TASK - 1 Gain a quick introduction to the design thinking methodology. Go through all stages of the methodology through a simple design challenge.
DESCRIPTION:
Design thinking is a non-linear, iterative process that teams use to understand users, challenge assumptions, redefine problems and create innovative solutions to prototype and test.
Design teams use design thinking to tackle ill-defined/unknown problems because they can reframe these in human-centric ways and focus on what’s most important for users. With it, teams can do better UX research, prototyping and usability testing to uncover new ways to meet users’ needs.
Design thinking involving five phases:
- Empathize
- Define
- Ideate
- Prototype
- Test
Empathize - Research Your Users' Needs
Here, you should gain an empathetic understanding of the problem you’re trying to solve, typically through user research. Empathy is crucial to a human-centered design process such as design thinking because it allows you to set aside your own assumptions about the world and gain real insight into users and their needs.Define - State Users' Needs and Problems
It’s time to accumulate the information gathered during the Empathize stage. You then analyze your observations and synthesize them to define the core problems you and your team have identified. These definitions are called problem statements. You can create personas to help keep your efforts human-centered before proceeding to ideation.Ideate - Challenge Assumptions and Create Ideas
Now, you’re ready to generate ideas. The solid background of knowledge from the first two phase’s means you can start to “think outside the box”, look for alternative ways to view the problem and identify innovative solutions to the problem statement you’ve created. Brainstorming is particularly useful here.Prototype - Start to Create Solutions
This is an experimental phase. The aim is to identify the best possible solution for each problem found. Your team should produce some inexpensive, scaled-down versions of the product (or specific features found within the product) to investigate the ideas you’ve generated. This could involve simply paper prototyping.Test - Try Your Solutions Out
Evaluators rigorously test the prototypes. Although this is the final phase, design thinking is iterative: Teams often use the results to redefine one or more further problems. So, you can return to previous stages to make further iterations, alterations and refinements – to find or rule out alternative solutions.
TASK - 2: Learn techniques on how to empathize with users
DESCRIPTION
In the empathise stage, your goal, as a designer, is to gain an empathic understanding of the people you’re designing for and the problem you are trying to solve.
Empathy is crucial to a human-centred design process such as Design Thinking, and empathy helps design thinkers to set aside his or her own assumptions about the world in order to gain insight into their users and their needs. Depending on your time constraints, you will want to gather a substantial amount of information at this stage of the Design Thinking process.
The following are Empathise methods:
What-How-Why: It is a tool that you can use while observing people to help you dive into your observations and derive deeper levels of understanding.
Conducting an interview: During the initial stages as you build your understanding of users, and after testing prototypes with them, you are likely to ask them questions so as to probe deeper into their emotions and behaviors.
Building Empathy with Analogies: We communicate in analogies as they allow us to express our ideas or to explain complex matters in an understandable and motivating way. Analogies are a great way for us to build empathy towards users and for generating new ideas around a problem. Use analogies to gain a fresh way of looking at an environment, and in instances where direct observation is hard to achieve.
TASK – 3: Learn how to brainstorm effectively
DESCRIPTION:Ideation is creative processes where designers generate ideas in sessions e.g., brainstorming, worst possible idea.
A Brainstorm session involves sprouting related points from a central idea. Brainstorming is one of the primary methods employed during the Ideation stage of a typical Design Thinking process. Brainstorming is a great way to generate many ideas by leveraging the collective thinking of the group, by engaging with each other, listening, and building on other ideas.
This method involves focusing on one problem or challenge at a time, while team members build on each other’s responses and ideas with the aim of generating as many potential solutions as possible. These can then be refined and narrowed down to the best solution(s). Participants must then select the best, the most practical, or the most innovative ideas from the options they’ve come up with.
Only one conversation is allowed at a time. No other person must intervene when an idea is being given.
Focus must be on the quantity and not on quality. In this step, the group must have large number of ideas with them.
Think out of the blue. Wild ideas must be encouraged even if they invoke plain humor or seem impossible.
The group leader must defer judgment. The fellow thinkers also need to suspend judgment. Judgmental attitude leads to an obstruction for the thinkers.
Visualization is important. The design thinkers must create a visual picture of the problem statement and then try to see a visual image of their ideas as well.
Build on each other’s ideas. Support other ideas and build on them through group discussions and healthy debates.
TASK – 4: Learn how to create effective prototypes.
DESCRIPTION:
A prototype is a simple experimental model of a proposed solution used to test or validate ideas, design assumptions and other aspects of its conceptualization quickly and cheaply, so that the designer/s involved can make appropriate refinements or possible changes in direction.
Prototypes can be quick and rough — useful for early-stage testing and learning — and can also be fully formed and detailed — usually for testing or pilot trials near the end of the project.
Prototyping is about bringing conceptual or theoretical ideas to life and exploring their real-world impact before finally executing them.
Some of the purposes that prototypes fulfill are:
Exploring and Experimentation
You can use prototypes to explore problems, ideas, and opportunities within a specific area of focus and test out the impact of incremental or radical changes.Learning and Understanding
Use prototypes in order to better understand the dynamics of a problem, product, or system by physically engaging with them and picking apart what makes them work or fail.Engaging, Testing, and Experiencing
Use prototyping to engage with end users or stakeholders, in ways that reveal deeper insight and more valuable experiences, to inform design decisions going forward.Inspiring and Motivating
Use prototypes to sell new ideas, motivate buy-in from internal or external stakeholders, or inspire markets toward radical new ways of thinking and doing.
TASK – 5: Iterate prototypes and ideas through user feedback.
DESCRIPTION:Testing involves generating user feedback as related to the prototypes you have developed, as well as gaining a deeper understanding of your users.
Conducting a User TestWhen conducting a user test on your prototype, it is ideal to utilize a natural setting (i.e., the normal environment in which your users would use the prototype). If testing in a natural setting proves difficult, try to get users to perform a task, or play a role, when testing the prototype. The key is to get users to be using the prototype as they would in real life, as much as possible.
Improve Your Test ResultsConducting a test is not as simple as getting the user and the prototype in the same room and watching what happens. In order to achieve the best learning results from each test, here are some areas of a test that you should take into consideration:
The Prototype
Remember that you are testing the prototype, not the user. Your prototype should be designed with a central question in mind — a question that you will put to the test in the testing stage.Context and scenario
As much as possible, try to recreate the scenario in which your users are most likely to be using the product. This way, you can learn more about the interaction (or disruptions) between the user, the prototype and the environment, as well as how problems might arise as a result of that interaction.How you interact with the user
Make sure your users know what the prototype and test are about, but do not over-explain how the prototype works.How you observe and capture feedback
While collecting feedback, make sure you are not disrupting the user’s interaction with the prototype. Find a way to collect feedback in a way that freely allows you to observe what is happening.