Design Thinking Principles for Non-Designers | Catherine Stolarski | Skillshare
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Design Thinking Principles for Non-Designers

teacher avatar Catherine Stolarski, Product Designer

Watch this class and thousands more

Get unlimited access to every class
Taught by industry leaders & working professionals
Topics include illustration, design, photography, and more

Watch this class and thousands more

Get unlimited access to every class
Taught by industry leaders & working professionals
Topics include illustration, design, photography, and more

Lessons in This Class

    • 1.

      Introduction

      2:12

    • 2.

      Class & Project Overview

      0:34

    • 3.

      What Is Design Thinking?

      2:01

    • 4.

      When & Why Do We Use It?

      4:12

    • 5.

      The Design Thinking Process

      3:21

    • 6.

      Principle #1: Empathize With The User

      4:33

    • 7.

      Principle #2: Beginner's Mind

      2:02

    • 8.

      Principle #3: Holistic Approach

      3:00

    • 9.

      Principle #4: Collaboration

      3:00

    • 10.

      Principle #5: Lots of Ideas

      3:54

    • 11.

      Principle #6: Embrace Uncertainty

      5:51

    • 12.

      Principle #7: Implement a Solution

      4:26

    • 13.

      Conclusion

      0:57

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About This Class

Overview

Do you want to become more creative? Do you want to learn how to come up with innovative ideas? Then the Design Thinking Process is for you!

In this course, you will learn how you and your team can practice Design Thinking to boost your innovative capacities and find creative solutions to complex problems.

You will learn what is Design Thinking, its key principles and the step-by-step process to implement it in your organization.

Prior Knowledge 

This course is for any non-designer curious about Design Thinking and doesn’t require any prior knowledge in this field.

You can follow the class with just a pen and paper.

Meet Your Teacher

Teacher Profile Image

Catherine Stolarski

Product Designer

Teacher

Hello, I'm Catherine.

I am a French product designer with over 10 years of experience in practising Design Thinking to solve business problems and help companies to come up with creative solutions whether it is a physical product, a service, a process or a digital interface.

Through running my design consultancy in London, I had the chance to collaborate with entrepreneurs, startups as well as larger corporations.

See full profile

Level: Beginner

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Transcripts

1. Introduction: Hi there. How do you ever wonder why everybody's talking about design thinking to say, well more than a buzzword. It's actually a great tool that allows organizations to innovate. My name is Catherine said ascii, and I'm a product designer with over seven years practicing design thinking. Design thinking has allowed me to solve design problems and helps a company to come up with creative ideas. Whether it is a product, a process, a service, or a digital interface. Proud running my consultancy in London. I had the chance to collaborate with startups, entrepreneurs, and larger corporations by involving the team members in the design process, we came up with incredibly unique and creative IDs, showing that you don't have to be a designer to practice design thinking simply because how designers work is not magic. They actually follow a method that I will teach you in the next lessons. And you don't need any prior knowledge the belt design to follow this course. First, I will introduce you to design thinking. What is it, why and when to use it? What are the different steps of the process? We will then go through 70 design thinking principles. For each principle, you will learn how it works. What methods could you use? We will explore real-life examples, and then you will have to apply it for a practical exercise. By the end of this class, you will know how to use the process and the key ingredients to allow you and your team to come up with innovative ID and think like a designer, and to come up with creative solutions is only a few lessons away. So are you ready? Let's go. 2. Class & Project Overview: As a practical exercise, you will have to select a project you would like to work on. It could be a professional project or personal project funded instructions at the end of each class and fill out the worksheet attach. After free theoretical lessons, introducing design thinking, I will guide you step by step through the different stages with practical lesson. So pi, what you will learn in this goals, we will allow you to practice design thinking in real life. 3. What Is Design Thinking?: So what is design thinking? At, defined by Tim Brown, design thinking is a human-centered approach to innovation, anchored in understanding customer's needs, rapid prototyping, and generating creative ideas that will transform the way you deadlock products, services, processes, and organizations. When Tim Brown says it is an approach, this is because this is not just a process, it's also a mindset. This method allows people who aren't trained designers to use creative tools to address a wide range of challenges. So you don't have to be a designer to practice design thinking. And it is not pure creativity, but innovation. And more exactly creativity applied to a problem where we can measure the output. So what's the story up to 20 thinking? It is first inspired by how designers work and design agency, IDEO is commonly known as the inventor of this method. In fact, design thinking has been evolving from references in engineering, sociology, cognitive science, and design. And IDEO is the one that made it popular by consistently applying it, solving small and large scale problems. Nowadays, which are the companies that practice design thinking. It had been used by leaders and innovative companies such as IBM that see AirBNB, Siemens, and Addis. So what about you do want to follow the lead of this company's? Do you feel like design thinking good benefits your organization and projects? In the next lesson, we will learn what is the value of design thinking? 4. When & Why Do We Use It?: We are in a world where everything is linked and works in systems. And everything comes through to changes very fast. So the problems we face are complex, constantly evolving, and multifaceted. How to navigate through this complexity. How to quickly respond to change, how to adopt a system or still empowering individuals. These are the challenges often encountered in companies. And these challenges have a name. In 1992, Designer and scholar Richard document, frame, this ongoing challenge for design thinking through the notion of wicked problems. Wicked problems are problems that are complex, open-ended, and ambiguous. This is where design thinking becomes useful. When you can't answer the problem by yes or no, right or wrong. You can't usually rely on solely data from competition from past projects when facing high uncertainty. And that the right solution may not exist yet. You can apply a recipe, adapt a one size fits all attitude. Why? Because the mantra, we have always done things this way doesn't work anymore when it comes to wicked problems, and most importantly, doesn't allow innovation. Sometimes the data is wrong and the only way forward is to build your way forward. So how do you do it? Well, you also need an intuitive insight. By combining analytical and intuitive thinking. You're not only know what, but also the why. This gives you flexibility to adapt and consider new ideas while backing it up with data. Think like an inventor. You have a set of rules that need this part of experimentation to make a real discovery. So why design thinking? The benefits of using design thinking are to reduce risk by avoiding pitfall of offering the wrong solution. This also allows to reduce the level of costs as you figure out mistakes earlier and fix them faster. It allows you to meet real demand by understanding the mindset of people you are building the solution for. And also to line teams around common goals by formulating the problem and working together towards a solution. And of course, helps you to innovate by considering a wide array of fresh solutions. The different solutions could be products, services, experiences, interactions, processes, strategy, and also systems of all of the above. In 2015, study, I'm 235 international companies showed that design thinking improve their work culture by 71%, improved the innovation process by 69%. Have them save cost for 29% of them, and the help increase profitability for 18% of them. Design Thinking is best used to find solutions to complex, ambiguous problems. And now it's your turn. Distill wicked problems using the worksheet. My advice taught with small internal problem, don't reinvent the wheel just yet. By securing a when you will work on the bigger problem next. And it formed problem seems really two broad tried to break it down by focusing on more specific aspects of it. In the next lesson, we will go through the entire design thinking process. 5. The Design Thinking Process: So let's go through the design thinking process. Depending on the source, the design thinking process is constituted of four to seven stages. And each project is different. But generally, you have five steps, which are to empathize, which is learning from the people and interrogating your end users. To define in finding patterns, organizing your ideas. Ideate, where you find design principle and explore possibilities. Iterate. Where you make your solution tangible by testing, relevancy, and implementation, where you build the final version of your solution. This process is more a guide on the recipe. And to be honest, most of the time, it looks a little bit more like this, where you have to come back to explore new ideas after you have tested your prototype. The first step to empathise. You need to keep the end-user in mind, which is at the core of the design thinking process. So obviously the first step is to meet this user and learn as much as possible about who they are, what they do, and how they interact with their environment. Imagine that you're a spy. Uh, you need to gather knowledge on your user's interactions, habits, and feeding. What I go, what they'd like, why they do things a certain way. You have to keep every information as you don't know if it might be useful maxed. The second step is to define. It means that you have to integrate all of these findings and to find links between them. What are the common themes you see appearing? Synergize, distill, and connect your research. The third step is to ideate. At this stage, you explore as many ideas as possible with your team, no matter how crazy it is. And then you decide on the best solution that came up out of it. From there, you iterate. You make fast, inexpensive version of your solution. You test and assess what works and what doesn't. And from there, you refine your design accordingly. Lastly, when all your lights are green, it's time to create the final version of your solution. And as we're dealing with complex problems, there is no one size fits all cookie-cutter recipe. So you might have to adopt this process to your problem. So decide now what will be a challenge. Using the instructions in the worksheet. Pick one of the problem you listed earlier and rephrase it as a design challenge, them stopped planning your project. In the next seven lessons, we'll cover design thinking principles that will help you to find a solution to your challenge. 6. Principle #1: Empathize With The User: Let's start with the most important principle of design thinking, which is to empathize with your end-user. And first, let's see what happens if you don't empathize with your user. We all have seen some designs and think, what were they thinking? Quizzes will, well, most of the time they would not thinking, although a following bed instructions while being unaware of people's perspective. And what happens if this kind of errors happens at a larger scale? When Google launched the Google glasses, they spend years developing top-notch technologies. It was a great innovation. There's no doubt about that. And yet it failed because people didn't want to wear them. The price, $1500 is too much for what was perceived as an OB pair of glasses. So you have to do your research and understand how people perceive your product before you launch. It is very easy to focus on the technical aspect and details when you are in the midst of a product. This is why empathizing with the user is so important by using design thinking and make decisions based on what customers really want. Instead on relying only on historical data, technical performance, or making risky bets based on instinct instead of evidence. So how do we learn more about the people we designed for? We can start by demographics, market studies, even surveys, but they're not interactions and there are not enough. What they say, what I do and what they say to do is different. So it doesn't really tell us how they feel. So how do we find out what value for the user is? So there are other methods which are observation. You go and watch people take notes of what they do or even go one step further and experienced the problem first-hand yourself and note how you felt about it. You can conduct interviews. And you can also build analogies by looking at similar situations in a different context. So how do you collect information? First, you keep a record of your finding and write them down. You can use photography or video recording with people's concerns. Of course, you can ask your users to make a photo or video journal of the personal experience and don't forget to engage with extreme users, meeting people who are not your average user, as they usually experienced the problem harder and usually can express it in a clear way. Here's an example. Doug Dietz, N3 at General Electric Healthcare is the design of a new MRI machine. When he probably came to see it in action in Pittsburgh Children's Hospital, he realized that kids were terrified of it. And we're often sedated because there were so anxious with the scanning procedure. He wanted to solve this problem knowing that he couldn't redo the entire machine from scratch. At a workshop at Stanford's D School, where he learned about human-centered design methods. He decided to apply them to improve how children experience the MRI scan. He conducted interviews and by exploring children analogies and story. He came up with this to scam becomes an adventure and makes children excited instead of scared. This shows how empathy can really improve people's experience. And dog is since training other general electric employees to practice design thinking. So you have to stay curious, learn as much as you can and keep an open mind. Don't make any judgment at this phone is you shouldn't try to find solution to avoid any bias in gathering information. And remember, the primary goal of design thinking is to focus on users need and our children, who are the people experiencing a problem? Think of the problem from the perspective, starts with an observation and understand how and why. How can you collect more information and use the worksheet? In the next lesson, we will see how to avoid bias in research. 7. Principle #2: Beginner's Mind: So how do we keep a beginners mindset to solve problems? As a master Sayed, if your mind is empty, it is always ready for anything. It is open to everything. In the beginner's mind. There are many possibilities, but in the expert's mind, there are few. This might sound counterproductive, but in the context where we are looking at new ideas, it is important to keep a fresh, open-mind and to assume that we don't know. The most important is to avoid assumptions, ask questions, dig deeper, and make a hypothesis rather than a statement. One method is to ask questions like a detective or a dramatist. Always ask who, what, how, why, when, and where. And then to dig deeper, we need to pass through the superficial answer and ask why again and again. The 5-Why method is as simple as it sounds. Each time you get an answer, you ask, why. Don't draw conclusions unless you have research to back it up. Scientists formulate what you think is right as a hypothesis until your research confirms. And firms at keeping a curious and judgment free mind will help you dive deeper into the problem and collect more valuable information. Have you gone deep enough in your research? Have you kept on and biased and beginner's mind tried to be as impartial as possible and organize a research finding you have collected so far. Do you see information that you wouldn't have expected to see? What are the recurring teams? Use the worksheets to guide you. And in the next lesson, we will see how to get a broad vision of the project. 8. Principle #3: Holistic Approach: So why is it important thing holistically? When you are developing a new solution? It is not solely about uses need. It is also depending on your goals and your technical constraints. But it's not that simple. As you start digging deeper in your research, you see that it might actually look a little bit more like this. And that all of these elements connected to each other. Our word is complex and interconnected. And this is why it is important to grasp a broader view of the context within which you're problem is. This bird's eye view is called holistic design or design, and Nicholas Philips defines it. Holistic design takes into account the person, the device, the moment, the ethnographic environment, the physical space as well as human behavior and psychology. Like thinking, attitudes, emotions, motivations, abilities, triggers, et cetera, and aims to deliver an optimal experience. And how do you represent this complex set of interactions in a simple way. There are many ways to create a representation of your interactions. The first one is a journey map, which focuses on the users or customers interactions. What they do, think and feel at each step of the journey. The Venn diagram helps you visualize different dimensions, interact. In a two-by-two chart. You can place different elements depending on two parameters. And the relationship map shows the link between all the elements. These will not only help you visualize what your project entails, but also communicates with others. The most common representation is mind-map. Usually place your subject at the center here, your design challenge. And you start mapping all the elements and relations that are interacting with it. Here are a few examples, so it can be hand-drawn. If you feel creative, you can add a few sketches, are keep it simple. My tip is to build it little by little and know that it can evolve. Your map is not set in stone. You can come back to it real good, nice elements and add new findings as you progress in your project. This map can help you keep all the parameters in mind when you advance in your product. And now it's your turn, plays the problem at the center and surrounded by elements that could influence or with which the user interacts. In the next lesson, we will see how to cultivate a cross-disciplinary approach through collaboration. 9. Principle #4: Collaboration: In this lesson, we will see why collaboration is so important. We have seen that a design challenge is complex and link to different domains of expertise. So how do you make sure that you get to the bottom of all of these aspects? You can do it by yourself. And usually one person is not an expert in all of these fields. So you need to build a collective intelligence and you make it possible through collaboration and by assembling a cross-disciplinary, diverse team. Each member of the team will have ideas and insights to offer. And it is the combination of these insights and ideas which will allow you to make sure that all the aspects of your challenge are covered. So how do you create your team? Make sure you have experts are representative from each field. Involve, remember your diagram, which domain where directly linked to your challenge. Ideally, you will have one representative of each. At least you need one representative and user as the solution is for this person, we want the feedback at each step of the process. It is also good practice to include one person of instruments or authority from your organization. Why? Because this person will get firsthand understanding of what you do and thus will help you with implementing change as he or she will be a powerful advocate of your project. You will also avoid dispersion to perceive your independent team project as a threat to their authority. It is important to understand that each of these members speaks a different language. So you need to make sure everybody understands what each member does. What are the usual tasks and objectives, what inputs that you'd like to have, which set of data they need and how to present it. Today have words which have a specific meaning in the field. You have to respect each other, values and approach. And keep in mind that no party is better than the other. And each might holds more expertise in a certain domain. It may take up to three weeks to adjust. To collaborate is to add, create value to achieve things collectively that you cannot achieve in individually from your challenge to determine who will be part of your team, right, a list of people along with the coal knowledge. In the next lesson, we will explore how to make the most of the collective to generate creativity and innovation within the team. 10. Principle #5: Lots of Ideas: You have now gathered valuable information and organize your findings with your team. Well now going to explore the ideation stage. What is ideation? Ideation is a creative process of generating, developing, and communicating new ID, where an ID is understood as a basic element of boat that can be either visual, concrete, or abstract. This will bring you opportunity to step being the obvious, to increase your innovation potential and to bring together perspectives and strength of your team members. It is now time to generate IDs. Don't worry, the design thinking got you covered with games and exercises that will help you generate a lot of IDs. Before you start, make sure to the topic of this session is clear for everyone. Remember the how might we questions. Use this technique to phrase the problems as challenges to encourage solution driven IDs. The most common ideation technique is brainstorming. Team members sit around the table and each share their opinion, write things down on a whiteboard, a post-it notes, and try to make a decision. It is not always the best one as it doesn't encourage new IDs. Are everybody's ID to become sort of a equally. Luckily, now plenty of other techniques that have been developed and here are some of them. The first one is camber, and it stands for Substitute, Combine, Adapt, Modify, Put to another, use, Eliminate and rearrange. This method will allow you to organize to different features, solution and to select the best ones. The second method is the crazy aids. Each participant separate a piece of paper into eight areas, are drew eight boxes. Set a timer for eight minutes when each participant draw one idea per square per minute, it is effective for smaller challenges are products. Another method as a mashup. This technique invented by design agency ideal, is meant to bring odds or unexpected things together to spark fresh ideas. Step one, frame, articulate the challenge as How Might We statement? Step too narrow. Pick two broad unrelated categories like hospitals and hotels, are waiting rooms and schools. Think outside your industry. Step three, generate, starting with one category at a time. List as many elements of these two experiences you can into minutes. Step for mashup, combined items from the two lists to ideate as many new products, services, or experiences as you can. All of these techniques can be adapted online through collaborative tools like Mirror, mirror, things to keep in mind. Go for quantity, encourage wild ideas, defer judgment. Avoid blocking and build on each other's ideas. And most of all, have fun. And it is not about coming up with the right ID at this time. It is about generating the broadest range of possibilities. Now that we have seen how a team can generate a lot of creative ideas, it's your turn. Organize your ideation workshop, gather your team around a defined objective and select the best exercise to proceed. Find additional help in the reference list in the worksheet. In the next lesson, we will learn how to start developing the solution. 11. Principle #6: Embrace Uncertainty: You probably have now a lot of possible ideas and a half probably selected a few that are more realistic to explore further, but you are not done yet. As you now need to test the validity of your concept through an iterative process. Iteration is an incremental improvement and validation process in which you create a real life model of your id, a prototype that you will then test to know what works and what doesn't. So you make an experiment and you learn from it. Each cycle of prototyping and testing is an iteration, brings you one step closer to your end point. So what is prototyping is a draft version of your solution, a physical representation of your assumption, and it must be quick and inexpensive. This is a paper prototype for a smart watch app. Paper prototyping is often used for screen interfaces like this mobile app. Here, a physical model of the id made out of Kabul. And here a set that can be quickly rearrange where people play different scenarios. You can see this is not about being beautiful or well-crafted. This is not your final solution. This is why it is better if it is made out of cardboard and tape and you come get attached to it because it will change, it will evolve. The goal here is to test your ID in real life with real users and to learn from their what works and what doesn't. So you can make another prototype, a better prototype, and test it again. So why testing? Well, if you innovate, how can you collect data on a product that doesn't exist? Share user can say what they imagine the future to be. But once you put the prototype in front of them, they might change their mind. And it's okay. And this is why you prototyped and don't build the entire solution in one go. The only way to solve the problem is to build your WayForward, generate data through observing interactions between your prototype and your user. So how do you test your prototype? Off course, you have to interact with the user, but the prototype in front of them and see what happens. So how do you test your prototype? Of course, you have to interact with the end-user, put the prototype in front of them and see what happens as much as possible. You have to do it in the context or environment. It is meant to be used in with the right interactions between people, objects, and the location. Record everything, gather reactions, success, information, and then go back to your prototype and make changes accordingly. Keep track of your advancements with measurable outcomes as time-on-task satisfaction rates, et cetera. And don't influence the user. Don't ask misleading questions and be impartial. So what methods can you use? Here are a few. The first one is Gary casting. You can go on the street or any public space and ask people randomly what they think about your prototype. It is very inexpensive method, but it is best to use it for the very early stages of your prototype. As a result, are less reliable, doesn't take all the conditions are the previously listed. More controlled methods are role playing. Like a play, you follow a script, recreate an act, different scenarios, and record the user's reactions. It is great if you design a service by example. Another meta is Wizard of odes. When your prototype is not totally functional, you follow what the user does and you and your team activate the response accordingly. This gives you a great idea of how your solution works without having to invest in fully developing the technology behind it. Ab testing. This is when you are down to the fine details. And you want to know which of two of more variations is the most effective. You put both in exactly the same context and measure the outcome. As a good example of evolution. These are the prototypes, engineers when fruit to build the asthma robot, you can see how they use iteration to refine the design. And that what they started with is really different from what they ended up with. Be okay with uncertainty. Until you test your prototype, you don't know if it's going to succeed or fail. And you have to be comfortable with uncertainty. As David Kelly said, you have to fail fast. If you want to succeed sooner. Don't be afraid of failing. Failing is good. It means you learning and it's better to fade. Now that at the end of the road when your product is out there on the market. What you should remember is to step back from perfection, focus on function, preserve ambiguity until you have data to back up your choice, built quickly and as often so you can develop a better solution. It is now time to create your prototype. Which tools would you use? Who do we need to help you? How would you test it? In the next lesson, we will go through last thoughts and consideration when finalizing your solution. 12. Principle #7: Implement a Solution: In this final lesson, we'll go through a few considerations and frequently asked questions before you finalize your solution. Ultimately, design thinking is a solution-driven approach that helps to deliver viable product on the market. You now feel like you're getting close to the final solution. But how to be sure? Actually, the iterative process could never end as you could always improve your solution, right? But how to make sure it is good enough then? Here are a few conditions to consider. Is your solution useful? Does it solve one or more users needs? Is it achievable? Do you have access to the means and technology to execute it? Is valuable. Is it align with your business goals? Are people ready to pay for it? Is a desirable, does it bring joy, satisfaction? Did you receive a positive feedback from your users? Is it attractive? Is it safe? Is it homeless? Does it align with health and safety measures? Is it expected to people understand what it is? Is it used as you intended for? Are all the stakeholders align around the same expectations? Hasn't been validated. Did it meet your success metrics? Does it bring a solution to your design challenge? If your answer is yes, at all of the above, you are ready to launch. And if you have dumplings, right, you have all the data to support your choices. You have support from your team members, coming from different departments and backgrounds, and a person of influence, authority in your team will back up your IDEs. Have you encountered some roadblocks along the way? A few frequently asked questions. It didn't work. Why? Well, the main reasons behind design thinking failures are rather the culture of your organization. Is it ready to adapt to new processes? Are wrong problem framing. The key here is practice. Remember that you have to rewire your brain to new thinking habit. And it doesn't happen overnight. And this is not a comfortable process. It has to be learned and practice to be mastered. Try again and start with small problem to build up your experience. I got lost in the process. What can I do? What is the last part you are sure of? Go back to it and start again. You have to remember that this is not a linear process. And you often have to go back to redefine your problem, redo research, generate new ideas, start new prototype, and so on. How do I overcome political barriers? Politics as the Invisible Influence structure can often be a problem. And we have seen fantastic teams that have formed, but internal company politics prevented them from succeeding. And this method does not work if you don't have the right culture in your organization. And this might take time and you have to repeat your message over and over again and show results before they can change their mind. And if it's too hard to work on a professional project, you can start practicing on a personal one. This will give you the confidence to tackle a bigger challenge next time. Once you feel that your project is good to go, you don't have to go all in from there. You can keep on working with incremental steps. The next one could be to launch a pilot to test the entire system behind your solution and see how it goes. If you have found this process hard, don't worry. As you work out new thinking habits, practices, the key. Have you filled the checklist? If yes, congratulations. You are ready to launch your solution. What are your next steps? And good luck. 13. Conclusion: And regulations. You're now a design thinker in this course. We have gone through the entire design thinking process. You now know how creativity and innovation is a mindset away of the thing game and a proactive process to find a new solution. The more you practice thinking for his lenses on each project, the easier it will get for you to see opportunities watching you and your team on the right path to create innovative solutions. Now that you know how to think creatively, I hope you will use this power to make the world a better place. Have you completed the worksheet uploaded into a resource in Project section and share it with the class. Thank you for completing this course and see you in the next month.