My Design Thinking
I fell in love with design because it allows me to engage with two of my favorite passions: understanding how things work and creating things. As a designer, I strive to understand users’ existing processes, perspectives, mindsets, and motivations, as well as their requirements—what makes them tick, and how they might be best served—as well as similar problems and existing solutions. I then strive to create a product or service to reframe, to improve, to spark joy.
The design process, as I learned it from Professors Peter Robbie and Eugene Korsunskiy at Dartmouth and continue to learn it based in my project experiences, is rooted in design thinking.
Design thinking begins with empathizing with the user, seeking to deeply understand her problems from her perspective. This step involves heavy qualitative and quantitative user research. Where possible, I prefer a mixed-methods approach, incorporating observational ethnography and interviews. The latter, packed with open-ended questions and avoiding leading questions as much as possible, is critical for understanding any objects of your observation from the user’s perspective. Deep understanding of the user’s mindset and motivations can only come with the personal interview. Conversely, non-obtrusive observation of the users in their own spaces and processes provides important complementary, objective evidence—to confirm, contextualize, and help you to visualize what the user explained to you in the interview, or to provide you the opportunity to see something that the user has not noticed about their own current process. The two methods inform one another in a complementary fashion, and the two together provide the opportunity for a more holistic picture of the user’s problems—and better insights.
The definition phase involves analysis of the findings from user research to generate insights. For me, this phase usually involves whiteboards filled with sticky notes—a sticky note for each observation and comment collected in the empathize phase, rearranged on the boards in several configurations over time to identify different patterns among them. My other favorite analysis tool is the journey map, with major motivations and mindsets indicated and pain points highlighted. The goal of this phase is to define both the problem and the metrics for a successful response to that problem. Importantly, definition of the problem comes from understanding not only the issues that users explicitly complained about during the empathize phase, but also their underlying or latent needs—the ones that lie at the root of their problems, and to which the users are too close to explicitly identify.
Equipped with deep understanding of the user, insight into the latent needs, and awareness of the requirements for a successful solution, the ideation step can begin. In this exciting phase, lots of possible responses of the problem are generated, building off of one another—going for volume of ideas. Sometimes, even an idea that seems crazy and outside the realm of possibility can spark a reframed mindset and the invention of an idea that is realistic, changing the game.
After a set period of time for this generation phase, the designer or team takes a step back and takes stock of the walls of sticky notes or pages of thumbnails. The most promising ideas are then selected for prototyping. Fast, cheap prototypes are the best way to solidify ideas enough to validate their further pursuit—low-fidelity, but high enough fidelity for the next phase to be beneficial.
This evaluation comes in the testing phase, where the prototypes are brought back to the user to understand what works and what doesn’t, from the user’s perspective and/or in the user’s environment. Results from these tests inform the development of further prototypes.
And, finally, if all goes well, the design is made real in the implementation phase.
So when I explain it like that, it all sounds pretty linear. In reality, though, it looks more like this:
The process is super iterative—and all based in the understanding of the target user. And this is why I love it—I love the chance to understand what makes a particular user group tick, what drives and motivates them, and then to create something that works for them, that makes their lives just a bit easier, more joyful, better.
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I approach design with users first in mind. I am also so excited to have so much to learn about the process of design, and by the idea that this will always be the case—I am so eager to keep learning about it for many, many years ahead.