Design Thinking

Lessons from IDEO and Stanford’s D School

David Kelley on 60 minutes

“The value lies not in the idea, but in the action.”

Creativity

• Creativity is a skill that everyone can learn, practice, and use
• Creativity is as much a skill as playing a sport, cooking, or learning a language
• Everyone can get better through practice

The creativity gap

A 2012 Adobe study on creativity shows 8 in 10 people feel that unlocking creativity is critical to economic growth and nearly two-thirds of respondents feel creativity is valuable to society, yet a striking minority – only 1 in 4 people – believe they are living up to their own creative potential.

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Source: Creativityatwork.com

Innovation without creativity?

Innovation is defined simply as a "new idea, device, or method.”

An innovative product is novel and useful

There is no innovation without creativity. The key metric in both creativity and innovation is value creation.*

*Creativityatwork.com

Image source: Workplaceleader

Image source: Slideshare

Creative confidence

“Creative confidence is the notion that you have big ideas, and that you have the ability to act on them.”

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Let David Kelley explain: https://player.vimeo.com/video/103471086

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Being human centered is the core of the innovation process

Source: Creativeconfidence.com

DEEP EMPATHY

• Deep empathy for people makes our observations powerful sources of inspiration.
• Focus on understanding why people do what they currently do with the goal of understanding what they might do in the future.
• Our own first-person experiences help us form personal connections with the people for whom we’re innovating.
• An empathic approach fuels our process by ensuring we never forget we’re designing for real people.
• And as a result, we uncover insights and opportunities for truly creative solutions.

Source: Creativeconfidence.com

Image source: Slideshare

Achieve empathy through “design thinking”

Seeking that sweet spot of feasibility, viability, and desirability as you take into account the real needs and desires of your customers is part of what IDEO and the d.school call “design thinking.”

• Desirability: Do people want it?
• Feasibility: Can I make it given my understanding of technology and my organization?
• Viability: Can I do this in a financially practical way?

Important terms and concepts

• Human-centered design (HCD): a 3-step process of inspiration, ideation, and implementation that begins with people’s emotions and desires and ends with an innovative solution
• Method: a particular form of procedure for accomplishing or approaching something, especially a systematic or established one.

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Important terms and concepts

• Design thinking: a formal method for practical, creative resolution of problems and creation of solutions, with the intent of an improved future result, that focuses on user empathy

Important terms and concepts

• Desirability: Do people want it?
• Feasibility: Can I make it given my understanding of technology and my organization?
• Viability: Can I do this in a financially practical way?

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The basic model of design thinking

Too many entrepreneurs start out with an idea that (1) isn’t fully based on understanding the needs of their customers and (2) hasn’t been sufficiently brainstormed and prototyped in order to fully explore what the customer would value

Design thinking expressly places the user experience at the beginning of the solution development process

For Game Day Experience Activity

How your final concept should look!

The person / people and the problem

Relevant technologies

Solution

(Features / benefits)

Relevant business(es)

How they relate

“Understand” is based on four types of innovations

Emotional

Process

Functional

Experience

See also: John Venn

“Understand” is based on four types of innovations

1. Emotional innovation is the intersection of desirability and viability. You develop a relationship with customers based on how well you position your offering as desirable
2. Functional innovation is the intersection of desirability and feasibility. You are (or are not) able technologically and organizationally to make something people want.

“Understand” is based on four types of innovations

• Process innovation is the intersection of feasibility and viability. You have the technology and the supply chain capabilities to fulfill the offering to customers
• Experience innovation is the intersection of all three - desirability, viability, and feasibility. You innovate on experience by innovating across these three domains

Source: http://blog.ideorg.org/2014/04/28/focused-on-the-human-element/

Explore

Exploration is based on the build-measure-learn cycle

The fundamental activity of a startup is to turn ideas into products, measure how customers respond, and then learn whether to pivot or persevere. All successful startups should be geared to accelerate that feedback loop.

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This is the fundamental activity in the lean startup methodology

The five steps of the design process

Source: http://dschool.stanford.edu/fellowships/2013/10/23/a-design-thinkers-cheat-sheet/

Applied to the DP0 framework

1 & 2

3 & 4

5

6

7

8

Switch roles after 1, 2, 6, & 8

1. Interview 4 min each
2. Dig deeper 3 min each
3. Capture findings 3 min
4. Take a stand with a point of view 3 min
5. Sketch alternatives 5 min
6. Share solutions, capture feedback 4 min each
7. Reflect, generate new solution 3 min
8. Share solution 2 min each

Debrief

• Which step(s) was (were) the most difficult for you?
• What insights did you get into user needs through the empathy stage?

1. Empathy

Empathy is the foundation of a human-centered design process. To empathize, you:

• Observe. View users and their behavior in the context of their lives.
• Engage. Interact with and interview users through both
• Immerse. Experience what your user experiences.

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Source: d.school bootcamp bootleg

Why empathy?

Watching what people do and how they interact with their environment gives you clues about what they think and feel. It helps you to learn about what they need. By watching people you can capture physical manifestations of their experiences, what they do and say. This will allow you to interpret intangible meaning of those experiences in order to uncover insights. These insights will lead you to the innovative solutions. The best solutions come out of the best insights into human behavior. But learning to recognize those insights is harder than you might think. Why? Because our minds automatically filter out a lot of information in ways we aren’t even aware of. We need to learn to see things “with a fresh set of eyes” – tools for empathy, along with a human-centered mindset, is what gives us those new eyes.

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Source: d.school bootcamp bootleg

2. Define

• The define mode is when you unpack and synthesize your empathy findings into compelling needs and insights, and scope a specific and meaningful challenge.
• Two goals of the define mode are to develop a deep understanding of your users and the design space and, based on that understanding, to come up with an actionable problem statement: your point of view.
• Your point of view should be a guiding statement that focuses on specific users, and insights and needs that you uncovered during the empathize mode.

Source: d.school bootcamp bootleg

Why define?

The define mode is critical to the design process because it explicitly expresses the problem you are striving to address through your efforts. Often, in order to be truly generative, you must first reframe the challenge based on new insights you have gained through your design work. This reframed problem statement can then be used as a solution-generating springboard.

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Source: d.school bootcamp bootleg

3. Ideate

• Ideate is the mode of your design process in which you aim to generate radical design alternatives.
• Mentally it represents a process of “going wide” in terms of concepts and outcomes—it is a mode of “flaring” rather than “focus.”
• The goal of ideation is to explore a wide solution space – both a large quantity of ideas and a diversity among those ideas.
• From this vast depository of ideas you can build prototypes to test with users.

Source: d.school bootcamp bootleg

Why ideate?

You ideate in order to transition from identifying problems into exploring solutions for your users. Various forms of ideation are leveraged to:

• Step beyond obvious solutions and thus increase the innovation potential of your solution set
• Harness the collective perspectives and strengths of your teams
• Uncover unexpected areas of exploration
• Create fluency (volume) and flexibility (variety) in your innovation options
• Get obvious solutions out of your heads, and drive your team beyond them

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Source: d.school bootcamp bootleg

4. Prototype

• Prototyping is getting ideas and explorations out of your head and into the physical world. A prototype can be anything that takes a physical form – be it a wall of post-it notes, a role-playing activity, a space, an object, an interface, or even a storyboard.
• The resolution of your prototype should be commensurate with your progress in your project.

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Source: d.school bootcamp bootleg

4. Prototype

• In early explorations keep your prototypes rough and rapid to allow yourself to learn quickly and investigate a lot of different possibilities.
• Prototypes are most successful when people (the design team, the user, and others) can experience and interact with them.
• What you learn from those interactions can help drive deeper empathy, as well as shape successful solutions.

Source: d.school bootcamp bootleg

Why prototype?

Traditionally prototyping is thought of as a way to test functionality. But prototyping is used for many reasons, including these (non-mutually-exclusive) categories:

• Empathy gaining: Prototyping is a tool to deepen your understanding of the design space and your user, even at a pre-solution phase of your project.
• Exploration: Build to think. Develop multiple solution options.
• Testing: Create prototypes (and develop the context) to test and refine solutions with users.
• Inspiration: Inspire others (teammates, clients, customers, investors) by showing your vision.

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Source: d.school bootcamp bootleg

Why prototype?

We prototype to:

• Learn. If a picture is worth a thousand words, a prototype is worth a thousand pictures.
• Solve disagreements. Prototyping is a powerful tool that can eliminate ambiguity, assist in ideation, and reduce miscommunication.
• Start a conversation. A prototype can be a great way to have a different kind of conversation with users.
• Fail quickly and cheaply. Creating quick and dirty prototypes allows you to test a number of ideas without investing a lot of time and money up front.
• Manage the solution-building process. Identifying a variable to explore encourages you to break a large problem down into smaller, testable chunks.

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Source: d.school bootcamp bootleg

5. Test

• Testing is the chance to get feedback on your solutions, refine solutions to make them better, and continue to learn about your users.
• The test mode is an iterative mode in which you place your low-resolution artifacts in the appropriate context of the user’s life.
• Prototype as if you know you’re right, but test as if you know you’re wrong.

Source: d.school bootcamp bootleg

Why test?

• To refine your prototypes and solutions. Testing informs the next iterations of prototypes. Sometimes this means going back to the drawing board.
• To learn more about your user. Testing is another opportunity to build empathy through observation and engagement—it often yields unexpected insights.
• To test and refine your POV. Sometimes testing reveals that not only did you not get the solution right, but also that you have failed to frame the problem correctly.

Source: d.school bootcamp bootleg

Human-Centered Design

Notice how HCD moves from concrete to abstract back to concrete as observations are transformed into themes, opportunities, and eventually prototypes

Pause

A few methods and tools to apply design thinking

Blank page to insight

Mindset: Turn routine classroom assignments into real-life products

“All action leads to new knowledge.” (insert image of 3x5 card on my desk)

Source: Creativeconfidence.com

We are surrounded by broken things

• We are surrounded every day by products that don’t work well, services that slow us down, and setups that are just plain wrong
• Noticing that something is broken is an essential prerequisite for coming up with a creative solution to fix it.

Source: Creativeconfidence.com

Bug lists

• Bug lists can help you to see more opportunities to apply creativity
• Keeping track of opportunities for improvement can help you engage with the world around you in a more proactive way
• The running list can serve as a useful source of ideas when you’re looking for a new project to tackle

Source: Creativeconfidence.com

Bug lists

• Write down the things that bug you, and you’ll start being more mindful of them.
• It may seem like you’re focusing on the negatives, but the point is to notice more opportunities to do things better.
• Many of the items on your bug list may be things you won’t be able to fix, if you add to it regularly, you’ll stumble onto issues you can influence and problems you can help solve.
• Almost every annoyance, every point of friction, hides a design opportunity.
• Instead of just complaining, ask yourself, “How might I improve this situation?”

Source: Creativeconfidence.com

What’s missing?

Scenario:

Some second-graders were working on describing pumpkin growth and jack-o-lantern carving

Their teacher had asked them to take a look at this wordless storyboard and describe what was happening

Most students began by coloring the pictures

Source: tumblr.com

What’s missing?

• Scenario (continued):
• I walked over to a few groups and told them that I could see that something was missing from the pictures.
• The students looked a little puzzled and asked me what it was.
• I said, “why don’t you take a second look. I’m going over to another group to see if they can spot it.
• Within a few minutes the whole class was buzzing with conversations around what was missing from the pictures.

Source: tumblr.com

Source: tumblr.com

Bug lists

• No “search” function
• Shuts you out after one hour without warning even if you are actively working within site
• Shuts you out of material you presumably paid for at end of semester

“How might I improve this situation?”

Improve game day!

What’s “missing?” What problems do people experience on game day? Do this on your 3x5 card:

1. Make a “bug list” of problems you have on game day on one side of your card
2. On the other side, write the problem people are having
3. Describe a bold solution to that problem - be as creative as possible!
4. Describe the benefits of your bold solution

Improving “YOU” through design thinking

“What are you good at?” “What will people pay you to do?” and “What were you born to do?”

• If you focus on just what you’re good at, you can end up in a job you are competent at but that doesn’t fulfill you.
• As for the second circle, while people say, “Do what you love and the money will follow,” that’s not literally true.
• The third circle—what you were born to do—is about finding work that is intrinsically rewarding.

Hint: Aim for here

Source: Creativeconfidence.com

Remember the four types of innovations?

Emotional

Process

Functional

Experience

A design approach to you

Feasibility

Desirability

Viability

Emotional

Innovation

Functional

Innovation

Process

Innovation

Design and User Experience

A work in progress

Dimensions of an improvement

• How many people does it help?
• How many people will buy it?
• How much do they value it and are willing to pay for it?
• How long does it last?
• Does it need to be replaced?

The design of your solution and understanding of the user experience will add substantial value to your “customers”

Dimensions of an improvement

• How many people does it help?
• How many people will buy it?
• How much do they value it and are willing to pay for it?
• How long does it last?
• Does it need to be replaced?

Consider: Smart light bulbs versus smart cars

Both satisfy the desire to minimize a carbon footprint. Value, willingness-to-pay, and durability will differ.

Q: How much value have you created?

A: It’s the area of this rectangle

# of users

How much you improve peoples’ lives

Paul Graham

How about another example?

OK. Medical devices

• blood sugar test kits
• blood pressure cuffs
• stethoscopes, thermometers
• crutches and casts
• … and medical diagnostic imaging...

User experience: MRI machines

Moderate distress severe enough to be described as a dysphoric psychological reaction has been reported by as many as 65% of the patients examined by MR imaging. The most severe forms of psychological distress described by patients are anxiety, claustrophobia, or panic attacks.

Doug Dietz

• Doug is a designer of medical imaging systems at GE
• He’s very proud of his work – until he saw a girl crying in the hospital because she was scared of the MRI
• It turns out that 80% of pediatric patients need sedating
• So Doug worked out a new design while at Stanford’s D. School…

Excerpt from David Kelley TED Talk: “How to Build Your Creative Confidence”

This experience forced Doug to empathize with the people who were placed inside his MRI machines. He redefined the MRI experience based on empathy insights, ideated, and built a prototype.

User experience re-imagined�Doug Dietz’s Pirate Island for children

Method: What? | How? | Why?

Source: d.school bootcamp bootleg

Why use What? | How? | Why?

• What? | How? | Why? is a tool that can help you drive to deeper levels of observation.
• This simple scaffolding allows you to move from concrete observations of a particular situation to the more abstract emotions and motives that are at play in that situation.
• This is a particularly powerful technique to leverage when analyzing photos that your team has taken into the field, both for synthesis purposes, and to direct your team to future areas of needfinding.

Source: d.school bootcamp bootleg

How to use What? | How? | Why?

• Set-up: Divide a sheet into three sections: What?, How?, and Why?
• Start with concrete observations (What):
• What is the person you’re observing doing in a particular situation or photograph?
• Notice and write down the details.
• Try to be objective and don’t make assumptions in this first part.

Source: d.school bootcamp bootleg

How to use What? | How? | Why?

• Move to understanding (How):
• How is the person you’re observing doing what they are doing? Does it require effort? Do they appear rushed? Pained? Does the activity or situation appear to be impacting the user’s state of being either positively or negatively? Use descriptive phrases packed with adjectives.

Source: d.school bootcamp bootleg

How to use What? | How? | Why?

• Step out on a limb of interpretation (Why):
• Why is the person you’re observing doing what they’re doing, and in the particular way that they are doing it?
• This step usually requires that you make informed guesses regarding motivation and emotions.
• Step out on a limb in order to project meaning into the situation that you have been observing.
• This step will reveal assumptions that you should test with users, and often uncovers unexpected realizations about a particular situation.

Source: d.school bootcamp bootleg

Method: User camera study

Source: d.school bootcamp bootleg

Why use User Camera Study?

• In empathy work, you want to understand your users’ lives, and specific tasks within the context of their lives.
• A User Camera Study allows us to understand a user’s experience by seeing it through their eyes.
• It will also allow you to understand environments to which you might not normally have access.

Source: d.school bootcamp bootleg

How to use User Camera Study

1. Identify subjects whose perspective you are interested in learning more about.
2. Briefly explain the purpose of the study, and ask if they would be willing to take photographs of their experiences. Get permission to use images they take.

Source: d.school bootcamp bootleg

How to use User Camera Study

• Provide a camera to your subject and instructions such as: “We would like to understand what a day in your life feels like.
• On a day of your choosing, take this camera with you everywhere you go, and take photos of experiences that are important to you.”
• Or you could try: “Please document your [morning routine] experience with this camera.”
• Or, “Take pictures of things that are meaningful to you in your kitchen.”
• Frame your request a little broader than what you believe your problem space might be, in order to capture the surrounding context. Many insights can emerge from that surrounding space.

Source: d.school bootcamp bootleg

How to use User Camera Study

• Afterwards, have your subject walk you through the pictures and explain the significance of what they captured. Return to a good empathetic interviewing technique to understand the deeper meaning of the visuals and the experience they represent.

Source: d.school bootcamp bootleg

Method: Interview for empathy

Informal

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Formal

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Source: d.school bootcamp bootleg

Why interview for empathy?

• You want to understand a person’s thoughts, emotions, and motivations, so that you can determine how to innovate for him or her.
• By understanding the choices that person makes and the behaviors that person engages in, you can identify their needs, and design to meet those needs.

Source: d.school bootcamp bootleg

How to interview for empathy

• Ask why. Even when you think you know the answer, ask people why they do or say things.
• The answers will sometimes surprise you.
• A conversation started from one question should go on as long as it needs to.
• Never say “usually” when asking a question. Instead, ask about a specific instance or occurrence, such as “tell me about the last time you ______”

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Source: d.school bootcamp bootleg

How to interview for empathy

• Encourage stories. Whether or not the stories people tell are true, they reveal how they think about the world. Ask questions that get people telling stories.
• Look for inconsistencies. Sometimes what people say and what they do are different. These inconsistencies often hide interesting insights.
• Pay attention to nonverbal cues. Be aware of body language and emotions.

Source: d.school bootcamp bootleg

How to interview for empathy

• Don’t be afraid of silence. Interviewers often feel the need to ask another question when there is a pause.
• If you allow for silence, a person can reflect on what they’ve just said and may reveal something deeper.
• Don’t suggest answers to your questions. Even if they pause before answering, don’t help them by suggesting an answer. This can unintentionally get people to say things that agree with your expectations.

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Source: d.school bootcamp bootleg

How to interview for empathy

• Ask questions neutrally. “What do you think about buying gifts for your spouse?” is a better question than “Don’t you think shopping is great?” because the first question doesn’t imply that there is a right answer.
• Don’t ask binary questions. You want to host a conversation built upon stories.
• Make sure you’re prepared to capture. Always interview in pairs. If this is not possible, you should use a voice recorder—it is impossible to properly engage a user and take detailed notes at the same time.

Source: d.school bootcamp bootleg

Method: Extreme Users

Source: d.school bootcamp bootleg

Why interview extreme users?

• Designers engage with users (people!) to understand their needs and gain insights about their lives. They also draw inspiration from their workarounds and frameworks.
• When you speak with and observe extreme users, their needs are amplified and their workarounds are often more notable. This helps you pull out meaningful needs that may not pop when engaging with the middle of the bell curve, AND, the needs that are uncovered through extreme users are often also needs of a wider population.

Source: d.school bootcamp bootleg

How to use extreme users

• Determine who’s extreme. Determining who is an extreme user starts with considering what aspect of your design challenge you want to explore to an extreme.
• List a number of facets to explore within your design space. Then think of people who may be extreme in those facets.

Source: d.school bootcamp bootleg

How to use extreme users

• Engage. Observe and interview your extreme user as you would other folks. Look for workarounds (or other extreme behaviors) that can serve as inspiration and uncover insights.

Source: d.school bootcamp bootleg

How to use extreme users

• Look at the extreme in all of us. Look to extreme users for inspiration and to spur wild ideas.
• Then work to understand what resonates with the primary users you are designing for.

Source: d.school bootcamp bootleg

Method: Saturate and group

Source: d.school bootcamp bootleg

Why saturate and group?

• You space saturate to help you unpack thoughts and experiences into tangible and visual pieces of information that you surround yourself with to inform and inspire the design team.
• You group these findings to explore what themes and patterns emerge, and strive to move toward identifying meaningful needs of people and insights that will inform your design solutions.

Source: d.school bootcamp bootleg

How to saturate and group

• Saturate your wall space (or work boards) with post-its headlining interesting findings (see “Story Share-and-Capture”) plus pictures from the field of users you met and relevant products and situations.
• In order to begin to synthesize the information, organize the post-its and pictures into groups of related parts.
• You likely have some ideas of the patterns within the data from the unpacking you did when producing the notes.

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Source: d.school bootcamp bootleg

How to saturate and group

• For example, you may have seen and heard many things related to feeling safe, and many things regarding desire for efficiency.
• Within the group of ‘safety’, go beyond the theme and try to see if there is a deeper connection that may lead to an insight such as “Feeling safe is more about who I am with than where I am”. Maybe there is a relation between groups that you realize as you place items in groups – that safety is often at odds with users’ desire for efficiency.

Source: d.school bootcamp bootleg

How to saturate and group

• Try one set of grouping, discuss (and write down) the findings, and then create a new set of groups.
• The end goal is to synthesize data into interesting findings and create insights which will be useful to you in creating design solutions.
• It is common to do the grouping with post-its headlining interesting stories from fieldwork. But grouping is also useful to think about similarities among a group of products, objects, or users.

Source: d.school bootcamp bootleg

A mixed-media saturate-and-group output

Method: Prototype to test

Source: d.school bootcamp bootleg

Why prototype to test?

• Prototyping to test is the iterative generation of low-resolution artifacts that probe different aspects of
• your design solution or design space.
• The fundamental way you test your prototypes is by letting users experience them and react to them.
• In creating prototypes to test with users you have the opportunity to examine your solution decisions as well as test your perception of your users and their needs.

Source: d.school bootcamp bootleg

How to prototype to test

• Think about what you are trying to learn with your prototypes, and create low-resolution objects and
• scenarios which probe those questions. Staying low-res allows you to pursue many different ideas you generated without committing to a direction too early on.
• The objective is not simply to create a mock-up or scale model of your solution concept; it is to create experiences to which users can react.
• Bring resolution to the aspects that are important for what you are trying to test, and spend less effort on other aspects.

Source: d.school bootcamp bootleg

How to prototype to test: Some tips

• Start building. Even if you aren’t sure what you’re doing, the act of picking up some materials (paper, tape, and found objects are a good way to start!) will be enough to get you going.
• Don’t spend too long on one prototype. Move on before you find yourself getting too emotionally attached to any one prototype.
• Build with the user in mind. What do you hope to test with the user? What sorts of behavior do you expect? Answering these questions will help focus your prototyping and help you receive meaningful feedback in the testing phase.
• ID a variable. Identify what’s being tested with each prototype. A prototype should answer a particular question when tested.

Source: d.school bootcamp bootleg

Radical ideas for reinventing college, Sarah Stein Greenberg, executive director of Stanford Design School

Source: Wired.com

Alert: You may have already watched this on the wiki

You are the designer/entrepreneur

• Think about a problem you or someone you know is having
• Think about the emotional experience that person (you?) has when s/he encounters the problem
• How would you redefine and refocus the problem based on your empathic insights?
• Come up with as many ideas as you can based on your new insights and make a prototype

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See also...

• Design Kit: The Field Guide to Human-Centered Design
• http://www.designkit.org/
• IDEO Labs
• A virtual crash course in design thinking from the Hasso Plattner Institute of Design

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Extra slides follow….

Design thinking for educators

Source: http://www.designthinkingforeducators.com/

Both approaches are from IDEO

Original IDEO method

1. Empathize
2. Define
3. Ideate
4. Prototype
5. Test

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DT for educators

1. Discovery
2. Interpretation
3. Ideation
4. Experimentation
5. Evolution

Design thinking and executive ed