Design Thinking Process Guide

Empathize
1. What is it to?
  1. Working on understanding people
  2. Understanding others within the context of the design challenge
  3. Effort to understand why people do things. Physical Emotional Need sand what they think about the world around them
2. Why ?
  1. To solve problems that a particular subset of people are facing
  2. Gaining empathy to understand what is important to them
  3. Observing others and understanding how the interact with their environment which provides clues on what they are thinking and feeling
  4. Capturing emotions by watching. This provides Insights into human behavior.
  5. Engaging people will enable design thoughts to gauge thoughts. These can surprise the designer and the person talking
  6. Stories told and what people "do" can be different from what they actually "do". Observing and Communicating though conversations provides better indicators and insights
3. How to?
  1. Observation
    1. View users behavior in the context of their lives
    2. Powerful realizations come from noticing the disconnect between what someone says and what they do
    3. Observation add relevant contexts in addition to interview
  2. Engaging
    1. Also known as interviewing but making it a conversation
    2. Questions are based on what needs to be asked. However, the conversation (ball) is in their court
    3. Conversation is loosely bounded. Eliciting stories from people and asking "why?" to unover deeper meanings.
  3. Watching and listening
    1. Combination of observation and engagement
    2. Asking the interviewee how they would complete a task. Then having them attempt to go through the steps and let you see what they do, in their eyes
    3. Have the interviewee vocalize what is going through their mind as they perform tasks or interact with an object
    4. Having a conversation in context of someone's home or workplace. Stories are embodied in artifacts
Define
1. Moving from empathy work. Drawing conclusions from what was observed. processing everything that was heard and taking away the bigger picture.This provides a cchance to share what was found and capturing the most important parts in visual form. The stage of putting everything together starts here
2. What?
  1. Bringing clarity and focus to the design space. A chance and responsibility of the design thinker to define the challenge which is being taken on. Based on what has been learnt about the user
  2. Becoming the instant-expert on the subject and gaining invaluable empathy for the person which the design is for.
  3. Making sense of the widespread information which has been gathered
  4. Craft meaningful actionable problem statement. The guiding statement which focusses on insights and needs of the user.
  5. Insights don't turn up. They emerge from a process of synthesizing info to discover connections and patterns. Better known as sense making
3. Why?
  1. Critical to the design process. Results on point of view. Explicit expression of the problem which is being addressed
  2. POV defines the right challenge to address based on the understanding of the people and the problem space
  3. Crafting a narrow focussed problem statement tends to gain a greater quantity and higher quality solution when generating ideas
  4. Synthesizing the scattered findings into powerful insights.
  5. Synthesis of the empathy work, gives greater advantage that no one else has found. Discoveries can leverage to tackle design challenge which is INSIGHT.
4. How?
  1. Asking why someone had a behavior or feeling. You are making the connections from person to larger context
  2. Developing an understanding of the type of person you are designing for THE USER
  3. Synthesizing and selecting a limited set of needs which are addressed. Working to express insights which are developed .
  4. Articulating the POV by combining elements (user, need and insight) as actionable problem statement will drive the rest of the design work
    1. Good POV is one that
      1. Provides focus and frames the problem
      2. Inspires your team
      3. Informs crriteria for evaluating competing ideas and empowers the team to make decisions independently in parellel
      4. Captures the hearts and minds of people met
Ideate
1. Determining the specific challenge to take. Ideate focuses on generating solutions to address the challenge. A well-scoped/articulate POV will lead ideation. A great transition step is using "how might we?" brainstorming topics which creates subset of topics of the entire problem. Allowing focus on different aspects of the challenge
2. What
  1. Process where concentration on idea generation is primary
  2. Mentally representing a process of "going wide" in terms of concepts and outcomes
  3. Providing fuel and source material for building prototypes and gentting innovative solutions into the hands of the users
3. Why
  1. Order to transition from identifying problems to creating solutions for the users
  2. Chance to combine understanding from the problem space and the people being designed for. To essentially generate solution concepts
  3. Ideation is gauging the widest possible range of ideas which can be selected from. There is no way of finding the "BEST" solution. This is determined and discovered later on through feedback of testing stages
  4. Forms of ideation are leverage to
    1. Obvious solutions and increase the innovation potential of the solution set
    2. Harness collective perspectives and strengths of the team
    3. Uncover unexpected areas of exploration
    4. Create fluency and flexibility in innovation options
4. How
  1. Combining conscious and unconscious mind and rational thoughts with imagination. I.E. Brainstorm leveraging the synergy of the group to reach new ideas by building on others' ideas
  2. Adding constraints, surrounding oneself with inspiring materials, embracing misunderstanding, which allow one to progress than just simply thinking about a problem
  3. Ideation technique is building/prototyping. Turing points into something physical which can encourage new ideas and decisions to be made
  4. Bodystorming, mindmapping, sketching can also further the ideation stage.
5. Avoid losing innovation potential which has been creating through ideation. It is recommended a process of considered selection, by brinding multiple ideas forward to to prototyping. Carryy two-three ideas which receive the most votes. This preserves innovation portenial and multiple ideas are ready for prototyping incase there is an issue
Prototype
2. What?
  1. iterative generation. Intended to answer questions which get one closer to final soltuon
  2. Creating low-resolution prototypes which are quick and cheap to make. Eliciting useful feedback from users and colleagues will assist down the track
  3. Later stages both your prototyping and questions may get the solution more refined.
  4. Prototype can be anything a user can interact with. A wall of post it notes/gadgets/role-playing or storyboard
  5. Walking one through a scenario with a storyboard is good. Role-playing throug ha physical environment will bring more emotions and response from that person
3. How
  1. Start Building
    1. Pick up materials and start going. Regardless of experience
  2. Not spending too long on 1 prototype
    1. Ensure one does not become too emotionally attached to a prototype
  3. ID a variable
    1. Identify what is being tested with each prototype. The prototype should answer the particular question. Ensuring oneself is not being blind to other tangential understanding one can gain as someone responds to a prototype
  4. Build with a user in mind
    1. Answering questions i.e. Who is the user being tested for or what sorts of behavior do you expect will help focus the prototype to receive meaningful feedback
4. Why?
  1. ideate and problem solve - build and think
  2. Communicate
  3. Start a conversation - Interactions are richer when around a conversation piece. A prototype is an opportunity to have another, directed convo with a user
  4. Fail quickly and cheaply
  5. Test possibilities- low-res allows one to pursue many different ideas without commiting to a direction
  6. Manage the solution-building process by identifying a variable which encourages one to break a large problem into smaller testable chunks
5. Prototype and test are considered in tandem more than transition between. When you attempt to test and how you are going to test an aspect, this is critical to consider prior to creating the prototype. These modes in conjunctionbrings up layers of testing. Through prototyping/testing are sometimes intertwined. Often the case that planning and executing a successful scenario is considerable step after the creation stage.
Test
1. What?
  1. Soliciting feedback about prototypes which have been created for users. This is an oppurtunity to gain empathy for the people which are being designed for
  2. An oppurtunity to understand the user, unlike the initial empathy mode, this is done moreso post framing the problem and creating the prototypes to test
  3. Asking users what they like/dislike about the test. Asking "why?" to learn more about the person and the problem to seek other possible solutions
  4. Testing within real context of the users life.
    1. Physical object, asking people to take the test unit with them and experiance in real life scenarios.
    2. When testing a prototype it is more realistic to have your users to take on the role. Rule of thumb, always prototype as if you know you're right, but test if you know you're wrong. It will refine the solution and make them better
2. Wjy?
  1. Refine prototypes and solutions
    1. Testing informs the next iterations of prototypes. Sometimes this means going back to the drawing board
  2. Learn more about the user
    1. Another Opportunity to build empathy observation and engagement - it often yields unexpected insights
  3. Refine you POV
    1. Testing can reveal that not only did one fail to get the solution right, however, one failed to frame the problem correctly
3. How?
  1. Show don't Tell
    1. Putting the prototype in the users hand or the user within the experience
    2. Let the tester interpret the prototype. Watching how the use/missuse it. allowing them to handle and interact with it. Asking questions later
  2. Create Experiences
    1. Create the prototype and test them within the way that feels like an experience one would rect to. Rather than an explanation that your user is evaluating
  3. Ask users to compare
    1. Bringing multiple prototypes to test gives users basis of comparison. Which will expose the latest needs
Iteration and making the process "ones" own. Iterating by cycling through process multiple times and iterating within step. By creating multiple prototypes or trying variations of brainstorming topics with multiple groups. Multiple cycles through the design process narrows, working on broad concept to nuanced details, but the process still supports the development. The process is articulated with Linear progression of but design challenges can be taken through using design modes in various orders. The process presented is a suggestion of the framework. However, it is up to one-self to own/adapt to the style of work. Honing into ones process is important to continue innovation and mindset

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Design Thinking Process Guide

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	Created by Andress Cesc almost 9 years ago