Design Thinking

Attributes

1. Human Centered - Design thinking focuses on empathizing with people
2. Creative and Playful - reframe the problem and look at it from various perspectives in order to find many solutions
3. Iterative - Early rounds of testing, feedback and refinement deliver solutions people love
4. Prototype Driven - Tangible representations allow for sharing and early feedbacks
5. Collaborative - people with diverse perspectives work together, creating multidisciplinary teams that encourage different viewpoints, and client co-creation.

Frameworks

Concept Poster - describe your concept in a single sheet

Have the following fields within a single sheet of paper :

1. Concept Name
2. Value Statement/Unmet need
3. Key Stakeholders
4. Features and Benefits
5. Price/Pricing Model
6. Illustration of idea
7. Time and Cost to Develop

Stakeholder interviews - interviewing your target audience

Process :

• Look at your research goal and objectives to help you decide what types of people you’d need to speak to. Stakeholder Mapping is a good place to start and define your sample.
• Coordinate and schedule meeting for willing participants
  • Give 0.5 - 1 hour gaps between sessions
  • Schedule a maximum of 3-4 sessions
• Write your interview Discussion Guide
• Do a dry run with team and/or stakeholders with: test interview questions, Directed Storytelling topics and stimulus. Refine, if needed.

During the meetings be sure to have a moderator to take notes, and if doing in a group, ensure to debrief each interviewer immediately after the interviews.

Transfer your observations to a sticky note or similar structure, and place them on flip charts, paper on walls, or on tools such as Mural. Affinity Clustering can be used to add more meaning to the data gathered.

Interview debreifing

6 keywords which describe key behaviour/attitudinal characteristics :

1. Worrier
2. Highly Detail Oriented
3. Likes control
4. Trustworthy
5. Ambivalent toward her job
6. Creative tactician

Top 3 motivators :

1. Family
2. Maintaining a high level of integrity with carriers and customers
3. Creative, public-facing work, like marketing

5 core needs :

1. Organizational support, included dedicated assistance from help line and internally from department management
2. Streamlined internal processes, including eliminating and having better coordinated training and administrative processes
3. Autonomy : The ability to use her own systems for working, as it has enabled her to achieve great success
4. Time: She is consistently overwhelmed.
5. Fewer hoops to jump through when navigating partner portals

Affinity Clustering - finding themes

After conducting interviews, the key points collected from each interview can be put on a whiteboard, after which the common topics can be grouped together, which would generate themes to focus on as well as insights.

How Might We? - drill down to the core of the issue

This is a team discussion session where we need to do the following :

• Form an interdisciplinary team. You need different perspectives and people with different backgrounds to be part of the conversation
• Set the context by reminding each other of the initial challenge, and what you know to-date
• Allow time to explore the challenge and topic area. Allow the people with different experiences a chance to ask questions and discuss

Remind participants what is the phrase about :

1. How - assumes that solutions exist - creative freedom
2. Might - You can be comfortable coming up with ideas that may or may not work - it's okay because we need to be iterative
3. We : It's about collaborating

A useful structure for HMW statements is: How might we {verb} + {theme} + {user (context)}. E.g. How might we design a better travel experience for ABC company's employees?

Create as many HMW questions as possible.

Group similar ideas, discuss and agree on your most promising HMW questions to better represent your challenge. Visualize the vote to narrow down.

Use your reframed challenge statement(s) to come up with lots of ideas to solve the challenge using Round Robin or Creative Matrix.

Creative Matrix : Create a matrix, with columns of personas, and rows of categories of enablers(tech, environment, process, etc.). See Creative Matrix and Creative Matrix enablers.

Crazy 8 : Ask everyone to gather around, and after descriptively describing the problem as HMW questions, ask everyone to come up with 8 ideas taking 8 mins for each idea.

Brainstorming - generating ideas through collaborations

• Have a mix of diverse people, have a facilitator to moderate the discussions.
• Do a bit of ice-breaking, via games, self introduction and other activities

Share the ground rules for the brainstorming session with your team and gently remind everyone to stick to them during the session. Examples of good brainstorming rules are:

• Quantity over quality – the objective is to generate as many ideas as possible, they don’t have to be perfect or overthought
• Wild and crazy ideas are welcome – feasibility or viability should not be criteria
• Defer judgement – this is a safe space with no judgement
• Everyone should participate – allow time for everyone to share and discuss
• Build on ideas of others – to get to even more creative ideas

Next, give some additional inspiration to the group to encourage creative thinking and start one or more rounds of time boxed group brainstorming. For example:

• Use inspiration cards (find examples below in the ‘Method in action’ section below) or Brainstorm Cards from Board of Innovation
• Use inspiring prompts like “What would Google/Apple/[any leading company] do?”
• Use ‘reversed’ brainstorming by asking “How could you prevent the problem from being solved” which could inspire then creative ideas to solve as well