midterm design thinking

Enterprise Systems

These are systems that are used to aid businesses in business operations/processes execute smoothly and successfully to achieve the businesses’ goals.

Can be a transaction processing system, management information system, decision support system and the like a suite called Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) System.

Business Intelligence System

Helps users with statistical analysis of data by analyzing data from users, processing it into patterns or trends and showing it to users using visualization tools.

It helps in making mid to upper-level management coming up with a strategic business decision.

Business Process Management System

a tool that allows organizations to manage, automate, and optimize their recurring business processes.

Generally, consist of a customizable digital form to collect information for the process and an automated workflow of tasks to process the information.

Customer Relationship Management System

An application that lets businesses provide continuous healthy relationship to its customers by consistently providing high quality of customer services like customer support, customer interactions, marketing and the like

Enterprise Resource Planning System

A cross-functional information system that provides organization-wide coordination and integration of the key business processes and helps in planning the resources of an organization

Human Resource Management System

A system for human resource processes such as job hiring, employee records management, attendance checking, employee performance and promotion monitoring, .and payroll

Supply Chain Management System

Is management of the flow of goods, data, and finances related to a product or service, from the procurement of raw materials to the delivery of the product at its final destination

Computer Game Systems

It is an emotional artifact used through a series of structured interactions.

Adventure:

Story-driven and have one or more central characters

Action:

Games that test players’ dexterity, reaction time and quick-wittedness under pressure

Word Games:

A subgenre of Puzzle/Guessing Games but focuses mainly on utilizing words as the main ingredient of the challenge

Role Playing Games:

Similar to adventure games, but are normally defined more by the growth of the main character throughout the course of the game’s story

Strategy:

Involves careful planning, resource management, and decision making and the level of minutia the player must maintain

Simulation:

It emulates real or fictional reality, to simulate a real situation or event

Board/Card Based Games:

Usually a digital version of a real-world game. These games use boards or cards.

Idle Games:

These are simplified games that involve minimal player involvement, such as clicking on an icon over and over. These keep players engaged by rewarding those who complete simple objectives.

Sports Games:

It simulates sports like golf, football, basketball, baseball, soccer., skiing, darts and pool

Vehicles:

These games revolve around the operation of a vehicle on land, in water, in air, or in space

Network Design Solution

A solution which is a design of a network to provide consistent, high speed connectivity between devices.

It is achieved by careful planning, thorough research, effective construction, consistent monitoring and responsive maintenance

Structured Cabling Systems:

A group of computers and peripheral devices that share a common communications line or wireless link to a server within a distinct geographic area.

Remote Network Monitoring:

Network that allows computers that are in a large-number of distance, like half a mile, to connect and communicate with each other

Home & Office Network (SOHO):

A network solution for small scale groups of devices in which high-end network companies are tapped to provide an efficient network.

Enterprise Network:

A network solution provided to strengthen the business and IT processes.

Design Thinking

is an iterative process in which we seek to understand the user, challenge assumptions, and redefine problems in an attempt to identify alternative strategies and solutions that might not be instantly apparent with our initial level of understanding.

Provides a solution-based approach to solving problems.

Empathize:

A stage to gain an empathic understanding of the problem you are trying to solve. It allows design thinkers to set aside their own assumptions about the world in order to gain insight into users and their needs

Define the problem:

It helps the designers in your team gather great ideas to establish features, functions, and any other elements that will allow them to solve the problems or, at the very least, allow users to resolve issues themselves with the minimum of difficulty

Ideate:

The identification of new solutions to the problem statement you’ve created, and you can start to look for alternative ways of viewing the problem

Prototype:

A number of inexpensive, scaled down versions of the product or specific features found within the product are produced in this stage, so they can investigate the problem solutions generated in the previous stage.

Test:

Here is where developers or evaluators test the complete product using the best solutions identified during the prototyping phase. This is an iterative process

Empathize

A stage to gain an empathic understanding of the problem you are trying to solve.

It allows design thinkers to set aside their own assumptions about the world in order to gain insight into users and their needs

The process which involves developing a sense of empathy towards the people you are designing for, to gain insights into what they need, what they want, how they behave, feel, and think, and why they demonstrate such behaviors, feelings, and thoughts when interacting with products in a real-world setting.

Assuming a Beginner’s Mindset

Designer’s should do their best to leave their own assumptions and experiences behind when making observations of the users.

Never judge what you observe

Question everything – even if you may say you know the answer

Really listen what the others (users and co-designer) are saying.

Ask What? How? Why?

By asking the three questions — What? How? Why? — designers can move from concrete observations that are free from assumptions to more abstract motivations driving the actions they have observed.

Photo and Video User-based Studies

This is used to uncover needs that the users did not realize they needed.

It can help guide your innovation efforts, identify the right end users to design for, and discover emotions that guide behaviors.

Users are photographed or filmed either: (a) in a natural setting; or (b) during sessions with the design team or consultants users hired to gather information.

Personal Photos and Video Journals

The users are asked by the designers to make logs of their day-to-day activities especially with the ones when or where they encounter the problem.

It is used to have personal experiences and user stories without the interruption or presence of the designer.

Interview

Mostly structured method of gathering information from users where a set of questions are prepared to understand the needs, hopes, desires, and goals.

The questions can be Open-Ended Questions or Closed Questions

Open-Ended -

Well-suited for getting opinions 

Closed

Used when all of the answers can be listed as choices

Engaging with Extreme Users

By focusing on the extremes, you will find that the problems, needs and methods of solving problems become magnified.

The extreme user refers to a user that utilizes the current system’s functions to the maximum level, like a user that shops on an online app 24/7 for a volume of different items and does all modes of payments.

Identify first extreme users, engage with this group to establish their feelings, thoughts and behaviors, and then look at the needs you might find in all users.

Analogous Empathy

The use of analogy in developing new insights.

Analogies are used to compare two or more scenarios which helps the designers open up their eyes and deepen their understanding.

Methods that can be done: comparing your problem and another in a different field, creating an 'inspiration board' with notes and pictures, focusing on similar aspects between multiple areas

Sharing Inspiring Stories

Design team members will be sharing their research, , from field studies, interviews, etc., to speed on progress, draw meaning from the stories, and capture interesting details of the observation work

Bodystorming

is the act of physically experiencing a situation in order to immerse oneself fully in the users’ environment.

This requires a considerable amount of planning and effort, as the environment must be filled with the artifacts present in the real-world environment, and the general atmosphere/feel must accurately depict the users’ setting.

It puts the team in the users’ shoes, thereby boosting the feelings of empathy we need as designers in order to come up with the most fitting solutions.

Empathy Map

It allows you to sum up your learning from engagements with people in the field of design research.

The map provides four major areas in which to focus our attention on, thus providing an overview of a person’s experience.

An Empathy Map consists of four quadrants (SAID, DID, THOUGHT, FELT). The four quadrants reflect four key traits, which the user demonstrated/possessed during the observation/research stage

Empathy Map: Best Practice

Step 1: Fill out the Empathy Map

Step 2: Synthesize NEEDS

Step 3: Synthesize INSIGHT

Step 1: Fill out the Empathy Map

Lay the four quadrants out on a table, draw them on paper or on a whiteboard.

Review your notes, pictures, audio, and video from your research/fieldwork and fill out each of the four quadrants while defining and synthesizing:

Step 2: Synthesize NEEDS.

Synthesize the user’s needs based on your Empathy Map. This will help you to define your design challenge.

Needs are verbs, i.e. activities and desires. Needs are not nouns, which will instead lead you to define solutions.

Identify needs directly from the user traits you noted. Identify needs based on contradictions between two traits, such as a disconnection between what a user says and what the user does

Step 3: Synthesize INSIGHTS

An “Insight” is your remarkable realization that can help you to solve the current design challenge you’re facing.

Look to synthesize major insights, especially from contradictions between two user attributes. It can be found within one quadrant or in two different quadrants. You can also synthesize insights by asking yourself: “Why?” when you notice strange, tense, or surprising behavior.

Write down your insights.

Empathy Map: Steps

Step 1: Define the scope and purpose

Step 2: Conduct relevant research

Step 3: Fill out your empathy map

Step 4: Analyze the quadrant data

Step 5: Identify your users’ needs

Define the Problem

It helps the designers in your team gather great ideas to establish features, functions, and any other elements that will allow them to solve the problems or, at the very least, allow users to resolve issues themselves with the minimum of difficulty.

Defining the problem aids in making a guiding concept of what you should do to solve the problem of the users.

A good problem statement opens the doorway to ideation process

Analysis

It is about breaking down complex concepts and problems into smaller, easier-to-understand constituents.

It starts with stage 1, Empathize.

Example: The collected data during Empathize are looked into its details. Either separating, grouping, sorting, removing some details in order to see the whole picture of the scenario.

Synthesis

It involves creatively piecing the puzzle together to form whole ideas.

Synthesis happens when you interpret the organized data from empathizing with your users.

What is a Problem Statement?

It will guide you and your team and provide a focus on the specific needs that you have uncovered.

What Makes a Good Problem Statement?

It helps to begin the problem statement with a verb, such as “Create”, “Define”, and “Adapt”, to make the problem become more action-oriented.

Human-Centered:

The problem statement should be about the people the team is trying to help, rather than focusing on technology, monetary returns or product specifications.

Narrow enough to Make it Manageable:

Problem statements should have sufficient constraints to make the project manageable. 

Broad enough for Creative Freedom:

The problem statement should not focus too narrowly on a specific method regarding the implementation of the solution. It should not list technical requirements.

Space Saturate and Group and Affinity Diagrams

Designers collate their observations and findings into one place, to create a collage of experiences, thoughts, insights, and stories.

The term 'saturate' describes the way in which the entire team covers or saturates the display with their collective images, notes, observations, data, experiences, interviews, thoughts, insights, and stories in order to create a wall of information to inform the problem-defining process.

It will then be possible to draw connections between these individual elements, or nodes, to connect the dots, and to develop new and deeper insights, which help define the problem(s) and develop potential solutions

Empathy Mapping

An empathy map consists of four quadrants (SAID, DID, THOUGHT, FELT) laid out on a board, paper or table, which reflect the four key traits that the users demonstrated/possessed during the observation stage.

Determining what the users said and did are relatively easy; however, determining what they thought and felt is based on careful observation of how they behaved and responded to certain activities, suggestions, conversations etc. (including subtle cues such as body language displayed and the tone of voice used).

Point of View Problem Statement

s a meaningful and actionable problem statement, which will allow you to ideate in a goal-oriented manner.

A POV involves reframing a design challenge into an actionable problem statement.

You articulate a POV by combining these three elements – user, need, and insight.

How Might We” Questions

How Might We (HMW) questions are questions that have the potential to spark ideation sessions such as brainstorms.

They should be broad enough for a wide range of solutions, but narrow enough that specific solutions can be created for them. “How Might We” questions should be based on the observations you’ve gathered in the Empathize stage of the Design Thinking process.

Why-How Laddering

Designers seek to define the problem and will generally ask why. Designers will use why to progress to the top of the so-called Why-How Ladder, where the ultimate aim is to find out how you can solve one or more problems.