belt with Business Origami being one of our favorites. Business Origami was created by Hitachi Design Business Origami aims to create a tangible, shared representation of a system, so everyone can easily get on the same page around an experience. We simplified and adapted this method to our organization and product needs.
What is it exactly?
To “do” Business Origami all you need is paper index cards (no technology, tangible paper), sharpies and easel paper. During the activity you will fold index cards in half to represent people, data, and touch points within the ecosystem. You then place them on a big piece of easel paper to map out the interactions and flows between the elements.
We like to pick the easiest, least complex portion of the process to start, this helps ground the team in what we are going to do in the rest of the exercise and gives everyone a clear starting point. From there we map out the “happy path”, this is the flow that would give our users the best possible experience if everything went to plan.
Next, we go back to the beginning of the flow and think about what could draw a user away from the happy path, what could go wrong. This is a great opportunity to breakout the different color Sharpies you had hiding in the back of your draw, using them to highlight different scenarios that need to be accounted for.
You can also include “zones” to symbolize pages of the application. This method is very complicated. It requires you to circle a group of index cards that will makeup a page or section of an application. This is something that honestly gives me anxiety (#type-A) because Alina jumps right into zoning with permanent marker (#type-yolo).
We love business origami because:
- Creates transparency into the user experience
- Rallies the team around a common goal
- Highlights pitfalls not otherwise noticed
- Encourages product, technology and design to see inter-dependencies
- Easily digestible
What’s next?
When you find yourself stuck, unable to create user flows, information diagrams or MVPs: find yourself the nearest designer, a box of colored sharpies, and locker yourselves in a room for a few hours. We promise it’s worth it. If you have any questions on how to implement this strategy give us a shout.
