DESIGN THINKING PROCESS

5 P’S OF DESIGN THINKING:

1. Practices: Applying proven methods from various disciplines, such as design,
market research, psychology, engineering sciences & strategic
management.
2. People: Assemble a team that contributes different competencies and
perspectives.
3. Principles: That serve as a guideline for the team collaboration.
4. Processes: Keep yourself flexible while handling different work& decision making
process in an agile manner.
5. Places: Offer places for group and individual work that encourage creativity & also
enable focused work.
What design thinking can do?
• Developing New Products
• Creating New Services
• Designing New Business Models
Freemium principle
DESIGNING SOCIAL & ORGANISATIONAL INNOVATIONS
SOCIAL Innovation:
are solutions for social problems & challenges that are not driven by the goal of profit
making.
ORGANISATIONAL INNOVATION:
includes new decision making processes at a company or a new organisational form.
Basics of Design Thinking:
1. Following & communicating the principles:
• Align yourself with people & their needs at an early stage.
• Develop Empathy
• Illustrate ideas
• Learning from failure
• Ensure diversity in the team
• Offer team oriented and creative work spaces
• Make the process flexible
2. Getting an overview of the whole process
This is a problem space where we address what, why,& how.
Here we combine 2 phases:
a) Divergent Phase: Collecting information or develop numerous ideas that result in
expanding perspectives.
b) Convergent phase: Sharpen the field of view and combine the results or decide on
choices.
3. ESTABLISHING A CULTURE OF INNOVATION
Process in detail
Empathize
• “deep understanding of the problems and realities of the people you are designing
for”
• 3 steps
• Observe
• How users interact with their environment.
• Capture quotes, behaviors and other notes that reflect their
experience.
• Notice what they think, feel, need
• Engage
• Interviews scheduled or ad-hoc
• Learn how to ask the right questions
• Immerse
• Find ways “to get into the user’s shoes”
• Best way to understand the users’ needs
Empathize tools
• Assume a beginner’s mindset
• Ask What-How-Why
• Ask the 5 whys
• Empathy map
• Conduct interviews with empathy
• Build empathy with analogies
• Use photo and video user-based studies
• Use personal photo and video journals
• Engage with extreme users
• Story share-and-capture
• Bodystorm
• Create journey maps
Empathize - Beginner’s mindset
• Forget your assumptions and personal beliefs
• Misconceptions or stereotypes limit the amount of real empathy you can build.
• A beginner’s mindset allows you
• to put aside biases and approach
• Design with fresh eyes
• What you should do
• Don’t judge
• Question everything
• Be truly curious
• Find patterns
• Listen without thinking how you’re going to respond
Empathize – Ask What – How – Why
 • Tool to help you better observe
• Especially good for analysing photos
• What you should do for a specific observation
• Divide a sheet into 3 parts – What / How / Why
• What = write what you observe the user is doing without making
assumptions
• How = understand what the user is doing. Is it positive or negative, does it
require effort? Use plenty of adjectives
• Why = now you have to interpret; guess motivations and emotions, make
assumptions that you have to test with users later
Empathize – Ask the 5 whys
• Repeating the Why question 5 times to identify the root cause of a problem
• Some useful rules
• Write down the problem and make sure that all people understand it.
• Distinguish causes from symptoms.
• Pay attention to the logic of cause-and-effect relationship.
• Assess the process, not people.
• Never leave "human error", "worker's inattention", "blame John" etc., as the
root cause.
• When you form the answer for question "Why" - it should happen from the
customer's point of view.
Empathize – Empathy map
• Says
• quotes from what users say during interview
• Thinks
• What users seem to think when experiencing the product
• Does
• Actions that the user takes during the experiment
• Feels
• The user’s emotional state (adjective + context) like
Impatient: pages load too slowly
Empathize – Conduct interviews with empathy
• Ask why.
• Never say “usually” when asking a question.
• Encourage stories
• Look for inconsistencies.
• Pay attention to nonverbal cues.
• Don’t be afraid of silence.
• Ask questions neutrally and don’t suggest answers.
Empathize - Build empathy with analogies
 • Use analogies to gain a fresh way of looking at an environment, and in instances
where direct observation is hard to achieve.
• analogies allow us to express our ideas or to explain complex matters in an
• understandable and motivating way.
• Start by identifying the aspects of a situation that are most important, interesting, or
problematic.
• Find other experiences that contain some of these aspects — it will help you gain a
better understanding of your users’ problems, and it will also spark new ideas to
improve their experiences.
• Create an inspiration space for analogies. You can do so by pinning photos and the
analogous experiences you have found.
Empathize - Use photo and video user-based studies

• Engage.
• Observe and interview extreme users just like other folks. Look for work-
arounds (or other extreme behaviors) to spark inspiration and uncover
insights.
• Look at the extreme in all of us.
• Look to extreme users to spur wild ideas. Then narrow in on what resonates
with the primary users that you’re designing for.
Empathize – Bodystorm
• technique of physically experiencing a situation to derive new ideas.

• requires setting up an experience - complete with necessary artifacts and people -

and physically “testing” it.

• can include physically changing your space during ideation.

• you're focused on here is the way you interact with your environment and the
choices you make while in it.

• Example: when thinking about a product for blind people try to actually experiment
not using your eyes during an experiment and try to see what you can achieve and
what are your needs

Empathize - Create journey maps

• Visual representation of the process a customer or prospect goes through to achieve

a goal with your company/products

• Identity the customer’s needs and pain points

• Steps:

• Set clear objectives for the map.

 • Profile your personas and define their goals.

• List out all the touchpoints (places in the app/site where you can interact
with

the customer)

• Identify the elements you want your map to show.

• Take the customer journey yourself.

• Make necessary changes.

Define

• synthesise your observations about your users from the Empathize stage

• definition of a meaningful and actionable problem statement, which the design

thinker will focus on solving

• A great definition of your problem statement => kick start the ideation process (third
stage) in the right direction.

• unpack your empathy findings into needs and insights and scope a meaningful
challenge

• Define your Point of View – meaningful and actionable problem statement

• Preserves emotion and the individual you’re designing for.

• Includes strong language.

• Uses sensical wording.

• Includes a strong insight.

• Generates lots of possibilities

Define tools

• Point of view
• How Might We
• Why-How Ladder
• Powers of Ten
Define - How might we
• Amp up the good: HMW use the kids’ energy to entertain fellow passenger?
• Remove the bad: HMW separate the kids from fellow passengers?
• Explore the opposite: HMW make the wait the most exciting part of the trip?
 • Question an assumption: HMW entirely remove the wait time at the airport?
• Go after adjectives: HMW we make the rush refreshing instead of harrying?
• ID unexpected resources: HMW leverage free time of fellow passengers to share
the load?
• Create an analogy from need or context: HMW make the airport like a spa? Like a
playground?
• Play against the challenge: HMW make the airport a place that kids want to go?
• Change a status quo: HMW make playful, loud kids less annoying?
• Break POV into pieces: HMW entertain kids? HMW slow a mom down? HMW
mollify delayed passengers?
Define - Why How Ladder
• Used to find user needs and ways to possibly solve them
• Step 1: Identify a few meaningful user needs and write them at the bottom of a
piece of paper.
• Step 2 Ladder up from that need, asking “why?”
• For example, why would a user “need to see a link between a product and
the process that creates it?” because the user, “needs confidence that it
won’t harm their health by understanding its origin.”
• Step 3 Ask why again, and continue to ladder from that same need.
• At a certain point, you’ll reach a very common, abstract need such as, “the
need to be healthy.” This is the top of the ladder.
• Step 4 Climb back down the ladder asking “how?”
• This will give you ideas for how to address the needs
Ideate
• generate radical design alternatives
• The goal of ideation is to explore a wide solution space
• both a large quantity and broad diversity of ideas.
• From this pool of ideas you can build prototypes to test with users
How to ideate
• Ideate=transition from identifying problems to exploring solutions
• Ideation is leveraged to:
• Harness the collective perspectives and strengths of your team.
• Step beyond obvious solutions and drive innovation.
• Uncover unexpected areas of exploration.
• Create fluency (volume) and flexibility (variety) in your innovation options.
• Fluctuate between focus and flare
Tools to ideate
• Brainstorm
• Braindump
• Brainwrite
• Brainwalk
 • Challenge Assumptions
• SCAMPER
• Mindmap
• Sketch or Sketchstorm
• Storyboard
• Analogies
• Provocation
• Movement
• Bodystorm
• Gamestorming
• Cheatstorm
• Crowdstorm
• Co-Creation Workshops
• Power of Ten
• Prototype
• Creative Pause
Ideate – Brainwrite
• the participants write down their ideas on paper
• they pass on their own piece of paper to another participant
• The other participant elaborates on the first person’s ideas and so forth.
• Another few minutes later, the individual participants will again pass their papers on
to someone else and so the process continues.
• The process takes 15 minutes
• Ideas are discussed afterwords
Ideate – Challenge Assumptions
• Identify the assumptions you have about the product you’re building

• (especially if you’re stuck)

• Challenge these assumptions

• Are they fixed because they are crucial aspects or because we have been
accustomed to them?

• Very important step if the empathy stage wasn’t well done and there were
many things assumed about the users and their context.

Ideate – Mindmap

• Process through which the participants build a web of relationships

• Participants write a problem statement

• They write solutins

 • Link statements and solutions between them

Define/Ideate – Power of Ten

• Consider challenges through frames of various magnitudes

• Consider increasing and decreasing magnitudes of context to reveal connections and

insights.

• Powers of ten for insight development – imagine what happens for example when
shopping for bubble gum vs. shopping for a TV vs. shopping for a house

• How does this changes the user behaviour?

• Powers of ten for ideation

Prototype

• A prototype can be anything that takes a physical form—a wall of post-its, a role-
playing activity, an object.

• In early stages, keep prototypes inexpensive and low resolution to learn quickly and
explore possibilities.

• Prototypes are most successful when people (the design team, users, and others)
can experience and interact with them.

• great way to start a conversation.

• interactions with prototypes drives deeper empathy and shapes successful solution

• use basic models or examples

• Just some features

• Methods

• Storyboarding.

• Sketching

• Card sorting- It is a method used to help design or evaluate the information
architecture of a site. In a card sorting session, participants organize topics
into categories that make sense to them and they may also help you label
these groups.

• 'Wizard of Oz'.
 is a technique used to test a concept/prototype that may not actually exist yet, but
appears to be functional because someone is controlling it behind-the-scenes.

Test

• chance to gather feedback, refine solutions, and continue to learn about your users.

• The test mode is an iterative mode in which you place low-resolution prototypes in
the appropriate context of your user’s life.

• Prototype as if you know you’re right, but test as if you know you’re wrong

Prototype/Test – Wizard of Oz Prototyping

• A wizard of Oz prototype fakes functionality that you want to test with users, saving
you the time and money of actually creating it.

• prototypes of digital systems, in which the user thinks the response is computer-
driven, when in fact it’s human-controlled.

• Determine what you want to test.

• Then figure out how to fake that functionality and still give users an authentic
experience

Prototype/Test – Card sorting

• how concepts for a project should be organized

• help the user experience professional know how to best organize a website or
software application so that the structure of information will be logical for the
largest number of users.

• Open card sorting = asking the users to come up with category names for each card

• Closed card sorting = predefined names for each category

• a participant is given a number of cards or sticky notes, each containing a different

word. The test participant is then asked to organize these as he sees best

Testing with users

• Allows you to learn about the solution you created but also about the users (builds
empathy)

• Let your user experience the prototype.

 • Show don’t tell. Put your prototype in the user’s hands (or your user in the
prototype) and give only the basic context they need to understand what to
do.

• Have them talk through their experience.

• Use prompts. “Tell me what you’re thinking as you do this.”

• Actively observe.

• Don’t immediately “correct” your user.

• Watch how they use (and misuse) your prototype.

• Follow up with questions.

• This is often the most valuable part.

Test – Feedback capture matrix

• real-time capture of feedback on presentations and prototypes

• arranges thoughts and ideas into four categories for easy assessment

• Fill in the matrix as you give or receive feedback.

• 1st quadrant: Constructive criticism

• 2nd quadrant: Place things one likes or finds notable

• 3rd quadrant: Questions raised

• 4th quadrant: new ideas spurred