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Ideation/Research

IDEO p.37

Secondary Research

Getting up to speed on your challenge is crucial to success in the eld.

Human-centered design is all about talking with people about their challenges, ambitions, and constraints. But as you move through the Inspiration phase, there will be moments where you’ll need more context, history, or data than a man-on-the-street style Interview can afiord. Social sector challenges can be really thorny, which is why Secondary Research, whether done online, by reading books, or by crunching numbers, can help you ask the right questions. At IDEO.org, we nd that a rm foundation of knowledge is the best place from which to tackle a design challenge.

Once you know your design challenge, it’s time to start learning about its broader context. You can bone up quickly by exploring the most recent news in the field. Use the Internet, newspapers, magazines, or journals to know what’s new.

02 Try to find recent innovations in your particular area. They could be technological, behavioral, or cultural. Understanding the edge of what’s possible will help you ask great questions.

03 Take a look at other solutions in your area. Which ones worked? Which ones didn’t? Are there any that feel similar to what you might design? Any solutions that have inspired you to make one of your own?

04 Because Interviews (p. 39) can be highly subjective, use your Secondary Research to get the facts and figures you’ll need to understand the context of your challenge.

IDEO p.39 (same as user test)

Interview

There’s no better way to understand the hopes, desires, and aspirations of those you’re designing for than by talking with them directly.

Interviews really are the crux of the Inspiration phase. Human-centered design is about getting to the people you’re designing for and hearing from them in their own words. Interviews can be a bit daunting, but by following these steps below you’ll unlock all kinds of insights and understanding that you’ll never get sitting behind your desk. Whenever possible, conduct your Interviews in the person’s space. You can learn so much about a person’s mindset, behavior, and lifestyle by talking with them where they live or work.

No more than three research team members should attend anysingle Interview so as to not overwhelm the participant or crowd the location. Each team member should have a clear role (i.e. interviewer, note-taker, photographer).

02 Come prepared with a set of questions you’d like to ask. Startby asking broad questions about the person’s life, values, and habits, before asking more specific questions that relate directly toyour challenge.

03 Make sure to write down exactly what the person says, not what you think they might mean. This process is premised on hearing exactly what people are saying. If you’re relying on a translator, make sure he or she understands that you want direct quotes, not the gist of what the person says.

04 What you hear is only one data point. Be sure to observe the person’s body language and surroundings and see what you can learn fromthe context in which you’re talking. Take pictures, provided you get permission first.

IDEO p.80

Find Themes

As you share your learnings with your team, patterns and themes are likely to emerge. Here’s how to spot and make sense of them.

Once you’ve had a chance to Download Your Learnings (p. 77) and Share Inspiring Stories (p. 78), you’re ready to Find Themes. Take a good longlook across your Interviews (p. 39), Analogous Inspiration (p. 53), and other learnings. Have any patterns emerged? Is there a compelling insight youheard again and again? A consistent problem the people you’re designing for face? What feels signi cant? What surprised you? These themes are bound to change, but as you move through the Ideation phase, continue to Find Themes and sort out what they mean.

TIME60-90 minutes

DIFFICULTY Moderate

02 03 04

Gather your team around your Post-its from previous Ideation sessions. Move the most compelling, common, and inspiring quotes, stories, or ideas to a new board and sort them into categories.

Look for patterns and relationships between your categories and move the Post-its around as you continue grouping. The goal is to identify key themes and then to translate them into opportunities for design.

Arrange and rearrange the Post-its, discuss, debate, and talk through what’s emerging. Don’t stop until everyone is satisfied that the clusters represent rich opportunities for design.

Identifying these themes will help you Create Frameworks (p. 89) and write Design Principles (p. 105).

IDEO p.94

Brainstorm

Energiez your team and drum up a staggering amount of innovative ideas.

At IDEO.org, we use Brainstorms to tap into a broad body of knowledgeand creativity. Over the course of your project you should do them not only with your design team, but also with partners and the people you’re designing for. Refer to Brainstorm Rules (p. 95) for the speci cs of what makes for a fruitful brainstorm, but remember that the best policy is to promote openness, lots of ideas, and creativity over immediate feasibility. Brainstorms work best when the group is positive, optimistic, and focused on generating as many ideas as possible.

Pass out pens and Post-its to everyone and have a large piece of paper, wall, or whiteboard on which to stick them.

02 Review the Brainstorm Rules before you start.03 Pose the question or prompt you want the group to answer. Even better if

you write it down and put it at the top of the paper, wall, or whiteboard.

04 As each person has an idea, have her describe to the group as she puts her Post-it on the wall or board.

05 Generate as many ideas as possible.

IDEO p.108

Create a Concept

Move from a handful of ideas and insights into a fully-fiedged concept, one that you’ll rene and push forward.

So far you’ve come up with, shared, and even discarded scores of ideas. You further re ned things as you Bundled Ideas (p. 97) and now it’s time to turn them into a concept. A concept is more polished and complete than an idea. It’s more sophisticated, something that you’ll want to test with the people you’re designing for, and it’s starting to look like an answer to your design challenge. This is the moment where you move from problem to solution and it drives everything that comes next.

Take the ideas that you bundled and put them up on the wall on Post-its.

02 Now might be a good time to Create Frameworks (p. 89) out of those bundled ideas. Start to visualize where your bundles are pointing, but think especially hard about making them into a system.

03 Don’t worry too much about all the details of your solution now—you don’t need a finely tuned Funding Strategy (p. 145) just yet. The goal is to get a robust, flexible concept that addresses the problem you’re trying to solve.

04 Keep referring back to your design challenge. Are you answering it? Are there elements missing in your solution? What else can you incorporate to come up with a great solution?

05 Like the rest of human-centered design, there’s a bit of trial and error here. And creating a concept means you’ll probably create a couple that don’t work out. That’s fine.

IDEO p.113

Storyboard

A quick, low-resolution prototype, Storyboards can help you visualiez your concept from start to nish.

You don’t need to be a great artist to create a great Storyboard. By visually plotting out elements of your product or service, you can learn a lot about your idea. Not only will this method help you re ne what your idea is, it can also help you understand who will use it, where, and how. Like all prototypes, the idea here is to make something really rough as a way to help you think the idea through. It’s amazing what putting pen to paper can reveal.

Determine what part of your idea you want to Storyboard. You don’t have to Storyboard the entire thing, and you may find it useful to test a component of your idea like an interaction, or how a customer finds out about your product. Spend no more than 30-45 minutes drawing how your ideas work. Use the series of comic book-style frames on p. 178 or make your own. This will help you spotlight key moments and build a short narrative. Don’t get hung up on your drawing abilities. It’s more important that a Storyboard helps you fully think through your concept than create something that looks beautiful. Once you’re done, act out the Storyboard to your team for feedback.

Double diamond (Step.1)

Observation

What is it?

Watching people as they interact with products, services and environments and identifying areas where problems occur.

What is it useful for?

Depending on your project, you might want to make general observations of something that already exists. For example, how people move around a shopping centre, or how people in the street use their mobile phones. Or you could test a design in a specific scenario.

How can I do it?

Pick your scenario and record your observation with photos or video. This lets you analyse the material after the event (and even catch important details you might have missed, like the expressions on people's faces). The photos or videos can also provide evidence to show to partners or stakeholders in your project.

Being your users

What is it?

A method to put yourself in the position of your user.

What is it useful for?

Building understanding of and empathy with the users of your product, service or environment.

How can I do it?

Identify your target user group, then carry out research to identify user scenarios and typical tasks users undertake.

Put yourself in the user's situation for a couple of hours, a day or even a week. Carry out the tasks that they would do, in the environments where they would do them. This could mean, for example, working on a supermarket checkout or driving an unfamiliar car for a week. Make detailed notes or keep a diary to record your thoughts.

You could also use empathy tools to simulate specific user characteristics. For example, wearing gloves and tinted glasses can simulate some of the physical effects of old age, or a pregnancy suit with a weighted 'bump' can simulate what it would be like for a pregnant woman to use your service.

Brainstorming

What is it?

Brainstorming is a method to enable a team to work together to generate ideas quickly and effectively.

What is it useful for?

Generating ideas quickly in response to a problem.

How can I do it?

Start with a warm-up. Brainstorm a fun problem such as "How can we get every Monday morning off work?"

State the problem clearly and concisely.

Don't lose anything. Write your ideas on flipcharts, or on the wall.

Number your ideas and set a target – to get to 100, for example.

Keep the focus sharp: edgy and precise statements are better than fuzzy ones.

Keep the ideas flowing, be responsive and keep trying to approach the problem from different viewpoints.

Brainstorming will be most effective if you keep to these ground rules:

Defer judgment – build on ideas to make them better

Don't criticise!

One conversation at a time

Go for quantity – the more ideas the better

Have wild ideas – every idea is valid

Stay focused on the problem in hand

Be visual – draw ideas or represent them with whatever is to hand

After brainstorming, a smaller group can cluster the ideas for voting.

Fast visualisation

What is it?

Generating quick sketches of your ideas.

What is it useful for?

Visualising ideas will make them easier to understand and modify, and will in turn stimulate new ideas.

How can I do it?

Sketch ideas during a group brainstorm. The drawings don't need to be perfect: they only need to have just enough detail to communicate the idea.

Secondary research

What is it?

Setting aside time to explore a range of published information about your customers, your competitors and political, social and economic trends.

What is it useful for?

It’s vital to explore and understand the context you’re working in and to stay up to date with the latest developments.

How can I do it?

Search online or at your local reference library (where you can ask for help). Services like Google Alerts allow you to receive automated updates about new articles in your area of interest as they are published.

Double diamond (Step.2)

Comparing notes

What is it?

Visually sorting and prioritising a large amount of information about a problem.

What is it useful for?

When presented with many pieces of information, it's not always obvious where to start. Sorting and grouping these ideas in order is often the best way to begin.

How can I do it?

Write all of your ideas on individual sticky notes.

Reduce the number of notes by rejecting low priority items and combining notes that deal with similar things.

Compare pairs of notes in turn and put the most important one higher up the list (using the same criteria for all comparisons).

When no more swaps can be made, the list will be in order of importance.

For example, if you wanted to determine the most important factors in choosing a pushchair you could take all the potential considerations from your research (or brainstorm them) and then compare notes to determine the most important considerations. This method also works for ranking things other than by importance, for instance in order of speed, cost, quality or desirability.

You could also use this method with users to get them to put their considerations in order of importance, for example, "What are the most important considerations connected with buying a new home?".

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des105mana · 3 years ago

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Iteration

IDEO p.119

Rapid Prototyping

Build your prototypes quickly, share them immediately, and keep on learning.

For human-centered designers, Rapid Prototyping is an incredibly efiective way to make ideas tangible, to learn through making, and to quickly get key feedback from the people you’re designing for. Because prototypes are meant only to convey an idea—not to be perfect—you can quickly move through a variety of iterations, building on what you’ve learned from the people you’re designing for. Rapid Prototyping means that you’re building only enough to test your idea, and that you’re right back in there making it better once you’ve gotten feedback.

TIME120 minutes

DIFFICULTY Hard

WHAT YOU’LL NEED Pen, paper, supplies

PARTICIPANTS Design team

03 04

Once you’ve Determined What to Prototype (p. 111), it’s time to build it.

You can make any number of prototypes: Storyboards (p. 113), Role Playing (p. 118), models, mock-ups. The goal here it to make something tangible that conveys the idea you want to test. No need to make it perfect, just make it good enough to get the idea across.

Now take your prototype out and test it with people you’re designing for. Put it in their hands and ask them what they make of it. Make sure to Get Feedback (p. 126).

Here is where you can Integrate Feedback and Iterate (p. 127). Once you’ve quickly built another prototype you’ll do it all over again until it’s just right.

IDEO p.127

Integrate Feedback and Iterate

Let the feedback of the people you’re designing for guide the next iteration of your solution.

Integrating the feedback you hear from the people you’re designing for is one of the essential elements of human-centered design. You learned from people in the Inspiration phase, and in the Ideation phase one of the best ways to keep learning from them is to show them what you’ve made and nd out what they think. Integrating their feedback into your work and then coming up with another prototype is the best way to re ne your idea until it’s something that’s bound to be adopted and embraced.

Sit with your design team and share the feedback that you collected. Use the Share Inspiring Stories (p. 78) or Download Your Learnings (p. 77) Methods to share what you learned.

You’ll now probably want to synthesize some of the feedback you got. You can Create Frameworks (p. 89) based on what you heard and how it applies to your idea. You might also now try a Brainstorm (p. 94) around how your idea could change based on your feedback.

Get tangible and start building the next iteration of your prototype. Integrating Feedback and Iterating is closely tied to Rapid Prototyping(p. 119). So once you’ve determined how your prototype should change to reflect the feedback you got, build it.

Remember that this is a method for refining your idea, not for getting to the ultimate solution the first time. You’ll probably do it a few times to work out the kinks and get to the right answer.

Double Diamond (Step.2 Define)

Assessment criteria

What is it?

A method of selecting the most promising ideas to develop further.

What is it useful for?

Agreed assessment criteria are useful for taking into account the concerns of multiple stakeholders when deciding the best ideas to take forward.

How can I do it?

Brainstorm, refine and agree a shared set of assessment criteria. These need to be structured to encourage participants to consider the perspectives of the other stakeholders when making their assessments. For example, if you were selecting a product design to take forward into production you might give each of the ideas a score of 1 to 5 on the criteria of:

Technical feasibility (the engineering team's concern)

Cost (finance's concern)

Passion for the idea (the project team's concern)

Portability and size (some of the customers' concerns)

Score all of your ideas against the criteria then add up a final score for each idea.

Double Diamond (Step.3 Develop)

Physical prototyping

What is it?

Building a model of your idea. An early model can be very simple to test underlying principles; when it comes to the later stage of the design process, a more accurate model is required to refine details of form and function.

What is it useful for?

Physical prototypes help iron out any unanticipated problems with your creative ideas. Prototypes give you insight into how your design will be used, before you create a finished version.

Physical prototypes are also particularly effective in communicating design ideas to diverse groups of stakeholders.

How can I do it?

First decide which aspect of the user experience you want to test, and build an appropriate model to test it. This will vary according to the stage of development your project is at.

At an early stage a 'quick and dirty' prototype that people are not afraid to criticise is best for testing principles.

At a later stage a you may want to create 'works-like' prototypes to detail aspects of build and functionality and a (possibly separate) 'looks like' prototype to test response to form.

For example, you might first test the principles of a new office workstation by building it in foamboard using hot glue. In later stages you may test a detail of a mechanism by building a 'works-like' mechanical prototype.

Build your prototypes using available material and test them with end users, or role play how you might use the designs yourself. Use what you learn to improve the prototype designs further.

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des105mana · 3 years ago

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User tesing

IDEO p.39

Interview

There’s no better way to understand the hopes, desires, and aspirations of those you’re designing for than by talking with them directly.

IDEO p.126

You’ve learned and built. Now share what you’ve made with the people you’re designing for and see what they think.

Soliciting feedback on your ideas and prototypes is a core element of the Ideation phase, and it helps keep the people you’re designing for at the center of your project. It’s also a direct path to designing something that those same people will adopt. If the point of a prototype is to test an idea, then collecting feedback from potential users is what pushes things forward.

Now that you’ve got a prototype to share, get it in front of the people you’re designing for. There are lots of ways to do it: Reconvene a Group Interview (p. 42), intercept people in markets for Interviews (p. 39), do another Expert Interview (p. 43) with your prototype, or perhaps run a Co-Creation Session (p. 109) designed to elicit feedback.

02 Capturing honest feedback is crucial. People may praise your prototype to be nice, so assure them that this is only a tool by which to learn and that you welcome honest, even negative feedback.

03 Share with lots of people so that you get a variety of reactions. Refer back to Extremes and Mainstreams (p. 49) to make sure you’re capturing a cross-section of potential users.

04 Write down the feedback you hear and use this opportunity with the people you’re designing for to ask more questions and push your ideas further.

Double Diamond (Step.3 Develop)

Scenarios

What is it?

Detailed accounts of situations in which your users will interact with your product, service or environment over a period of time.

What is it useful for?

Gaining an understanding of the context in which users may be interacting with your product, service or environment in order to refine it. It’s particularly useful when a series of interactions are necessary from the user.

How can I do it?

Define a set of characters who will use what you are designing. Consider the details of their lives – their jobs, their regular activities and their attitudes. Identify key moments where these users interact with your project, then realise them as scenes in a short text or a storyboard.

Test the scenario on users or yourself. Use what you learn to improve the design further.

To investigate the full scope of user interactions, you may need to construct three or four scenarios around the needs of a different character and improve them with each iteration.

Role-playing

What is it?

Role-playing means physically acting out what happens when users interact with products, services or environments.

What is it useful for?

Taking the role of the user and acting out their interactions can prompt more intuitive responses and help you to refine your design. Role-playing is particularly useful for prototyping interactions between people, for example in a service context.

How can I do it?

Define a character or characters who will use or deliver the end product, service or environment you are designing. Isolate key moments where these users interact with it, and then act them out – with or without props.

Use your intuitive responses prompted by the enactment of the scenario to refine your design. You can also use role-play as a method to test physical prototypes.

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