With the photograph from this event, which became known as “Earthrise,” the Apollo 8 astronauts inadvertently sparked a spontaneous reframing of the environmental problems threatening our planet. No longer were we on a vast planet with seemingly endless resources, but rather a small, very finite lifeboat in an infinite universe.  This change in perspective helped charge the modern environmental movement, inspiring the creation of Earth Day in 1970.

Reframing the way that a problem is viewed can inspire a movement, as it did in this case. It can also be a powerful way to create innovative design solutions to challenging problems and even create new and disruptive business models. During the Empathizephase of the Design Thinking process, you collected stories and insights from your users. This Define phase will give you an opportunity to synthesize these findings and come up with a problem statement, called a point of view (POV), that can help you reframe the problem and open new and innovative solution spaces.

Developing a point of view (POV)

A POV is composed of 3 elements:

• Who is your user? (Note as many specific details as possible.)
• What is their deep, unmet need?
• Why is this insightful? (List the insights you gleaned from your empathetic needfinding process.)

As an example, below is a POV from the founders of AwesomeBox, a gift-giving platform, used in the early days of developing their product. They were trying to design for people who have a hard time giving thoughtful gifts. They interviewed and observed hundreds of potential customers, from which they created POVs like the following.

Let’s create some hypothetical POVs using Netflix, as they’re a good example of a company that disrupted an existing business model by reframing the problem for users.

In the early days, Netflix might have framed their POV like this:

“Caroline is a 26-year-old single mom who loves sci-fi movies. She needs a way to rent DVDs that doesn’t clutter her already-busy schedule, while making her feel relaxed after a long day of work and taking care of her daughter.”

Using this point of view, Netflix certainly could have come up with a solution that only delivers DVDs by mail—but the solution space would have been constrained and they might’ve missed a larger opportunity.

Now consider how Netflix could have reframed the problem with a different POV.

Caroline is a 26-year-old single mom who loves sci-fi movies. She needs a way to access new and entertaining content in a way that allows her to consume it at her own pace, while making her feel excited about discovering new shows to share with her friends.

With the problem statement rewritten, Netflix opened up all kinds of opportunities for innovation. Let’s unpack them.

“She needs a way to access new and entertaining content … ”

This doesn’t even mention DVDs! In the early days, a mail delivery solution may have worked, but over time Netflix developed the streaming services that helped make them so popular. Also, “new and entertaining” doesn’t necessarily limit them to licensing content. Netflix could also develop and distribute their own shows.

“ … in a way that allows her to consume it at her own pace … ”

Again, mail delivery of DVDs would be a partial solution to this constraint, but with streaming as an option, there’s an even bigger opportunity. Add in original content, and now Caroline can binge-watch House of Cards while her daughter sleeps. (We never said that innovative solutions always have a positive social impact.)

“ … while making her feel excited about discovering new shows … ”

Netflix famously developed a “recommendation algorithm” that helps viewers discover new content based on the shows they already watch—and the ratings they give to each. This feature wouldn’t have necessarily stemmed from the previous POV.

“ … which she can share with her friends.”

This last insight, while minor on its surface, is a huge reason for the viral growth of Netflix—especially after the company began developing original content. Once rave reviews about shows began to surface—with the only way to access them being Netflix—the continued growth was almost assured.

Clearly, there would have been a lot of value left on the table had Netflix used the first POV to guide their designs. In addition to helping you reframe a problem, a good POV can align your team, provide a way to compare competing ideas, and help fuel brainstorms. In fact, the d.school at Stanford came up with a great checklist of all the things that a good POV should help you accomplish:

Point of view (POV) checklist

Your POV should:

• Provide focus and frame the problem
• Inspire your team
• Provide a reference for evaluating competing ideas
• Empower team members to make decisions in response to the high level goals of the team
• Fuel brainstorms by suggesting “how might we” statements
• Capture the hearts and minds of people you meet
• Save you from the impossible task of developing solution concepts that are all things to all people
• Allow you to revisit and reformulate the POV as you learn by doing
• Guide your innovation efforts

In the remaining sections of this chapter, we will dive into a case study where developing a POV provided inspiration for a healthcare project with a lot of impact. Then, we’ll share an exercise to help you quickly generate POVs of your own.

Case study: GE Healthcare MRI redesign

We first met Doug Dietz when doing the research for this chapter. Over the phone, Doug is a kind, affable midwesterner—the sort of guy you imagine it would be fun to go to a Milwaukee Brewers game with. But beneath his unassuming presence is a formidable design mind with over 25 years of experience at GE Healthcare. First as a principal designer and now Innovation Architect, Doug has helped develop medical equipment such as MRI and CT scanners for one of the world’s largest corporations.

In 2008, Doug ran into a problem. He was at a hospital where one of his new MRI machines had recently been installed. The machine had won a prestigious industrial design award and Doug was eager to see the machine in situ.

Before he had much of a chance to ask the technician about the machine, he was asked to step outside of the room, as a patient was scheduled to come in for an appointment. What he witnessed in the hallway changed the course of his career and helped him reframe the MRI user experience.

A young family walked in, their 7-year-old daughter obviously distressed. As the family got closer, Doug could see that she was weeping. The father leaned over and said, “Remember, we talked about this, you can be brave.”

Doug peered into the room where the young girl was about to enter the scanner. Crouching down, he had a new perspective on the room—and on the machine that he had so proudly designed. He could immediately understand why the girl was terrified: warning stickers plastered the machine and yellow and black tape marked the floor like a crash-test scene. The machine itself looked like a beige “brick with a hole in it.”

Given this new perspective, it’s no mystery why many children have to be sedated to get MRI or CT scans. Everything about the experience can be frightening, from the room and the machine to the claustrophobia and loud noises. Doug came away with a new mission: to understand how GE might redesign this experience for children so that it’s a positive experience and not something to be dreaded.

Doug’s boss recommended he attend an executive education workshop at the d.school at Stanford to get the Design Thinking toolkit and help him solve this big, emotionally-charged problem. The workshop helped him frame the problem as a POV, in the form of a Madlib which was structured in the following way:

“We met … ”

“We were amazed to realize that … ”

“It would change the world if … ”

Using this framework, Doug and his team were able to iterate on their POV until they came up with a statement more aligned with the goal.

“We met scared families trying not to fall apart during the hospital visit.

We were amazed to realize that they have to sedate 80% of children between 3 and 8 years old, in order to have them scanned.

It would change the world if we could capitalize on the child’s amazing imagination to transform the radiology experience into a positive, memorable adventure.”

By reframing the problem using this POV, Doug and his team realized that the beginning of the user experience started at home, when the parents were trying to figure out what the procedure was like and how to explain it to their children. They were able to outline the whole user journey for the family and determine the different touchpoints that they could influence or redesign.

The team didn’t have the budget to do a full redesign of the machines, so once they had identified a few promising opportunities, they decided to implement a low-fidelity prototype. By applying decals to the exterior of the machine and the walls of the scanning room, they were able to transform the dull, monotone experience into a colorful pirate adventure, where the captain’s helm led to the inside of the “ship” (this feature had the added benefit of making the opening seem much larger and less claustrophobic). They created a script for the operator, who led the children through the pirate adventure.

The results from this redesign and from others like it were no less than amazing. Sedation rates dropped from 80% to fractions of one percent. But to Doug, the human stories behind the numbers are just as important.

While visiting the pirate-themed scanner, Doug talked to the parents of a little girl about the room’s piña colada scented aroma, something they were getting a kick out of. The little girl came up to the mom and tugged at her shirt. “Can we come back tomorrow?” she asked.

For at least one family, Doug and his team had transformed the experience from something terrifying to something to look forward to. By using their POV as a way to reframe the problem, his team was able to change the world.