In 1987, the three companies that would later form IDEO worked together with Microsoft to create the world’s first ergonomically designed mouse. IDEO’s human factors research suggested a small but significant change: Moving the location of the mouse ball forward, from under the palm to under the fingertips, enabled more precise control and resulted in measurable performance differences compared with earlier models.

The industrial design effort examined and tested dozens of shapes in comfort and aesthetic studies that led to the famous “Dove Bar” form, a significant advance over the boxy mouses prevalent at the time. The resulting clean appearance, enhanced control, and improved reliability created enormous consumer appeal that replaced all earlier versions, and Microsoft sold more than 2 million units in its first two years.

With approximately 55,000 Americans waiting to receive kidneys and a list that could double in the next 10 years, there is an acute and urgent need for new technology to increase the quality and number of organs available for transplant. Using the conventional method of organ storage and transportation—a cooler filled with ice—doctors and nurses needed to accompany the organ to ensure proper handling.

IDEO and Organ Recovery Systems created the LifePort Kidney Transporter to provide a new high-tech alternative. The LifePort gently perfuses, or pumps, the kidney with a cold liquid solution to improve its condition before transplantation, which can nearly double storage time and may increase the number of usable kidneys and improve patient outcomes. The device also provides critical data to monitor and evaluate kidneys during transport.

Organ Recovery Systems believes that perfusion has the potential to remove tens of thousands of patients from the waiting list and dialysis, and save the healthcare system more than $1 billion annually. In 2006, the LifePort Kidney Transporter was used to transport 350 kidneys per month in 12 countries, and was included in the permanent architecture and design collection at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City.

Pediatric healthcare system Nemours provides primary, hospital, and clinic-based specialty care, prevention and health information services, and medical education programs in Delaware, Florida, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania. When Nemours wanted to strengthen its brand, it faced two challenges: Empowered patients had more access to information and choice than ever before, and new players—alternative-care centers, retail-based care clinics, and urgent-care centers—were entering the marketplace, diverting market share.

Nemours approached IDEO for help in creating an innovative, differentiated, and patient-centric experience for a new hospital in Orlando, with the goal of establishing Nemours as a destination care provider and industry leader. Together, they identified and clarified both family needs and key experience touchpoints in the patient journey, resulting in the state-of-the-art-designed, 60-acre, $400 million Nemours Children’s Hospital in Lake Nona Medical City, Florida. “The design team’s approach to defining key moments in the patient journey was highly instructive,” said Dr. David Milov, chief of clinical informatics at Nemours. “They captured insights otherwise unavailable to us.”

Concepts that were realized in the hospital’s final design include:

• Care Team Room ID: Patients and families are introduced to each member of their care team to ensure continuity of care.
• Floor Greeters: Concierge-like greeters welcome and orient families and answer questions.
• Family Lounges: Private dining rooms have kitchenettes, so families can cook and eat together.
• Emergency Department: Patients are greeted, sorted by medical condition, and immediately checked into rooms.
• Patient Information Screens: Doctors and nurses can access patient information prior to entering an exam room to enable informed conversations and build trust.
• Smart Bracelets: Personalized RFID-enabled bracelets keep track of the care team.
• Smart Rooms: Triggered by the Smart Bracelet, Smart Rooms “welcome” the patient upon entry.

To arrive at these designs, IDEO sought inspiration via analogous kid-friendly environments, such as museums, schools, toy stores, and zoos. Designers also conducted in-context interviews with patients, parents, families, doctors, nurses, support staff, and outside physicians. One key insight that led to the final design: Patients and families came to Nemours with varied levels of experience—first-timers, occasional visitors, and those who were chronically ill—but the hospital treated them all the same.

To address these needs, the team created an experience blueprint focused on welcoming, guiding, and supporting patients and families through unique environments, integrated service moments, and market-differentiating spaces and tools. To test the look, feel, and value of the designs, designers built full-scale foam core prototypes of welcome stations, waiting lounges, and exam rooms.

The results appeal to patients, families, and caregivers. According to Dr. Lane Donnelly, Nemours chief medical officer, “all the amenities at Nemours focus not only on the child but their parents and families as well.”

The hospital won two awards at the International Interior Design Association’s 2013 Best of the Best Gala (Georgia Chapter), one for the Healthcare Design category and one for best overall out of all 11 categories. Parenting.com writer Shawn Bean noted, “Set amidst a wooded expanse of central Florida, with theme park roller coasters peppering the horizon, Nemours Children’s Hospital is arguably the new high water mark for pediatric care in the United States.”

Designer turned educator Kiran Bir Sethi wanted to blur the boundaries between school and life to help young students become aware, enabled, and empowered to effect change in the world. In aiming to spread her message to millions of children across India , Sethi tapped IDEO and the d.school at Stanford to help create a design contest for youth that would show them that they could make a difference in their community.

Together with the d.school, IDEO designed a competition for middle school students called the Design for Change Contest. Adapting the human-centered design approach into a simple process that 10- to 13-year-old kids could follow on their own, the contest included rules, tools, and platforms that would be accessible to children and teachers throughout India regardless of their previous exposure to design.

The team shaped the rules so that students could learn core design-thinking skills such as empathy, brainstorming, collaboration, and reflection through the process of participating in the contest. And together, the group developed a toolkit to walk students through the simple four-step process.

The biggest challenges to the contest were overcoming the lack of infrastructure, language barriers, and a discrepancy in school resources. There was no national database of schools for easy outreach, so Riverside built relationships with NGOs across India to distribute the contest toolkit to more than 30,000 schools.

The contest receives about 2,000 entries from groups of youth in India each year. They have been addressing challenges such as illiteracy, pollution, traffic safety, care for the elderly, alcoholism, and the environment.

As of 2015, the Design for Change Contest has scaled far beyond India, and is being run in 30-plus countries, with millions of children participating. Each contest entry shows that kids really can make a big difference in the world.

Creativity Challenge #8: Empathize with customers, employees, and other end users.

One way to develop more empathy with—and gain new insights about—your customers is to look beyond the narrow definition of your offering and consider the customer’s total experience. The more broadly you define the customer experience, the more opportunities you can identify for improvement through design.

Say, for example, you make interior house paint. You could focus narrowly on the characteristics of the product itself, on making the paint less drippy or making it cover a surface in a single coat. But you’ll find many more opportunities for innovation if you think about the arc of the customer experience. In something as simple as repainting a bedroom, there are probably a dozen steps (each one of which is a chance to innovate): from getting the customer to realize that it’s time to repaint, to helping them choose the color, to shortening the preparation and cleanup time, to keeping track of which colors are on which walls for future reference when it comes time for touch-up.

A journey map helps you think systematically through the steps your customers—internal or external—have when they interact with your product or service. We use maps to synthesize what we learn from interviews and observations. (Or, during field research, you can also try asking your end user to map out his or her own journey.)

Tool: Customer Journey Map
Participants: Solo or groups of two to six people
Time: 1-4 hours
Supplies: Whiteboard or Post-its

Instructions

Step 1: Choose a process or journey that you want to map.
Step 2: Write down the steps. Make sure to include even small steps that may seem trivial. The goal is to get you to consider the nuances of the experience that you may normally overlook.
Step 3: Organize the steps into a map. Usually we display the steps sequentially in a timeline. Your map may include branches to show alternative paths in the customer journey. You could also use a series of pictures or whatever method fits your data.
Step 4: Look for insights. What patterns emerge? Anything surprising or strange? Question why certain steps occur, the order they occur in, and so forth. Ask yourself how you might innovate each step.
Step 5: If possible, show the map to people familiar with the journey and ask them what you’ve overlooked or gotten out of sequence.

Tips from the Field

Here is an example using this method:

Think about a trip to the hospital’s emergency room. Of course the most important moment is at the point of care, when the doc is diagnosing the problem or delivering treatment. But when people complain about (or, less commonly, rave about) their emergency room experience, it’s not usually the skill of the doctor they are talking about. A simple version of the patient journey might include moments like these:

• Experience the pain or discover the symptom
• Consider home treatment versus going to the hospital: the go/no go decision
• Choose transportation to the hospital
• Arrive and park (or pay the taxi, etc.)
• Enter the hospital and find the emergency room
• See the triage nurse
• Fill out the insurance forms
• Wait. And wait some more.
• Get ushered to the treatment room
• Put on an uncomfortable hospital gown, and wait some more
• See multiple preliminary nurses and technicians
• See the doctor for an assessment and sometimes preliminary diagnosis
• Undergo additional blood tests, X-rays, and so forth
• Receive a firmer diagnosis, which can lead to getting: instructions for home care, an outpatient procedure, a prescription, a follow-up appointment with a general practitioner or specialist, or admission to the hospital

As you lay out every step, ask yourself how you might cost-effectively innovate and turn the ordinary experience into something extraordinary.

Because emergency healthcare is often high-anxiety, we’ve discovered that patients are calmer if you spell out the journey ahead. We sometimes call that “journifying” the journey—taking an amorphous or scary process and breaking it down into tangible, predictable steps. We’ve found “journifying” helps people not only in the emergency room, but in any number of healthcare situations: taking your newborn home from the hospital, going in for surgery, or beginning a new treatment regimen.

This post was taken from Chapter 7 of Creative Confidence. Purchase the book for more on how to use creativity to solve problems, or read more from this series of creative exercises on the IDEO blog.

Everyone is creative. This belief runs through everything we do at IDEO, and in 2013, it led my brother David and me to write a book that would help others—even those who don’t think of themselves as “creative types”—to unleash their creative potential. Creative Confidence has inspired thousands of people to adopt a creative mindset and apply it to the diverse real-world challenges they face. In this series, we’ll share some exercises from the book that can help you approach your challenges from a new perspective.

I spent my afternoons on a small wooden pier, relaxing and staring up at clouds, looking for shapes. That pursuit is an exploration of pareidolia, the psychological phenomenon in which the mind responds to a stimulus, usually an image or a sound, by perceiving a familiar pattern where none exists. It was in that leisure time, trying to make sense of the clouds, that I found the comfort that I’d been seeking.

Nine years later, I found myself back in America, interning at IDEO Chicago, where I had far less opportunity for leisurely cloud gazing. Without the spare time to hang out on a pier, I wondered if I could engineer the same kind of comfort. Could I design an experience that brought back those long dreamy pareidolia days with the help of an app?

After all, people in my age bracket, between 25-34 years old, only spend an average of 13 minutes per day relaxing, according to the American Use of Time Survey, and experts say that we need to acknowledge and accept that we’re leisure-limited. Maybe this could be a shortcut to that leisure we’re missing.

So I created “Pareidolia,” an app that searches the sky on my behalf. It’s my way of trying to keep a part of my mind exploring, even when I need to be inside, working. If the app thinks it sees something in the clouds, it pings me to take a look.

To create Pareidolia, I set up a Raspberry Pi and a camera on the terrace of our Chicago studio, and programmed it to look continuously at the sky, searching for interesting shapes. The project uses computer vision, tensorflow, and keras to perceive images in clouds, then snaps an image, generates a drawing of what it imagines it might look like, and shares them via Slack. (The code can be found and downloaded from this Github repo.) It tells us what it sees in the sky in real time and invites us to go out and look for it.

As I started to share Pareidolia with colleagues and friends, my creation was met with mixed reviews. Ross Weijer, a data scientist here at IDEO Chicago, thought that it created efficiency while offering a different perspective. “Technology is something that speeds up your life and, lets you do things quicker,” he said. “So I think it’s subversive and helpful to have the aim of this project be to spare your imagination. It’s saying, ‘Stop, stop, take a moment to consider this.’”

Others, though, felt that the payoff wasn’t seeing images in the clouds, but actually, the act of searching for them. “I look at the sky so little, that when I do it’s because I am looking for an escape,” said Kevin Matuszeski, regional director of business operations “There are very few places left without the presence of screens or where you have to read something. So the pure joy of staring at something just for its beauty should be respected."

In other words, for some people, the joy lays in the process, and Pareidolia seemed to eliminate that.

Pareidolia didn’t turn out to be quite the leisure fix that I hoped it would. And it didn’t quite prove to be an antidote to homesickness, either. But it did encourage me to get outside, take my eyes off a screen for a few minutes, and enjoy nature as much as I could from the concrete of my downtown Chicago office. And even if it wasn’t a total fix, it does brighten up my days.

I was only 16 when I moved across the Atlantic to Vancouver Island, Canada, thousands of miles away from my home in Spain. In this strange new world, I found myself struggling to find something that felt familiar, and could give me comforts of home.

We know this is easier said than done, especially for large teams spread across multiple locations. Over the years, IDEO has helped organizations around the globe develop the capacity to innovate, and that work has allowed us to gather data on the behaviors that have the greatest impact on a team’s ability to develop a successful solution.

Here are four insights into the ways today’s businesses innovate—and what you can learn from what they’ve learned.

1. Quick and dirty prototyping isn’t just for software

Though many executives dismiss MVP-style prototyping as a software-only approach, we've found it's actually more effective in other industries.

In fact, rough, low-fidelity prototyping is significantly more impactful when used in industries where it's currently least applied—particularly for companies with long development cycles and long product lifecycles.

When we looked at data from our research, we found that organizations with long development cycles and long product lifecycles saw their chance of successful launches increase by 109% compared to their more nimble counterparts.

Why? And how? Let’s consider a car company: For those teams, the cost and risk of investing in poorly thought-out ideas is much, much higher. Building a high-fidelity vehicle prototype can cost millions of dollars using traditional methods. Instead, low fidelity mock-ups (in this case, using foam core and tape to create a simulated car dashboard) can uncover critical flaws that can save millions of dollars and years of effort.

2. Don’t let your team become blinded by purpose

Purpose statements are incredibly valuable. We’ve seen that organizations without a sense of purpose find it difficult to innovate: They struggle to choose which opportunities to pursue, and they have a more difficult time getting employees excited about developing those ideas. Our data shows that organizations with a strong purpose are 12% more likely to launch new solutions successfully.

But purpose can have a downside. Our research has shown that it lowers the ability to listen objectively to the results of customer experimentation.

What does that mean? A benefit of a strong purpose is that it simplifies decision-making. However, at its extreme, this approach can lead to less flexible thinking, leaving organizations a little less likely to truly hear what a stakeholder or customer is telling them.

Does this mean you should crumple up your purpose statement and toss it in the trash? No, not at all. Purpose is fundamental to innovation: It energizes employees, speeds up decision-making, and leads to more productive collaboration. But beware the line where purpose turns into dogma and diminishes your team’s ability to truly listen to customers and interpret data.

3. Move fast—but not too fast

With the rise of lean startups, companies are feeling the pressure to get moving. But getting started without a plan and a clear idea of your objectives can end up being a drain on resources.

What’s the cost? First, skipping the steps of getting to know your customer and market causes teams to fail 180% more often. Also, organizations that evaluate multiple ways to solve a problem are much more likely to succeed—more than 42% more likely—and, on average, get to market faster.

We’ve seen two significant reasons for this: First, testing multiple ideas in parallel keeps the team’s mind flexible; and second, customers involved in research and testing during development provide more useful feedback when they are presented with multiple ideas.

If your guess is right from the start, great—you've saved a lot of time. But many startup or venture teams don’t have the right idea at the start. Teams that spend the time getting to know their customer early, then testing multiple ideas can take months off of the overall duration of their initiative.

4. Don’t underestimate the power of culture

When you're working to solve complicated problems, it’s natural to rely on process. Process feels tangible, comfortable. Nail that "innovation formula," and success will come.

But process isn’t—and can’t be—everything. Sure, certain methods are helpful for testing assumptions and getting to the right ideas, but it’s people—their spirit, their judgment, and their energy—that ultimately lead to the development of great ideas.

Organizations whose employees consistently state that they understand how to drive ideas forward and feel that they're making significant strides toward their organization’s goals are 16% more likely to have a successful launch.

One of the qualities we’ve measured is whether an organization’s team members describe their culture positively. Do they see their interactions with those in other organizational functions as productive and supportive? The teams who score each other in the top 5% are 30% less likely to fail than those under the 50th percentile.

Methodology and approach matter, but lean too hard on just those elements while neglecting culture and people will quickly lose their passion and energy, and resort to a paint-by-numbers approach that yields unspectacular results.

Countless more insights like these have yet to be uncovered, but one thing is already clear: Innovation leaders can’t fall back into old, stagnant patterns, but instead must continually find new edges for their teams to push.

Illustrations by Beena Mistry

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Creative solutions don’t happen by accident. They aren’t enacted by lone geniuses—they come from diverse teams that work well together and optimize the right methods and behaviors.

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I’m grateful for Chicago’s trains—even amid the crush of people jammed into the morning’s rush hour commute and the thought-clouding clatter and clank that pervades every metal car. It’s a marvel that these hulking workhorses of public transport coordinate at all, and are generally safe, on time, and comfortable. And yet I often notice fellow train-goers challenged, like myself, by something basic: What do we do with our stuff? In my time as a commuter, I’ve seen myriad workarounds. Legs became walls propping up clothes and bags; thighs became resting ports for big headphones. And then there was the man who transformed his suitcase handle into a coat rack. Human ingenuity: It’s one more thing I’m grateful for during my commute.

Human-centered design requires us to observe human behavior with beginner's eyes, so that we can spot the innate ways people interact with the world around them. We call these intuitive and unconscious reactions Thoughtless Acts, and IDEO designers collect photos of them to inspire their work.

I help organizations cut through complexity by shaping how they show up, through brand strategy, identity, and storytelling.

Working at the intersection of brand and business, I bring an editorial eye and a bias toward making—turning ideas into tangible experiences that people can understand, trust, and believe in.

My work spans government, healthcare, financial services, media, and consumer goods, from launching Gen Z-focused ventures to building innovation labs and reimagining legacy brands. I relish moments of ambiguity and enjoy translating across teams, perspectives, and priorities to move ideas forward.

I started my career in editorial and digital design, shaping cross-platform experiences and identity systems in publishing and agency environments. That foundation still shapes how I work today: I’m detail-oriented, collaborative, and overreliant on the Oxford comma. I hold a BFA in Visual Communication from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

For 25 years, I've asked the same question: Who does this design exclude—and what are we going to do about it?

My work spans human-centered strategy, inclusive design, and qualitative research, with clients ranging from Microsoft, Google, and Verizon to the National Science Foundation, and San Francisco Unified School District.

Before IDEO, I taught elementary school in East Palo Alto and spent a decade doing design work with social service organizations—where I learned firsthand what it costs people when systems are built without them in mind.

I am currently writing User Error, a nonfiction book about digital access and the design decisions behind it. I live in Oakland, California.

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My expertise spans brand, communication, and product design across tech, education, the arts, and social impact.

I believe great work demands both high-level vision and obsessive attention to detail, and only happens through collaboration.

I bring an inclusive, hands-on approach and a deep understanding of business, which enables me to consistently deliver excellence while always asking why.

Before joining IDEO, I worked at the brand firms Pentagram and VSA Partners. I began my career as a designer, leading teams at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and the Milwaukee Art Museum. I hold an MFA in graphic design from Maryland Institute College of Art and a BFA in communication design from the Milwaukee Institute of Art & Design, and have taught at some of the best design schools in the US.

I am responsible for IDEO’s long-term success in China and working with clients to use design as a tool to enable growth. Specifically, I have helped Chinese companies design holistic brand solutions through the development of their products, communication, services, and innovation teams, and I have helped multinationals expand their presence and influence in China.

I advise global leaders on developing China-led innovation and capabilities.

In over 15 years in IDEO Shanghai, I have worked on projects that use design to elevate the quality of the experience of healthcare products and services, streamline processes that increase productivity, create spaces and programs that promote and enable inclusive communities, and build next generation mobility solutions that are planet-positive.

Before joining IDEO, I worked at Philips Electronics and the Electrolux Group in Italy, the Netherlands, and Singapore on a number of breakthrough commercial products. I am a member of the Young President Organization in Shanghai.

Most AI products today are built for work—a space with clear problems and established systems. One founder noticed a gap: personal life is messier, harder to systematize, and mostly left behind by the AI boom. So she built Cue, a personal AI that lives inside iMessage and group chats, to go where the other tools haven't.

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In this episode, Becca Carroll, IDEO's Chief Strategy Officer, talks with Sida Li, co-founder and CEO of Shared Context Lab, about staying anchored to a human need while the technology around her keeps changing shape, why she treats her business model with the same rigor she'd bring to a product, and what it feels like to build a company at this particular, disorienting moment in AI.

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The conversation also gets into how Sida makes design decisions: the language Cue uses to describe itself, the tradeoffs behind building inside iMessage instead of a new app, and a real story about a business idea that didn’t pan out.

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This is the second in a two-part series profiling founders from IDEO's Startups-in-Residence program. The first conversation is with Johannes Seemann, founder of Sooner, on designing GenAI for the emotional side of money.

Most personal financial tools are built to run the numbers and optimize towards a budget. While that works for some, most people experience money as a lived relationship that does not neatly fit into a spreadsheet. Johannes Seemann and Becca Carroll discuss why money is emotional before it is mathematical, and what a human-centered approach to building a generative AI financial product looks like in practice.

Mina Seetharaman talks with Scott Shigeoka, author of Seek and Head of Curiosity Cultivation at the Eames Institute, about what distinguishes genuinely curious leadership from performative curiosity, how power dynamics shape curiosity, and why practicing curiosity can restore energy rather than drain it.

Mina Seetharaman talks with David Epstein, author of Inside the Box and Range, about why total freedom often produces average work, how leaders can design useful limits on purpose, and what organizations such as General Magic and Pixar reveal about the relationship between boundaries and creativity.