For the empathy phase of my design challenge, I was planning to use a combination of the secondary research and extreme and mainstreams methods as introduced in the IDEO design kit; however, I hit an obstacle. Like some of my other peers, due to time constraints and time of year (summer holidays), the participants that I was hoping to interview for my needs assessment are not available. Fortunately, I have been in touch with one of my colleagues who assists one of the faculty members during class and was able to interview her to get her perspective on the students’ conduct while guest speakers present. With the interview results and the secondary research, I decided to use an empathy map to assist me with synthesizing the results. As pointed out by our instructor, Jordanne Christie, in her Collaborate Session presentation on July 3, an empathy map will allow us to “draw out unexpected insights about end users’ words, thoughts, feelings and actions”. Please refer to Figure 1 to see the findings.
Figure 1: Empathy Map by Joyce W.
To try and define my design challenge, the method that resonates with me so far is the Point-of-View (POV) Madlib method which was described by Woolery (2017) and in the d.school bootcamp bootleg. The POV statement incorporates the information about the end user, their needs and the insights that has been noted during the empathy phase.
[USER] needs to [USER’S NEED] because [SURPRISING INSIGHT]
I feel that this method will help me to reframe my design challenge especially since the POV statement can be converted into “How Might We (HMW)” questions, which will lead into the Ideate phase of the design thinking process.
References:
IDEO. (2015). Design Kit – Methods. Retrieved from http://www.designkit.org/methods
Stanford University Institute of Design. (2016). Bootcamp Bootleg. Retrieved from http://dschool-old.stanford.edu/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/METHODCARDS-v3-slim.pdf
Woolery, E. (2017). Design Thinking Handbook. Retrieved from https://www.designbetter.co/design-thinking