The Design Thinking Playbook

Design Thinking Playbook PDF

Process Synopsis

Introduction

• Keys to keep in mind when identifying new management paradigms
  • 1. Personality - Trust your experience and intentions when developing
  • 2. Love it, change it or leave it - Identify styles and. carry only what resonates with you
  • 3. Don’t do it alone - Develop together in order to create a more up to date style

Chapter 1

1.1 What needs are addressed in the Design Thinking Playbook

• User Profile Canvas - understanding a users background through investigative questioning
  • Used for strategy work and mapping the associated business ecosystems
• These are methods for when you are able to identify your user base and want to dive deeper into empathizing/understanding your user base

Understanding your users

• 1. Find the User
  • Quant data collection
• 2. Build up a hypothesis
  • Descriptions of similar groups
• 3. Confirmations
  • Quant data collection, Empathy Maps
• 4. Finding Patterns
  • Jobs-to-be-done method, Categorization
• 5. Creating Personas
• 6. Define Situations
  • User Profile Canvas, Customer Journey
• 7. Validation
  • Interviewing personas, reading about personas
• 8. Dissemination of Knowledge
  • Posters, meetings, emails, etc.
• 9. Creating Scenarios
  • Narrative scenarios, Hook method
• 10. Continuous further development
  • Usability testing, updating personas with new information

Canvas Methods

• Empathy Mapping - discussing a users experience and empathizing with each emotion they discuss
  • Good to involve images and video if allowed
  • Discuss how they are feeling
• AEIOU Framework - add structure to the format of user questioning and observation
  • Activities: What are people doing? What is their task? What activities do they carry out?
  • Environment: What does the environment look like?
  • Interaction: How do they interact amongst each other? What interfaces do they interact with?
  • Objects: Who uses the objects and in what environment?
  • User: Who are the users? Who influences them? What role do the users play?
• Hook Framework - how a framework of action is triggered and continually entered through reward
  • Investigating how to optimize each section:
  • Trigger - (internal) Loneliness triggering a move to Facebook (external) a notification triggering a user to check Facebook
    • Internal - What does the user want and how do we make it more effective?
    • External - What relevant triggers of action can be deployed?
  • Action - What is the simplest action a user needs to perform in order to be rewarded?
  • Variable Reward - Is there a reward for the user and/or the community?
  • Investment - How does our user release their action and re-enter the loop? Is there a way to close the loop more effectively?
• Jobs-to-be-done
  • 1. When… - Action taken (“When I take a photo”)
  • 2. I want to… - Desire (“I want to edit it like a professional”)
  • 3. so I can… - Outcome (“So I can have beautiful photos”)
• Future User Study
  • When a user is not at their stage of life we are analyzing so you will need to make some judgement calls

1.2 Why is Process Awareness Key?

• At what point of time do we need to collect information and ideas?
• At what point do we need to synthesize those ideas into distinct solutions?
• Micro cycle - day to day operation of the project and the cycle put in place to build
• Macro cycle - the overall project roadmap

The Design Thinking MICRO-cycle

• Diverging is often the easiest part to spend time on
• Converging is difficult with more information and ideas
• The Groan Zone is the apex of when we flip from Diverging to Converging
  • Creating a tighter time window can allow for more distinct and quick decision making where ideas are connected, deleted and decided upon quicker
• It is good to bring in other parties so the idea is not singular to your group
• There are a lot of different Design Thinking Processes that achieve similar outcomes through different methods (find the best one that suits the project)
  • IDEO Design Thinking Process (Understand, Observe, Visualize, Evaluate, Implement)
  • Scrum or ISO 13407
  • ICT Swisscom (Hear, Create, Deliver)

Phases of the Microcycle

• Understand - Understanding a problem or persona on the way to a problem statement
  • WHY - exploratory
  • HOW - specific
• Observe - Investigating the group we need to deal with first hand
• Define a point of view - Unify and establishing a common knowledge base through previous gained information
• Ideate - Brainstorming and creation for functions irrespective of constraints
• Prototype - Moving ideas to actionable prototypes
• Test - Large scale testing with users
• EXTRA: Reflect - Wraps up the process after completion with a retrospection

The Design Thinking MACRO-cycle

• Diverge
  • Emphasize creative process in order to get any and all ideas to run rather than start constrained
  • 1. Initial ideas are worked out in brainstorming
    • Understanding others opinions
    • Sprints to work through thought process
  • 2. Develop critical functionalities for the user
    • Identify what is essential for the target user base
  • 3. Finding benchmarks from other industries and experiences
    • Collecting and connecting experiences or similar situations in other industries
  • 4. Heighten creativity and find a dark horse solution
    • Push team members to find solutions when main functionalities are taken out
  • 5. Create a funky prototype
    • Maximize learning success and minimize time/attention by building a prototype without any constraints (what does/doesn’t work)
  • 6. Determine the idea with the vision prototype
    • Synthesize based on all previous ideas and steps of understanding, observation, POV, ideation and prototyping
    • Test and learn from you users what did and did not work
• Converge
  • Based on the response and ideas, move towards a more functional prototype
  • 1. Concretize the vision step by step
    • Functional prototype - create an MVP (minimal vital product) on the outset to concretize the essentials and test them extensively with users

1.3 How to get a good problem statement

• Well-defined Problem - Well defined problem, multiple paths, one solution
• Ill-defined Problem - Multiple problems, multiple paths, multiple solutions
• Wicked Problem - Unknown problem, multiple paths, part of a solution that helps make the problem statement more clear
• Finding the design challenge can be defined using a couple different frameworks:
  • How Might We…
  • Change the Perspective - What if…? What might be possible?
  • Experiencing other products to discover design challenge

1.4 How to discover user needs

1.5 How to build empathy with users

1.6 How to find the right focus

1.7 How to generate ideas

Transform Organizations

2.1