The "Design Thinking" Way (1/2)

Hey Guys,

Here I am with my new series of blog, which is kind of unique that I am writing into outside of technical space. There were times when I used to think that what the hell folks do in "Design Thinking" and why they just don't start coding when they know all the stuff that needs to be there & discussed in Specification document.

Well Well Well Hang on.... This is not so simple as it sounds... and I realized it around after 10 years of my IT career.You have to open the think-tank in the things that go in Agile way and have to really wear the customer shoes before you actually "start-to-code".

Design Thinking is all about adopting human-centric way of thinking like the end user and then start designing your software. During the course of this, it becomes a simplified process of collecting requirements as we understand the context of the process and literally "why" we are designing it!!

Now with that being said, "putting yourself in customer's shoes" is not all that easy.

This involves some steps and design-thinking being a phased approach tactics is strictly not understood by merely watching the videos or reading an book.

Sometimes we have to just fail and that's the way of learning it better. So a great tip here:

"Don't apply the Design Thinking concepts in your first assignment that you do, but remember all the things you did during the first assignment while going through the course of Design Thinking"...

• Read the concept, pause, think of your 1st Assignment of how have you handled it then and how you will handle it in your next one!!

Trust me, you will do amazing!! and if not then you are not James Bond!! So improvise and work on it....

Now lets start our journey by diving into some of the ways how we can think like a end-user, understand their requirements, build some really good prototypes (and I will suggest some tools to get that around) & finally ship them to your end-user with nice testing!!

1) Empathize with end-user

Now you don't have to hug your end-users but to be in their shoes to understand what their needs are and the use cases that they are looking to find solution for.

Few of ways to empathize are:

• Observations: How end-user is interacting with the product in their own way?

There can be a Direct Observation in which you directly see your customers interacting. Another one can be Indirect Observation in which recorded sessions or notes could be a tool.

• Interviews : In UX field, this is known as "User Research" where different set of questions are asked to end-users. Few tips behind these interactions are:

1. Do not interrupt the user while he/she is sharing his/her perspective with you
2. Take the user’s perspective.
3. Do not judge.
4. Take attention to repetitions and patterns in the discussion.
5. Listen attentively.
6. Train yourself in observation ( an Important one!!)

• So in between phase 1 and phase 2 you might have several things coming to your mind:

Why is the user blab-erring like this?

This seems so simple!! Why end-user is not able to get that?

Analyze the Collected data through Story Mapping as below:

Be Calm and then you will be able to define the problem (which is actually the next phase)

2) Define the Problem

So this is the step where all starts making sense of what you have been listening to your end-users.

• Clarify the queries to your business users again in order to refine them in detail as possible.
• Break problem statement into multiple small stories and ask yourself to train & walk-through the steps.
• Develop your Point-of-View(PoV) by brainstorming objects.

Follow a 3-segment approach as below:

Tip: During discussions ask "What-If?" statements and "How if not this?". This will generate ideas among your team and will help break down the problem into many smaller sections.

So this was all about the Introduction and first 2 phases of Design thinking.

There is still lot left to discuss & share the rest 3 phases: Ideate, Prototype & Testing which we will be covering in Part-2 of this series.

Stay tuned for upcoming articles....

Leave a feedback on below touch ups as how was this blog because "Learning never stops!!". Bye and take care.

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