Design Thinking Flashcards
What is Design Thinking?
An iterative process in which we seek to understand the user, challenge assumptions, and redefine problems to identify alternative strategies and solutions that might not be instantly apparent with our initial level of understanding
Motivation behind Design Thinking
- Knowing deeply your user
- By observing and developing empathy with the user
- Through the process of questioning
Design Thinking Phases
- Empathise – with your users
- Define – your users’ needs, their problem, and your insights
- Ideate – by challenging assumptions and creating ideas for innovative solutions
- Prototype – to start creating solutions
- Test – solutions
Design Thinking Phases - Empathise
- Gain an empathic understanding of the problem (observing and interacting with people to understand the problem).
- Depending on time constraints, a considerable amount of time should be spent in this phase
Design Thinking Phases - Define (the problem)
- Gather the data collected from previous phase
- Aim at defining the problem statement
- Team should produce ideas for the functions that will solve the problem
- Try to respond to questions framed like: “how could/might we …?
Design Thinking Phases - Ideate
- Start to generate ideas
- Summing up: you started by understanding users and their needs in Empathise Phase, then you gathered, analysed the data in Define Phase, ended up with a human-centred problem definition
- Now it is time to think out of the box!
Techniques: Brainstorm, Brainwrite, Worst Possible Idea, SCAMPER, etc. - Get the maximum of ideas at this stage!
Design Thinking Phases - Prototype
- Construct a number of cheap versions of the product, or of some features of the product in order to investigate the solutions achieved.
- Each solution should be tested against the users’ experience and needs in order to be accepted, revised or rejected.
- At the end of this stage, the team should have a clear idea of how users will behave when interacting with the product
Design Thinking Phases - Test
- Test the complete product achieved with the best solutions identified in previous phases
- This is the final phase but … it is an iterative process so some results may lead to redefinition of the problem a let’s start again
Emphasise with your users
Emerge in users’ environments
Adopt a beginner’s mindset: leave all your assumptions at home ☺
Ask 3 questions: what? how? Why?
* What?: details of what happened during observations
* How?: how the person is doing what she is doing
* Why? Try to figure out the motivations and emotions with the users
* Methods: Photo and Video User observations, Personal Photo and Video Journals, Interviews, Share Stories, Bodystorming
Define the Problem and Interpret the Results
Definition of a meaningful and actionable problem statement
Analysis and synthesis of observations
Analysis: breaking down complex concepts and problems into smaller, easier-to-understand constituents.
Synthesis: creatively piecing the puzzle together to form whole ideas,
when we organise, interpret, and make sense of the data we have gathered to create a problem statement.
Why is a problem statement important?
Because it will guide you and your team, and provides a focus on the specific needs that you have uncovered
What makes a good Problem Statement?
- Human-centered: problem statement should be about the people the team is trying to help, rather than focusing on technology, monetary returns or product specifications.
- General for creative freedom: Should not focus on a particular way of implementing, preventing the achievement of good solutions
- Narrow enough to be manageable: should have enough constraints to be manageable and achievable (not good example: Irradicate poverty!)
How to? [Problem Statement] - Space saturate and Affinity Diagrams
You space saturate to help you unpack thoughts and experiences into tangible and visual pieces of information that you surround yourself with to inform and inspire the design team.
You group these findings to explore what themes and patterns emerge and strive to move toward identifying meaningful needs of people and insights that will inform your design solutions.
How to? [Problem Statement] - Empathy Mapping
An empathy map is a collaborative visualization used to articulate what we know about a particular type of user.
It externalizes knowledge about users in order to
1) create a shared understanding of user needs, and
2) aid in decision making.
4 quadrants:
Says – contains what the user says out loud in an interview or some other study, e.g.: “I want something reliable”, “I don’t understand what to do from here”
Thinks – captures what the user is thinking throughout the experience, e.g.: “This is really annoying”, “Am I dumb for not understanding this?”
Does – encloses the actions the user takes, e.g.: Refreshes page several times
Feels – portrays the user’s emotional state, e.g.: confused: too many contradictory prices, worried: they are doing something wrong
How to? [Problem Statement] - Point of View
A Point Of view (POV) is a meaningful and actionable problem statement, which will allow you to ideate in a goal-oriented manner. Your POV captures your design vision by defining the RIGHT challenge to address in the ideation sessions.