Notes : Concepts and Lessons of Design Thinking
Creative confidence is the notion that you have big ideas,and that you have the ability to act on them.
Design Thinking
Service Blueprint
A map that displays all the touchpoints of the consumer with your brand, as well as the key internal processes involved in it. Useful to visualize the path followed by consumers across multiple channels and how you could improve the flow.
Consumer Journey Map
A diagram that explores the multiple (sometimes invisible) steps taken by consumers as they engage with the service. Allows designers to frame the consumer’s motivations and needs in each step of the journey, creating design solutions that are appropriate for each.
Personas
A relatable snapshot of the target audience that highlights demographics, behaviors, needs and motivations through the creation of a fictional character. Personas make it easier for designers to create empathy with consumers throughout the design process.
Ecosystem Map
A visualization of the company’s digital properties, the connections between them, and their purpose in the overall marketing strategy. Gives you insights around how to leverage new and existing assets to achieve the brand’s business goals.
Competitive Audit
A comprehensive analysis of competitor products that maps out their existing features in a comparable way. Helps you understand industry standards and identify opportunities to innovate in a given area.
Value Proposition
A reductive process in the early stages of product definition that maps out the key aspects of it: what it is, who it is for and when/where it will be used. Helps the team narrow down and create consensus around what the product will be.
Stakeholders Interviews
Scripts for interviewing key stakeholders in a project, both internal and external, to gather insights about their goals. It helps prioritize features and define key performance indicators (KPIs).
Key Performance Indicators
Pre-stabilized criteria to measure progress toward strategic goals or the maintenance of operational goals. KPIs help inform design decisions along the way and measure results of the UX efforts.
Brainstorming
The collective process of generating constraint-free ideas that respond to a given creative brief. Allows the team to visualize a broad range of design solutions before deciding which one to stick with.
Mood boards
A collaborative collection of images and references that will eventually evolve into a product’s visual style guide. Allows creatives to show clients and colleagues a proposed look for the product before investing too much time on it.
Storyboards
A comic strip that illustrates the series of actions that consumers need to take while using the product. Translates functionalities into real-life situations, helping designers create empathy with the consumer while having a first look at the product scope.
User Flow
A visual representation of the user’s flow to complete tasks within the product. It’s the user perspective of the site organization, making it easier to identify which steps could be improved or redesigned.
Task Analysis
A breakdown of the required information and actions needed to achieve a task. Helps designers and developers understand the current system and its information flows. Makes it possible to allocate tasks appropriately within the new system.
Taxonomies
An exploration around multiple ways to categorize content and data: topics in a news site, product categories in an ecommerce etc. Assists designers in defining the content structure to support the user’s and the organization’s goals.
Content Audit
The activity of listing all content available on a website. This list will come in handy at various stages of the project: see the big picture, define the content strategy and check the details of each page.
Heuristic Analysis
A detailed analysis of a product that highlights good and bad practices, using known interaction design principles as guidelines. Helps you visualize the current state of the product in terms of usability, efficiency, and effectiveness of the experience.
Sitemap
One of the most iconic IA deliverables, consists of a diagram of the website’s pages organized hierarchically. It makes it easy to visualize the basic structure and navigation of a website.
Features Roadmap
A product’s evolution plan with prioritized features. It could be a spreadsheet, a diagram or even a bunch of sticky notes. Shares the product strategy with the team and the road that needs to be taken to achieve its vision.
Use Cases and Scenarios
A comprehensive list of scenarios that happen when users are interacting with the product: logged in, not logged in, first visit etc. Ensures that all possible actions are thoroughly considered, as well as the system behavior in each scenario.
Metrics Analysis
Numbers provided by an analytics tool or your own database about how the user interacts with your product: clicks, navigation time, search queries etc. Metrics can also “uncover the unexpected”, surfacing behaviors that are not explicit in user tests.
User Interview / Focus Group
A panel of people discussing a specific topic or question. Teaches about the users’ feelings, opinions and even language. Useful when the target audience is new or unknown for the team.
Quantitative Survey
Questions that provide numbers as result. Quick and un-expensive way of measuring user satisfaction and collecting feedback about the product. It could indicate the need for a deeper qualitative test
Usability Testing
One-to-one interviews in which the user is asked to perform a series of tasks in a prototype or a product. Validates and collects feedback of flows, design and features.
Card Sorting
A technique that consists in asking users to group content and functionalities into open or closed categories. Gives you input on content hierarchy, organization and flow.
A/B Test
Offering alternative versions of your product to different users and comparing the results to find out which one performs better. Great for optimizing funnels and landing pages.
Eye-tracking
A technology that analyzes the user’s eye movements across the interface. Provides data about what keeps users interested on the screen and how their reading flow could be optimized by design.
Accessibility Analysis
A study to measure if the website can be used by everyone, including users with special needs. It should follow the W3C guidelines to make sure that all users are satisfied.
Sketches
A quick way of visualizing a new interface by using paper and pen. Sketches are useful to validate product concepts and design approaches both with team members and users.
Wireframes
A visual guide that represents the page structure, as well as its hierarchy and key elements. Useful to discuss ideas with team members and clients, and to assist the work of designers and developers.
Prototypes
A prototype is a simulation of the website navigation and features, commonly using clickable wireframes or layouts. It’s a quick and dirty way to test and validate a product before fully developing it.
Pattern Library
A hands-on library that provides examples (and code) of interaction design patterns to be used across the website. It not only promotes consistency, but also makes it easier improve elements as needed.
Inspiration
Ideation
Implementation
Embracing human-centered design means believing that all problems, even the seemingly intractable ones like poverty, gender equality, and clean water, are solvable. Moreover, it means believing that the people who face those problems every day are the ones who hold the key to their answers. The human-centered design offers problem solvers of any stripe a chance to design with communities, to deeply understand the people they’re looking to serve, to dream up scores of ideas, and to create innovative new solutions rooted in people’s actual needs.
Being a human-centered designer is about believing that as long as you stay grounded in what you’ve learned from people, your team can arrive at new solutions that the world needs.
philosophy of design and the seven mindsets that set us apart: Empathy, Optimism, Iteration, Creative Confidence, Making, Embracing Ambiguity, and Learning from Failure.
INSPIRATION: In this phase, you’ll learn how to better understand people. You’ll observe their lives, hear their hopes and desires, and get smart on your challenge.
IDEATION: Here you’ll make sense of everything that you’ve heard, generate tons of ideas, identify opportunities for design, and test and refine your solutions.
IMPLEMENTATION: Now is your chance to bring your solution to life. You’ll figure out how to get your idea to market and how to maximize its impact in the world.
philosophy of design and the seven mindsets that set us apart: Empathy, Optimism, Iteration, Creative Confidence, Making, Embracing Ambiguity, and Learning from Failure.
Creative Confidence
Creative confidence is the notion that you have big ideas,and that you have the ability to act on them.
Creative confidence is the belief that everyone is creative, and that creativity isn’t the capacity to draw or compose or sculpt, but a way of understanding the world.
It can take time to build creative confidence, and part of getting there is trusting that the human-centered design process will show you how to bring a creative approach to whatever problem is at hand. As you start with small successes and then build to bigger ones, you’ll see your creative confidence grow and before long you’ll find yourself in the mindset that you are a wildly creative person
Make it
You're taking out the process by making it simple first.And you always learn lessons from it.
As you move through the human-centered design process, it doesn’t matter what you make, the materials you use, or how beautiful the result is, the goal is always to convey an idea, share it, and learn how to make it better.
Best of all, you can prototype anything at any stage of the process from a service model to a uniform, from a storyboard to the financial details of your solution. As human-centered designers, we have a bias toward action, and that means getting ideas out of our heads and into the hands of the people we’re looking to serve.
Learn from failure
Don't think of it as failure,think of it as designing experiments through which you're going to learn.
MindsetsFailure is an incredibly powerful tool for learning. Designing experiments, prototypes, and interactions and testing them is at the heart of human-centered design. So is an understanding that not all of them are going to work. As we seek to solve big problems, we’re bound to fail. But if we adopt the right mindset, we’ll inevitably learn something from that failure.
Thomas Edison put it well when he said, “I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.” And for human-centered designers, sorting out what won’t work is part of finding what will.
Failure is an inherent part of the human-centered design because we rarely get it right on our first try. In fact, getting it right on the first try isn’t the point at all. The point is to put something out into the world and then use it to keep learning, keep asking, and keep testing. When human-centered designers get it right, it’s because they got it wrong first.
Empathy
In order to get new solutions,you have to get to know different people,different scenario',different places.
Empathy is the capacity to step into other people’s shoes, to understand their lives, and start to solve problems from their perspectives. Human-centered design is premised on empathy, on the idea that the people you’re designing for are your roadmap to innovative solutions. All you have to do is empathize, understand them, and bring them along with you in the design process.
For too long, the international development community has designed solutions to the challenges of poverty without truly empathizing with and understanding the people it’s looking to serve. But by putting ourselves in the shoes of the person we’re designing for, human-centered designers can start to see the world, and all the opportunities to improve it, through a new and powerful lens.
Immersing yourself in another world not only opens you up to new creative possibilities, but it allows you to leave behind preconceived ideas and outmoded ways of thinking. Empathizing with the people you’re designing for is the best route to truly grasping the context and complexities of their lives. But most importantly, it keeps the people you’re designing for squarely grounded in the center of your work.
Embrace Ambiguity
We want to give ourselves the permission to explore lots of different possibilities so that the right answer can reveal itself.
One of the qualities that set human-centered designers apart is the belief that there will always be more ideas. We don’t cling to ideas any longer than we have to because we know that we’ll have more. Because human-centered design is such a generative process, and because we work so collaboratively, it’s easy to discard bad ideas, hold onto pieces of the so-so ones, and eventually arrive at the good ones.
Though it may seem counterintuitive, the ambiguity of not knowing the answer actually sets up human-centered designers to innovate. If we knew the answer when we started, what could we possibly learn? How could we come up with creative solutions? Where would the people we’re designing for guide us? Embracing ambiguity actually frees us to pursue an answer that we can’t initially imagine, which puts us on the path to routine innovation and lasting impact.
Optimism
Optimism is the thing that drives you forward
The Field Guide to Human-Centered DesignHuman-centered designers are persistently focused on what could be, not the countless obstacles that may get in the way. Constraints are inevitable, and often they push designers toward unexpected solutions. But it’s our core animating belief—that every problem is solvable—that shows just how deeply optimistic human-centered designers are.
Iterate, Iterate, Iterate
By Iterating,, we validate our ideas along the way because we're hearing from the people we're actually designing for.
At base, we iterate because we know that we won’t get it right the first time. Or even the second. Iteration allows us the opportunity to explore, to get it wrong, to follow our hunches, but ultimately to arrive at a solution that will be adopted and embraced. We iterate because it allows us to keep learning. Instead of hiding out in our workshops, betting that an idea, product, or service will be a hit, we quickly get out in the world and let the people we’re designing for be our guides.