Reflections on the Design Process

In the design school process, there are six steps.

1. Understand - become an expert quick. Here, we come to a quick understanding of the focus area by doing background reading, figuring out who you need to talk to, looking at past interventions, and trying to figure out what the problem area is. The big goal is to talk to extreme users -- people who are deeply immersed in one or the other end of your target area -- to get an idea about the area from the people who know and care the most about it.

We started.

We settled into the focus area of STEM education.

2. Observe - deepen your insights. An insight is something that we wouldn't have assumed before the exercise. We interview and visit users. We capture their experiences. We figure out what makes them tick by finding common threads. We don't stay at the surface ideas of what they say and do - we try to find what they think and feel.

We interviewed.

We synthesized insights.

We drew graphs.

We cut before measuring.

3. Point of View - capture the meaning. There are a lot of insights from the previous step, but why are those insights there? This step is most deeply about empathy. It is about understanding the user's worldview better than they do, and certainly better than they say. What does the user need? Deep down, why does the user care? What makes the user get up in the morning and keep on fighting?

We refocused on user needs.

4. Visualize - generate compelling solutions. Here, we choose a point of view, ask how we might solve a piece of that point of view, and come up with solutions that answer those how might we questions. The goal is to generate tons of ideas that you can test out later.

We questioned ways to address those needs.

We answered those questions.

5. Prototype - make the idea physical, tangible. The goal here is to answer questions about what ideas are good. A prototype is not a solution; a prototype is a question. That might involve a physical prototype, a near implementation, or a rough 'low resolution' prototype (ie, a sketch or a skit), but any way, it will test some part of a potential solution.

We built.

6. Test and Iterate - get feedback and make changes. This is what many people try to skip to when they have an idea. This is about the polish. After prototypes have answered questions about what works, what doesn't and what needs more work, the testing and iteration will tell you whether or not you truly are solving the needs identified in your point of view. It will guide you as you move forward into the real world.

We refined.

Of course, the process isn't linear. In the process of polishing a statue, you might discover that the whole thing crumbles and you need to go back to visualizing.

The breadth varies across the design process. When understanding, you are choosing your target area, which narrows the focus down from all of the world's problems to one problem area. When observing, you expand your thoughts to everything involved in that problem area. A point of view narrows it down to one specific user group and their emotional needs. Visualization expands to many potential solutions. Prototyping brings forward the more promising solutions. Testing and iterating brings it down to the one solution onto which you attach your standard.

As time progresses, the number of ideas goes down from everything in the world to one concrete solution, and the cost of failure increases at each step. That's why it's a good idea to fail early and fail often so that it's easier to succeed when it counts.

Concreteness varies also. You might start with a concrete idea of the problem that you wanted to tackle. Then, you depart from the concrete and find out the big picture ideas that live around the problem. You begin to get more concrete as you visualize solutions, and it keeps on getting more concrete as you build solutions and build the entire institution around one particular solution.

User needs permeates it all. That is what I love most about the design process. People are at the center, the middle, and the edges of it. You interview people every step of the way. You figure out what people need. You abandon a solution if it doesn't address a real need that people have. You refine until people are satisfied. This is what the world is about.