Exploration — Lecture 2.1

Introduction

Lecture 2.1 introduced you to a selection of various Design Processes, among those User-centered Design, Design Thinking, IxD Design, and UX Engineering.

In this exploration, we will investigate Design Thinking, a five-step process, which you will follow in this class to succeed in your UX design and research project.

Design Thinking | A Brief Introduction

Although it was known since the 1960s, the process of Design Thinking was heavily popularized in the mid-2000s by the Hasso-Plattner Institute of Design at Stanford University. As such, Design Thinking is one of the newer processes available at our disposal in UX Design and Research. In a nutshell, Design Thinking is a five-step process, as illustrated below, consisting of the distinct activities of Empathize, Define, Ideate, Prototype, and Test.

The first three steps in Design Thinking are rather of conceptual nature. You are gathering user requirements & constraints and come up with ideas based on your research and creativity.

The latter two steps are more concrete and about showing what you created to your users and gathering their feedback. To do so, you must build a product, a prototype, a concept, or an MVP — a minimum viable product. And whatever you decide to build, you then will show to, or give to your users, to get feedback.

Design Thinking is a great process when you start from scratch, in a problem space without prior knowledge, where little or no work has been done before. Design Thinking is a great tool when you are trying to work in a new design space, with little knowledge of the domain, the user, or the actual interface or system you will build. Design Thinking puts a lot of focus on really understanding the user and the context of use and allows for dynamic problem reframing as well as creative problem-solving. As such, it will be the process you will follow in CS 352 for your group project.

Watch this short video on Design Thinking to further your understanding:

The Design Thinking Process (3:56)

Design Thinking | A Dynamic, Non-Linear Process

Keep in mind, Design Thinking (like almost all other processes in UX Engineering), is iterative and non-linear:

• Non-linear herein simply means that you do not have to progress through all five steps sequentially.
• Iterative means herein that you might have to repeat certain steps more than once.

For instance, you might find in testing that you need to re-empathize with your user and go all the way back to step 1. Or you might go to step 2 and re-define the problem instead. You may as well bounce back and forth between steps 3, 4, and 5. You might test, find out that something does not work, and come up with a new solution through ideation, which you will build and test again.

Take note, you don’t necessarily have to start at step 1, Empathize, either. However, it is highly recommended that you do so because there is a high probability that you will have to fall back to step 1 sooner or later. So don’t skip generative research, even if you believe to know already everything about your target audience and users.

Design Thinking | Possible Areas of Action

To further break down the individual steps, the below illustration breaks down the Design Thinking Process even further and provides a set of exemplary activities, which you may conduct in each step of the process.

1. Empathize: In this step, you really want to get to know your user and ideally, be able to see the world with `their eyes’. There are many activities we can do to empathize with our users or future target audience:
   • We can observe them.
   • We can talk to them.
   • We can ask them to write a diary or wear a recording device (if they consent).
   • We may decide to join them at their place of work and pretend to be a co-worker to understand the environmental or professional context.
   • We might conduct a focus group and ask questions related to our design and research project.
   • You even might consider reviewing secondary research of similar users and target audiences.
2. Define: In this step, you want to extract all the information, knowledge, and observations you gathered in step 1 (and otherwise) and create specific, concrete requirements and constraints regarding your project. For instance, you want to define a problem statement and a set of key pain points and challenges you might have observed with the status quo. You could create a persona — a fictional profile of one of your users — to keep your team on track and not forget who you are designing for. You may also want to generate a list of key problems you have already identified.
3. Ideate: Now you can use all your imagination, your knowledge, your personal experiences, and your ideas and generate solutions, which can address your core user problems and pain points in step 2. Important herein is to stay open-minded and keep it simple. Be bold, be innovative, be wide, and don’t become hyper-specific. Write down your ideas and disregard technical constraints to a larger degree. Discuss them in your team and with your friends and colleagues. Use creativity methods, for instance, Method 635. Ultimately, you want to be able to respond to the problem statement with your idea and vision before you proceed to the next step.
4. Prototype: Now you can put all your ideas and creative juices into design concepts of varying fidelity and even strive to create some early prototypes. But keep it really simple and perhaps stick initially with paper prototypes, a series of simple drawings to be able to communicate your idea. Later on, you might want to create a prototype, a `clickable’ mockup of a series of screens which represent the final system to a more realistic degree, especially if you have more confidence that you are moving in the right direction with your design. You might as well want to have a design, which you can hand over to users so they can play with it, work with it, test it and give you feedback. The level of detail of your prototype will really depend on the available time, the expert knowledge you have gathered and the specific problem areas you want to tackle.
5. Test: Finally, all this work will lead to you trying out your designs with your users. In this step, you will have users engage with your design or prototype. You might have partially functional prototypes, so users can try out certain features or solve predefined tasks. There is a high probability that you will find usability problems in your first test session, thus causing you to circle back in the Design Thinking Process and as a result — iterating your design.

Design Thinking | In Review

You want to move reasonably fast throughout the five steps of the Design Thinking Process for the first time, because 99% of the time, you will take another spin or two, changing and improving your concepts and designs. Therefore, don’t spend too much time polishing your screens and prototypes the first or second time you iterate. Instead, focus on important features, key aspects & functionalities such as form factors, modes of input, navigational paradigms, or information architectures instead of the `right color scheme' or the `perfect visual design aesthetics'.

Stefanos Zenios | Design Thinking is About Doing

In order to complete this exploration of the process of Design Thinking, please watch the below video from Professor Stefanos Zenios, the Director of the Center for Entrepreneurial Studies at Stanford Graduate School of Business, who addresses the following questions:

• Why is brainstorming a good way to generate new ideas? 0:05
• How do you facilitate brainstorming among different personality types? 1:00
• What's the best way to find out what your customer needs? 1:41
• Why are immersion and empathy critical to the design thinking process? 2:52
• What are the benefits of building a prototype? 3:31
• How do you prototype a business model? 4:28
• Does design thinking generate better ideas? 7:04
• Can anybody be creative? 7:34

Stefanos Zenios: Design Thinking is About Doing (8:22)