Six Senses
What does your context smell like? Taste like? Enrich your ways of describing your design space.
What does your context smell like? Taste like? Enrich your ways of describing your design space.
Visual artifacts help get your team on the same page and make your team process transparent.
Visit storyviz.com for more visual communication tools than you know what to do with.
Prototypes don’t have to be oriented toward your solution. Put a prototype in your user’s hands to help direct the conversation.
Put your idea to your users!
A user essence statement helps you figure out what’s interesting or surprising about your user.
A point-of-view statement is a valuable guidepost in your design process.
Prototyping often means building with whatever’s at hand, so make sure you’ve got your materials ready.
Coming up with needs at the right level of specificity is hard. A why-how ladder can help you understand how specific or general to be.
You may think of improv exercises as a way to get your team’s energy up, but they can also help you focus.
Placing things or people on a 2×2 matrix where you define the axes can help you clarify relationships and draw out insights.
Think about a process – any process – that’s part of your design space and articulate it with a journey map.
An empathy map is one way to unpack a user story to draw out needs and insights.
Filling your design space with artifacts that connect you to your user keeps you focused on your user and can help you draw out connections and insights.
You’ve done your empathy work – now what? Sharing and capturing stories will help you crystallize and identify your key findings.
Look beyond the problem space that you’re studying. Parallels and connections between your area and other areas can invigorate your empathy research.
Even if you can code up a digital product quickly, a paper prototype may be a better starting point.
Engaging extreme users who are often ignored in the empathizing stage can often help to create a solution that helps everyone.
By talking to users about their choices and behaviors, we can identify their needs and design for those needs.
Preparing for an interview not only allows you to make a deeper connection with your user but also allows you to obtain more data with which to tackle your problem.
A user camera study is a way to decrease distance between you and your user by seeing the world through his or her eyes.
What? How? Why? is a framework for moving from observation to inference about users in real-world scenarios.
Prototypes don’t have to be objects you prepare and show off. Here’s how to learn from your users by letting them create your prototype.
Giving and receiving feedback is a constant in design process. Here’s a structured way to build feedback into your group routine.
Sometimes expertise can be the enemy of open-mindedness. How do you ditch your preconceptions about a space, no matter your level of familiarity?
When you’re showing a prototype to somebody, your questions and behavior matter. Here’s what to do – and what NOT to do.
We use this improv game to get students’ bodies active as well as to get them reacting to and building on each other’s ideas.
