DESIGN THINKING

Introduction
Design Thinking is both an ideology and a process, focused on resolving complex problems in a
highly user-centric way.
Design Thinking is not an exclusive skill, natural ability, fine art, orrocketscience—
it'sopentoeveryoneandgreatlyusefulforanyindustryordiscipline

Importance of Design Thinking

The importance of design has been continuously increasing over the years.
The times that we live in demand innovation. It is impossible for a business to really make waves
without innovating.
In fusing your company with a design-driven culture that puts the customer first may not only
provider a land quantifiable results brutal so give you a distinct competitive advantage.

IBM Design Thinking frame work is placing end users at the centre of innovation when tackling
problems and developing solutions.
best accomplished by inter disciplinary teams.
At the heart of our human-centered mission is Enterprise Design Thinking: a frame work to solve
our user’s problems at the speed and scale of the modern enterprise.

Principles guiding us
Before you start your journey, embrace the principles of Enterprise Design Thinking, the foundation
element so four approaches:
A focus on user outcomes, diverse empowered teams, and a spirit of rest less reinvention.

Focus on user outcomes Who are you designing for, and what do they need?

Restless reinvention When’s the last time you rethought what you’re making?

Diverse empowered teams Do you have the right mix of makers?

Project Execution Methodologies

WATERFALL MODEL
AtypicalWaterfallprojectischronologicalandismadeupofthefollowingphases:
• Requirements
• Design
• Implementation
• Verification
• Maintenance
Where to apply?
This model is used only when the requirements are very well known, clear and fixed.
Product definition is stable.
Technology is understood.
There are no ambiguous requirements.
Ample resources with required expertise are available freely.
The project is short.
Agile
AGILE methodology is a practice that promotes continuous iteration of development and testing
throughout the software development life cycle of the project. Both development and testing activities are
concurrent unlike the Waterfall model.

Where is Agile Suitable?

Small to medium-sized software developments.
Multiple Variants.
Main deliverable can be broken down.

Design Thinking Case Study in Nepal

EMPATHIZE:
The first stage of the Design Thinking process is to gain an empathic understanding of the problem
you are trying to solve. This involves consulting experts to find out more about the area of concern through
observing, engaging, and empathizing with people to understand their experiences and motivations, as
well as immersing yourself in the physical environment so you can gain a deeper personal understanding of
the issues involved. Empathy is crucial to a human-centered design process such as Design Thinking, and
empathy allows design thinkers to set aside their own assumptions about the world in order to gain insight
into users and their needs.
Depending on time constraints, a substantial amount of information is gathered at this stage to use
during the next stage and to develop the best possible understanding of the users, their needs, and the
problems that underlie the development of that particular product.

DEFINE (problem):
During the Define stage, you put together the information you have created and gathered during
the Empathize stage. This is where you will analyse your observations and synthesize them in order to
define the core problems that you and your team have identified up to this point. You should seek to
define the problem as a problem statement in a human-centred manner.
To illustrate, instead of defining the problems your own wish or a need of the company such as,
“We need to increase our food-product market share among young teenage girls by 5%,” a much better
way to define the problem would be, “Teenage girls need to eat nutritious food in order to thrive, be
healthy and grow.”
The Define stage will help the designers in your team gather great ideas to establish features,
functions, and any other elements that will allow them to solve the problems or, at the very least, allow
users to resolve issues themselves with the minimum of difficulty. In the Define stage you will start to
progress to the third stage, Ideate, by asking questions which can help you look for ideas for solutions by
asking: “How might we… encourage teenage girls to perform an action that benefits them and also involves
your company’s food-product or service?”

Step 3-Ideate
Collaborate, generate many Ideas, let imagination run wild
IDEATE:
During the third stage of the Design Thinking process, designers are ready to start generating ideas.
You’ve grown to understand your users and their needs in the Empathize stage, and you’ve analysed and
synthesized your observations in the Define stage, and ended up with a human-centered problem
statement. With this solid background, you and your team members can start to "think outside the box" to
identify new solutions to the problem statement you’ve created, and you can start to look for alternative
ways of viewing the problem. There are hundreds of Ideation techniques such as Brainstorm, Brain writes,
Worst Possible Idea, and SCAMPER. Brainstorm and Worst Possible Idea sessions are typically used to
stimulate free thinking and to expand the problem space. It is important to get as many ideas or problem
solutions as possible at the beginning of the Ideation phase. You should pick some other Ideation
techniques by the end of the Ideation phase to help you investigate and test your ideas so you can find the
best way to either solve a problem or provide the elements required to circumvent it.
PROTOTYPE:
The design team will now produce a number of inexpensive, scaled down versions of the product or
specific features found within the product, so they can investigate the problem solutions generated in the
previous stage. Prototypes may be shared and tested within the team itself, in other departments, or on a
small group of people outside the design team. This is an experimental phase, and the aim is to identify the
best possible solution for each of the problems identified during the first three stages. The solutions are
implemented within the prototypes, and, one by one, they are investigated and either accepted, improved
and re-examined, or rejected on the basis of the users’ experiences. By the end of this stage, the design
team will have a better idea of the constraints inherent to the product and the problems that are present,
and have a clearer view of how real users would behave, think, and feel when interacting with the end
product.

TEST:
Designers or evaluators rigorously test the complete product using the best solutions identified
during the prototyping phase. This is the final stage of the 5 stage-model, but in an iterative process, the
results generated during the testing phase are often used to redefine one or more problems and inform
the understanding of the users, the conditions of use, how people think, behave, and feel, and to
empathise. Even during this phase, alterations and refinements are made in order to rule out problem
solutions and derive as deep an understanding of the product and its users as possible.

Importance of Design Thinking

Design Thinking
is applicable for every industry.
solves problems.
helps effectively meeting client’s requirements.
reinforces innovation.
strengthens leadership.
it’s not only for designers!

ORIGIN OF 5 STAGES MODEL:

In his 1969 seminal text on design methods, “The Sciences of the Artificial,” Nobel Prize laureate
Herbert Simon outlined one of the first formal models of the Design Thinking process. Simon's model
consists of seven major stages, each with component stages and activities, and was largely influential in
shaping some of the most widely used Design Thinking process models today. There are many variants of
the Design Thinking process in use in the 21stcentury, and while they may have different numbers of
stages ranging from three to seven, they are all based upon the same principles featured in Simon’s 1969
model. We focus on the five-stage Design Thinking model proposed by the Hasso-Plattner Institute of
Design at Stanford (school).

Conclusion:
In essence, the Design Thinking process is iterative, flexible, and focused on collaboration between
designers and users, with an emphasis on bringing ideas to life based on how real users think, feel, and
behave.
Design Thinking tackles complex problems by:
Empathizing: Understanding the human needs involved.
Defining: Re-framing and defining the problem in human-centric ways.
Ideating: Creating many ideas in ideation sessions.
Prototyping: Adopting a hands-on approach in prototyping.
Testing: Developing a prototype/solution to the problem.

Observation
Get to know users
 Understand Context
Uncover Needs
Listen to Feedback

Empathy Map
Empathy maps are quickly created collaborative artifacts that increase our understanding of users and help
us discover opportunities to help them.
Hands on Approach on Mural with Template
Empathy Map
Come Prepared with Observations
Set up the activity

Empathy Map
Capture observations
Find patterns and identify unknowns
Playback and Discuss

THE PRINCIPAL GUIDE US

Enterprise Design Thinking begins with a set of principles.
These principles provide the foundation for delivering solutions that meet or exceed your user’s
expectations.

IBM built on that idea, adding strategies, tactics and activities to create a framework that uniquely scales
design thinking across teams of all shapes and sizes, whether they are co-located or widely dispersed.

THE FOUNDATION ELEMENTS OF OUR APPROACH:

 FOCUS ON USER OUTCOMES
The success is measured how well human needs are fulfilled. Users are more than just the people made
for, they’re partners in design.

 RESTLESS INVENTION
Everything is a prototype. Being essential—and stayingessential—requires a continuous conversation with
our users and clients, responding to their changing needs through rapid prototyping and constant iteration.
No solution is ever considered to be truly complete, the success of the team centers on their capacity to
look at the human need with fresh eyes and putting theories about how to better approach old problems
to the test. Here’s the thing about restless reinvention: you’ll never feel done. There will always be a better
solution just around the corner. Recognize that from the perspective of your users, no solution is perfect.

 DIVERSE EMPOWERED TEAM

Diversity is the bedrock of a dynamic team. By empowering people with different skillsets, backgrounds
and perspectives to bring their unique points of view to the table, we generate more breakthrough ideas
faster. Move faster and work smarter by collaborating as a unit and not just as individual disciplines.

The two important team factors:

1. Diversity
2. Empowerment

DIVERSE EMPOWERED TEAM

Have empathy: first with each other and then with your users. Build a foundation of mutual trust and
respect across all disciplines.
Example
When building teams, you aren’t just assigning resources—you’re framing your approach to the problem.
Each team member brings their unique perspective and expertise to the team, widening the range of
possible outcomes. If you want a breakthrough idea, you’re more likely to get it with a diverse team.

STEP 1 – UNDERSTANDING
PERSONAS
A persona is an archetype of a user that helps designers and developers empathize by understanding their
user’s business and personal contexts. Don't confuse personas with roles
Start by getting to know the person or people that you intend to help with your product.
Collect information and answer a wide array of questions about them.
Who are they?
What are their personal demographics?
What are their normal tasks?
What motivates them?
What problems do they face?
What frustrates them?

UNDERSTANDING PERSONAS
You can gather this information from many sources, including surveys, forums, direct observation, and
interviews.
Take all of the information and organize it to describe one or more specific individuals, or personas, who
represent your target audience.

You can gain insights about the persona and their real-life circumstances. These insights can direct your
team's energy toward creating meaningful solutions for real problems.

THE LOOP DRIVE US

“Understand the present and envision the future in a continuous cycle of observing, reflecting, and making.
“

If research is the discipline of understanding the world, design is the discipline of shaping it. While research
asks, “what is?” design asks, “what should be?”

Among the uncertainty, design thinking provides us a model for action. We call this model the Loop:
continuous cycle of observing, reflecting, and making.

It drives us to understand the present and envision the future.

It enables us to build on our successes and learn from our failures along the way.

Observe
To drive meaningful outcomes for our users, we must first gain a deep understanding of the challenges
they face.

Whether you’re identifying new opportunities or evaluating existing ideas, breakthrough ideas are born
from a deep understanding of the real-world problems we’re solving for our users.

Get to know users:

Empathy begins with getting to know people as people, not just as users. Ask open-ended questions about
how they live and work. Listen to their stories to understand their hopes, fears, and goals that motivate
them.
Understand context:
Watch users interact with the people and tools in their environment. Find out who they rely on and who
relies on them. Sometimes the most effective way to help your users is to help the people around them.

Uncover needs:
Users won’t always be able to express their needs, so it’s your job to read between the lines and uncover
them.

Listen for feedback:

Test your ideas, assumptions, and prototypes by putting them in your users’ hands. Observe their
interactions, listen carefully, and capture their feedback as faithfully as you can.

STEP 2 – EMPATHY MAP

Empathy maps increase our understanding of users and help us discover opportunities to help them.

It’s the first principle of IBM Design Thinking that we must focus on our users. And the second principle of
IBM Design Thinking compels us to work in multidisciplinary teams. Empathy Maps tie these principles
together, taking advantage of our multidisciplinary teams to improve our understanding of the user.

Empathy Maps allow us to quickly combine everyone’s knowledge, and expand on it, and form new
insights.

Empathy Maps help to rapidly put your team in the user’s shoes and align on pains and gains.

Building Empathy map:

1. Come prepared with observations:
Empathy mapping is only as reliable as the data you bring to the table, so make sure you have defensible
data based on real observations

2. Set up the activity:

Draw a grid and label the four essential quadrants of the map: Says, Does, Thinks, and Feels. Sketch your
user or stakeholder in the center. Give them a name and brief description of who they are and what they
do.

3. Capture observations:
Have everyone record what they know about the user or stakeholder. Use one sticky note per observation.
Place it on the appropriate quadrant of the map.

4. Find patterns and identify unknowns:

Within each quadrant, look for similar or related items. If desired, move them closer together.

5. Playback and discuss:

Label anything on the map that might be an assumption or a question for later inquiry or validation.

STEP – 3 REFLECT
Reflect:
Different people can interpret the same situation in very different ways.
Reflect:
As a project progresses, we’re constantly taking in new information. Observing generates fresh data about
the real world, while making generates new ideas and opportunities to pursue. But as this information
reveals the complexity of our problem space, it’s easy to get overwhelmed, drift out of alignment, or lose
sight of the mission

Therefore, it’s important to regularly reflect as a team. Reflecting brings your team together to synchronize
your movements, synthesize what you’ve learned, and share your “aha” moments with each other.

A moment of sudden realization, inspiration, insight, recognition, or comprehension.

The eureka effect (also known as the Aha! moment or eureka moment) refers to the common human
experience of suddenly understanding a previously incomprehensible problem or concept. Some research
describes the Aha! ... moment started with defining attributes of this experience.

When reflecting, have the empathy to understand diverse perspectives, the flexibility to respond to
change, and the integrity to stay true to your team’s values.

Get to know each other:

Cultivate a common identity by discovering what unites you as a team. Get to know each other as people
and build empathy with them as you would with your users. Acknowledge everyone’s strengths and think
of your own limitations as an opportunity for others to shine.

Align on intent:
If you find yourselves drifting out of alignment, slow down and examine the intent and motivations behind
your work. Come to a common understanding of your users, the problem you’re solving, and the outcome
you’re working to achieve together.

Uncover new insights:

As you take in new information, take stock of what you know and what you don’t know. Synthesize your
knowledge to uncover hidden insight that illuminates the path forward. An insight isn’t restating an
observation—it’s a leap in clarity, reframing your point of view and changing your convictions about what’s
important.

Plan ahead:
As your understanding evolves, don’t move forward blindly. Decide together on your next move. You can
either take another loop or put a stake in the ground and commit to an idea.

STEP – 4 BIG IDEA VIGNETTES

Any time your team gets stuck or you feel there’s a better way to do something. Everyone has ideas. Don’t
make the mistake of leaving idea generation only to the designers, the engineers, the project owners, or
the executives. Everyone has a unique perspective on the user and the problem, so everyone should
contribute ideas for solutions.

Set up prompt:
Begin the activity with a good prompt, such as a needs statement, a user story, a Hill, or just a pain point
identified in an As-is Scenario Map. Write this prompt somewhere everyone can see it.
Generate ideas, not features
A big idea describes the experience a user might have with the solution. Features describe the
implementation of a solution. If you find that your ideas are starting to depict features, try using metaphor:
“It’s kind of like...”

Diverge
Create many big ideas and quickly share them with each other. Build off others’ ideas but stay out of the
weeds and avoid drifting into features or talking about implementation details.

Cluster, title, & discuss:

Look for similar ideas and natural affinities. Move them physically closer together. As you do, name the
clusters. Identify any clusters or individual ideas that stand out. Converge on a set that you would want to
advance.

STEP – 5 PRIORITIZATION
GRID
While prioritization is most helpful at the beginning of a project, it’s also worth taking time to prioritize
before an iteration or sprint.

Come prepared with ideas:

Prioritization is only as valuable as the ideas you bring to the table, so make sure you have a strong set of
ideas to prioritize.

Set up the activity:

On your whiteboard, large sticky pad, or virtual whiteboard, draw two axes: “Importance to the user” (low
to high) and “Feasibility for the team” (difficult to easy).

Evaluate ideas:
Have everyone quickly evaluate each idea on their own, and roughly plot them on the grid where they
make sense. Once many items are on the grid, start discussing with your teammates and reposition them
in relation to each other.

Focus the discussions:

Label the upper right-hand quadrant “No Brainers,” the center-right area “Utilities,” and the center-top
area “Big Bets.” Focus the discussion around “Big Bets”—mid-feasibility, high-importance ideas that reflect
significant investments with potentially big payouts.
History
“A people without the knowledge of their past history, origin and culture is like a tree without roots.”
Marcus Garvey
... And that’s why we’ll start by exploring a brief, and albeit high level,
history lesson.

Long before design thinking, starting in the 1920s & 1930s, the focus
was on human factors & usability engineering.

These approaches tended to focus on end-of-the-cycle testing, task

efficiency, and the eliminating user errors. And while there are many
methods within these approaches, <Click> Usability Testing is the
most often used method. It’s important to note that these approaches
by themselves are still used by practitioners.

In the 1980s and 1990s Don Norman introduced the User Centered
System Design. This was a significant new direction for the field.

User Centered System Design, or User Centered Design as it came to

be called, incorporated the human factors and usability approaches
into a truly end to end process but yet still tended to focus on the
behavioral aspects of user experience.

User Centered Design importantly included understanding users,

designing the user experience, evaluating designs to usability testing
methods.

A comprehensive survey of User Centered Design in actual practice at

100 companies showed that the effort required for an activity was
negatively related to its actual use which resulted in the most valuable
methods tending not to be used. While User Centered Design looked
good on paper, it often wasn’t used in the way its authors intended it.

In addition to User Centered Design not being practiced as intended,

the approach also lacked efficient ways of communicating information
and collaborating across disciplines and with executives. If a Tasks
Analysis was carried out, for example, it resulted in a multi-page
document that others had to read in order to incorporate insights into
design artifacts.

While many authors contributed to Design Thinking, David Kelley of

Stanford University and the design consultancy IDEO is credited with
popularizing it in the 1990s and 2000s.

Serial entrepreneur Phil Gilbert adopted Kelley’s foundational Design

Thinking approach but substantially further developed its use in
business with his company Lombardi Software, a company IBM
acquired in 2010. Gilbert infused what became known as Enterprise
Design Thinking into the business unit his company was acquired into
with great success, simplifying the portfolio of products from 44 to 4
while increasing revenue.
Enterprise Design Thinking combined User Centered Design with the
powerful Design Thinking communication & collaboration methods
such as Sponsor Users, Empathy and Scenario Mapping, Hills,
Ideation, Storyboarding, Prototyping, and Playbacks.

We’ll get into greater detail later but Enterprise Design Thinking’s
framework has three foundational principles, the all-important Loop,
and three what we call Keys.

Case Study
Shortly after becoming IBM’s CEO and Chairman, Ginni Rometti,
issued this directive to “Create a global sustainable culture of design
and design thinking at IBM”. Phil Gilbert whose company was acquired
by IBM three years previous to this was asked by Ginni to serve as
General Manager of Design and to execute this directive.

IBM focused heavily on hiring and now employs more than 20,000
design and user experience professionals globally some of whom work
on products and many of whom work directly with clients. The
disciplines include user research, visual and user experience design,
and content designers. The company also ensure that there was
balance with other key skills like front-end development and offering
management.

IBM built a network of 60+ studios in 34 countries around the world

within which our designers work and co-create with business and
engineering colleagues and our clients.

We've developed EDT education for incoming design and business

students (to fill in what they didn’t get in their university programs and
to introduce them to our EDT experientially) as well as for our teams
and executives across the business. We use design thinking + agile to
create new products and solutions in technology areas like AI, Cloud,
Analytics, Security, IoT, and Quantum and to provide services to our
customers.

To further scale IBM’s education and activation, an online education

platform was developed with micro-credential badging. A majority of
IBM’s employees are badged and practice Enterprise Design Thinking
in some form in their daily work.

These are some of the multiple prestigious design awards IBM’s

product teams have received as a result of the company’s hiring,
education, design thinking, and governance.

And, embedding Enterprise Design Thinking into IBM’s client-facing

services offerings yielded, according to Forrester Research, getting to
market twice as fast, a 300 percent return on investment, and a 75
percent improvement in team efficiency over alternative approaches.
When a sample of companies were asked by Forrester “what
organizations do you associate with design thinking,” 52% of
respondents associated design thinking with IBM.

Overview
OK, let’s briefly discuss the essential elements of Enterprise Design
Thinking.
A focus on user outcomes. The user, the human, is at the center and
we’re focusing on their outcomes. If you’re not focusing on real users,
you’re not doing design thinking properly.
Diverse, empowered teams. The more diverse the team, the more
creative it will be. The team’s diversity should also reflect the diversity
of the users of the thing you’re designing. Empowered is also so
important. If the team isn’t empowered to proceed with the work that
they’re using EDT for, they’re not using design thinking properly.
Restless reinvention which we illustrate with our loop.

We need to observe users to understand their problems, reflect on

what we’ve learned, and then quickly making something to
communicate potential solutions. You can enter the loop anywhere
but you need to cycle through the loop over and over again.

Let’s look into this in more detail. [click] Observing is about immersing
yourself in your users’ world. And you should focus on going into more
depth with fewer users that you continue to connect with. We call
these Sponsor Users.

Reflecting is about converging on a point of view by using various

mapping methods that we’ll discuss and what we call Playbacks which
involve regularly reviewing the evolving designed user experience
from the users’ point of view with all key stakeholders.

Reflecting is about converging on a point of view by using various

mapping methods that we’ll discuss and what we call Playbacks which
involve regularly reviewing the evolving designed user experience
from the users’ point of view with all key stakeholders.

7 Key Habits
Many organizations fail to introduce and use design thinking
effectively largely due to these anti-patterns:
1) They create an “innovation department” which then uses design
thinking and that department is expected to come up with the
innovation for the whole organization.
2) They build a workshopping space but change nothing else.
3) They have their executives have a tour of the Stanford D-School
and nothing else. The D-School tour is great but isn’t sufficient
training of course.
4) They train a few people in design thinking and expect that to be
sufficient.
5) They run workshops with design thinking because they’re cool but
don’t do anything with the results.
6) They typically do one or more of these things but don’t do anything

else. So, what are some habits that will combat these anti-patterns? Let’s
explore some...

The 7 Key Habits are: -

1) You can’t do design thinking without first empathizing with, talking to,
and getting feedback from users in your target market, the people
you’d like to provide a solution for.

2) You also have to get the right skills for your project (design, business,
engineering, etc.) and drive effective multidisciplinary collaboration.

3) Workshopping is an important element of design thinking but design

thinking is way more than just workshopping. Design thinking should
form the mindset of every member of the team in what they do every
day. It should involve user research to understand the problem and
the results of workshopping should inform follow-on activities.

4) Many teams using Agile development methods will aim to create a

minimal viable product or MVP which is a basic version of the product
that supports minimal functionality. However, often these MVPs don’t
have the user experience designed optimally. We therefore argue for
the design and development of minimal delightful experiences or
MDEs. As an illustration of the difference, MVPs are like giving
someone the crust of a new pizza you’re developing whereas a MDE
would involve a smaller slice but with the entire experience included.

5)Fail fast and fail often is a phrase that’s popular in startup circles as
well as in some enterprise ones as well. While its good to be resilient
and to learn from failure, many people take the phrase too literally
leading them to just start coding a product and if it fails, they’ll learn
from it and pivot. They should instead start with user research in
design thinking to first understand the problem and prototype with
paper and pencil which may well surface problems but they’re really
easy to address.

6) Technology is really important in many projects but it should only be

used to provide the user experience that’s desired rather than be an
end in itself.

7) Lastly, design thinking shouldn’t be practiced by the few but instead

should be deployed pervasively and considered to be a team sport.

The Loop
Observe
... people (Sponsor Users) who
are representative of those related
to your challenge and potentially extreme.

Ethnographic Observation
Capture what users do and say in their natural habitat

Structured Interviews
Probe what they do and say but also what they think and feel.

Audio/Video Recording & Journaling

Document observations in real time.

Reflect
... on what you’ve learned and captured through your observations.

An Empathy Map organizes what you observed into what a person does, says, thinks and feels.

Persona Development
A description of the persona making them real for your team covering what they do, say, think, and feel
regarding your challenge topic.
Someone reading it should feel like they’re meeting the person and learning about a summary of the
observations you’ve made through your user research.

A Stakeholder Map organizes what you learned about the relationships your key person has both
positive & negative.

An As-is Scenario Map organizes what you observed over timeline while keeping the does, thinks, and
feels.
Now Vote using six red dots each for what you believe has the greatest opportunity to improve.

Make
... iteratively ideate and create visualizations to communicate your solution.

Ideation:
Each teammate makes 3 Big Idea Vignettes.
Focus on your user’s pain points.
Not too much detail!

Obey the laws of physics for 2 of the ideas but not for the 3rd. Make the 3 rd absurd.

Ideation Consolidation:
Each team member plays back their ideas to their group.

Keep this quick and high-level. (15 seconds per vignette)

Cluster similar and related ideas—try labelling the clusters.

Prioritization:
What’s most impactful?
What’s most feasible?

Everyone gets 6 orange and 6 green dots.

Evaluate each “big idea” quickly and on your own, to the best of your knowledge.
Impact to the persona
LOTS OF ORANGE DOTS = HIGH IMPACT
• Does it turn a pain point into a delight?
• Does it expand value?

Feasibility
LOTS OF GREEN DOTS = HIGHLY FEASIBLE
• Can this be done in the organization?
• How difficult/costly will it be to do?

Prioritization Consolidation:
Roughly plot each idea onto the grid, using the voting dots as a loose guide.
Discuss and reposition ideas in relation to each other.
Do some ideas seem more impactful than others?
Do some ideas seem more feasible than others?

Prioritization Analysis:
No Brainers pose the possibility of a tactical advantage
Big Bets can offer strategic differentiation
Utilities may represent table stakes
Don’t waste time or energy discussing Unwise items

Storyboarding:
Describe what a possible new experience could be like.
Consider things like:
Tell a story with a beginning, middle, and end (happy ending)
What is the user experiencing especially emotionally?
The best way to storyboard is to individually take the selected big idea cluster(s) and tell a story fleshing
out how the idea(s) would work making sure to include a beginning, middle, and end to he story and
focus on the user experience especially emotionally. Provide sketches and narration. After each team
member has done that individually, share the storyboard and develop a single team master storyboard
with the best ideas from the team.

Playbacks:
Playbacks are used to review the solution from the user’s perspective with all stakeholders.

User Research
Get to know the people... for whom you’d like to improve things
Begin with getting to know people as people, not just as users. Listen to their stories to understand their
hopes, fears, and goals that motivate them. Put yourself in their shoes and absorb the highs, lows, and
nuances of their lived experiences first-hand.

Your users don’t live in a bubble. They are often part of complex, interdependent systems of people and
processes that effect each other. Watch users interact with the people and tools in their environment. Find
out who they rely on and who relies on them. Sometimes the most effective way to help your users is to
help the people around them.
Your users won’t always be able to express their needs. So you’ll need to read between the lines to
uncover unarticulated needs, reveal challenges, and figure out the stakes of failure. Find out how they
measure success and where their existing solutions fall short.

There are hundreds of different methods that user research specialists will be aware of but there are two
classes of methods that everyone should be aware of and use.

Observing: Watching and listening without intervening

Interviewing: Asking and listening while intervening

Observing:
Advantage –
Natural
Unbiased
Authentic
Good way to understand what people do & say

Disadvantages –
Time limited
Time consuming
No insight into why
Not able to
understand what
people think & feel

Interviewing:
Advantage –
Wide open scope
Wide time scale
Can ask why
Good way to understand what people think & feel

Disadvantages –
Unnatural
Can be biased
A reconstruction
Not able to understand what people actually do & say in the moment

Mindset for Both Methods

• Approach with curiosity and intention
• Be as neutral and unbiased as you can be
• Embrace their world and focus on them
• Remove distraction and capture everything

Observing
Do –
Get permission if appropriate
Be unobtrusive
Capture everything

Don’t –
Disturb the situation
Interrupt
Overstay your welcome

Interviewing –
Do –
Set a comfortable tone
Develop rapport
Keep questions simple
Listen authentically
Use pregnant pauses
Don’t be rushed
Thank them

Don’t –
Ask leading questions
Correct the person
Interrupt
Speak too much
Be distracted
Be distracting

User Feedback
Why Gather User Feedback?
First of all, you are not your user and people differ in all kinds of ways like cultural, demographics, life
experience, knowledge, and skills.

Feedback Methods:
Surveys – Good for demographic or attitudinal data and when you need large numbers or statistical
significance.
Cognitive Walkthrough – Think aloud that can be performed by expert proxies or by end users.
Real-Time Task-Based Tests – Good for design evaluations and playbacks.
Heuristic Evaluation – Best practices usability review by an expert on human-computer interaction.
Competitive or Comparative Review – Good for determine “best of breed” experience in the market.
Asynchronous Task-Based Tests – Good for large-n summative studies to confirm friends.