The design thinking process

- This course focuses on how to take the design thinking process remote without losing the essence of what makes it work so well as a collaborative team activity. In case you're not already familiar with the process, here's an incredibly brief overview of the main stages and how they relate to each other. Design thinking is a process for creating user-centered solutions to problems. It's primarily used to develop software-based solutions, but it can be applied much more broadly than that. The core principle of design thinking is that you've used the pain points you've uncovered from watching representative users do their work to create multiple possible solutions before narrowing down to one solution that you build in very rough prototype form so that you can test it with another set of potential users to gain feedback on whether you're on the right track. For me, the final stage of design thinking is taking what you've learned and creating an implementation plan so that you build the minimum possible to test your ideas with real code before continuing to flesh out the ideas and iteratively testing all the way through to releasing the product. The names I give to each of the stages are: observation, experience mapping to combine observations from each user and identify the key pain points, user goal creation, what a user is trying to achieve, and how could we remove those pain points? Persona creation, design charrettes for ideation, scenario and storyboards to show how the ideation concepts could be applied to solve the pain points. Paper prototype interface creation, user testing the paper prototype to understand what concepts work well, iterating on this process if necessary before creating a story map to plan out the functionality needed. And most importantly, the order in which it should be built. There are many different techniques you can use to complete each stage of the design thinking process. This is a list of the ones I've settled on that helped move a whole team of people through from initial user observations to a project plan without confusing them along the way. In this course, I'm not going to go through the justification for using each technique or the detailed steps to make it happen. I suggest that you at least watch my course on implementing design thinking. If you have personally been tasked with running a design thinking session, then you should definitely also watch my UX Design series so that you understand each of the techniques in depth. My preference, in fact, my insistence is to run design thinking workshops with a diverse group of individuals drawn from many different job functions across the organization, including developers, QA, marketing, sales, operations, and subject matter experts as well as user experience people. This diversity of thought means that you cover every angle in the design, which in turn means it's much more likely to be accepted by each different group as they're involved during the development process. As you can imagine, getting this group of people together in a remote session, using online versions of these techniques can be challenging. Through the rest of this course, we'll focus on the ways you can encourage creative thinking, teamwork and collaboration without being co-located.