drawn by @cwodtke

Five Habits of Design Thinking

When Common Sense is Not Enough

A picture is still worth a thousand words. Credit: https://thedesignsquiggle.com

1. An Interview Is a Conversation

The core skill of research is interviewing. If you cannot ask effective questions about your products and services, you cannot get the information you need to succeed.

From Luxr, an alternative to the script https://www.slideshare.net/clevergirl/luxr-oneday-workshop

2. Inhabit the Data

Now we’ve gotten a whole bunch data from our interviews, how are we going to make sense of it all?

4. Critique, not Criticism

A designer comes up with a potential direction for something. They show it to you. You say things. What do you say?

  • Goals. What is the purpose of this work?
  • Attempts: what has the designer tried to do?
  • Successes: where is the design effective at meeting the goal?
  • Possibilities: Do you know anything that could make this design better?

5. Iterate with Your Target Market

Time to get more feedback on the wonderful thing you just thought up, this time with the people who have no expertise except life. In many ways, this is just 1+2+3+4. Ready?

Design Thinking & Design Doing

Finally, while Design Thinking is all nifty pancakes and all, doing design is an entire craft and it’s a SO important to learn to do it right if you want to make things that are not just innovative but good. User experience research, information architecture, interaction design, interface design are all large bodies of knowledge with entire books written about them — and that’s just a few of the skills we need to make good software.

Booklist, if you actually want to learn to design digital stuff rather than just think about it

Understand People: https://amzn.to/307TPNE
Make information make sense: https://amzn.to/2LA7j0L
Make software that behaves well: https://amzn.to/2RSWjg3
Make software that looks good: https://amzn.to/2J5xomF
Most importantly, make software that IS good. https://amzn.to/2J6ykaI
https://amzn.to/2LyqaJE

0. Pick the Right Problem

Thanks to a conversation with Abi Jones right after I wrote this, I feel like I need to add one more habit. People who have internalized Design Thinking spend more time than most on making sure they’ve got the right problem/opportunity statement before kicking off a project.

Kermit is very excited about the new project.
My context Canvas for intrapreneurs

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Designing business, and the business of design. www.eleganthack.com

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