In the 9th grade Introduction to STEM Research course the students learned a variety of methods and techniques to gather information to create and develop user/client profiles throughout the course. Those techniques are compiled here for reference and ease of use in subsequent courses.
In Design Thinking the developer puts effort into understanding their users and the task in the first three stages: Understand, Empathize, and Define. In the engineering design process the stages are analogous however this understanding is developed in the Identify and Understand stages. In either case, we use the same tools to create a more intimate knowledge of the problem in order to guide our user-centric development. Each challenge is different and may call for any variety of these methods and as the student gains experience in the process it becomes their responsibility to choose their tools from the toolbox.
Interview Questions PPT (Teacher Resource)
Question Guide Worksheet (Student Resource)
Students individually define questions for the user, then summarize their questions as a group
Teacher shows slide on Interview Questions and facilitates discussions on Open vs Closed question and General vs Specific questions. Technique to prepare students to think about interview questions. Teacher has the students count 1, 2, and 3 in each group. One's are to brainstorm general questions, and two's and three's are to brainstorm specific questions without discussing them with the other members of the group. Remind them that their questions should be open, and have an indirect connection to the challenge for the general questions and a direct connection to the challenge for the specific questions. Their questions should be recorded on to post it notes that are stuck on to the left side of their Question Guide Worksheet. Teacher should monitor students to make sure all students have at least 3 to 4 questions that can be shared with their group.
Teacher shows slide on Summarizing a Question Guide and directs student groups to discuss their questions and select questions that they will summarize in to a question guide on to the right side of the Question Guide Worksheet. Teacher can choose to show the class a sample question guide to speed up the process, or can use the sample just with groups that are struggling to synthesize their guide. Tell students that they are not to fill out their roles just yet.
Once students have worked together to summarize their question guide, the teacher should show the last slide on Interviewing roles and then have the students define their roles at the bottom right of the Question Guide Worksheet.
Empathy Guide PPT (Teacher Resource)
Empathy Map Worksheet (Student Worksheet)
Students groups summarize their individual interview responses into a group empathy map.
Teacher shows the Empathy Map Guide slide on Parts of an Empathy Map and directs student group facilitators to work within teams to define a group empathy map using post-it notes based on the individual responses from their interviews. Teacher should monitor the groups to make sure that facilitators are leading by listening and seeking input from all members of the group, and that groups are separating facts (Say and Do) from interpretations (Think and Feel) on the map.
After they have completed transferring interview responses onto the four quadrants of the map, then show the next slide on Needs and Insights and student groups should add these to the bottom of the map.
Additional Resources
Design Facet and Character Examples
Extreme Users Handout (Student Resource)
Students recognize how to identify extreme users.
Teacher explains that determining who is an extreme user starts with considering what aspect of your design challenge you want to explore to an extreme. List a number of facets to explore within your design space. Then think of people who may be extreme in those facets. Teacher shows hands out Design Facet and Character Examples and instructs students to individually decide who are the lower and upper extreme for each of the two examples and write down their selection with a once sentence justification. Then teacher has students compare their responses. Next teacher has a class discussion on the extreme users in each of the two examples to clarify any further questions and why it is important to consider extreme users.
Last, teacher has students discuss as a group and define the Extreme Users at the bottom of the Design Facet and Character Examples hand out to identify the facet and extreme users of their challenge.
Storytelling Components (Student Worksheet)
Students apply their knowledge of narrative components to their problems.
1. Students use the Storytelling Components student worksheet in order to guide them on identifying what aspects of their problem could elements of good narratives or storytelling. Students should complete each question in the handout and share their results with another student pair.
Analagous Inspiration Worksheet (Student Resource)
“How might we make (our service, experience, or problem) more like (analogous service, experience, or solution)?”
Step 1:
Choose a piece of the service, experience, or problem you want to focus on.
Example: We want to increase access to our school lunch programs
Step 2:
Identify one emotion you want to evoke in your audience of focus.
Example: We want kids to feel proud rather than ashamed of using our programs
Step 3:
Brainstorm other services, experiences, or solutions that evoke that emotion.
Example: Seeing their work displayed on a classroom wall, being selected for a team, receiving a compliment on project
Choose one to move forward with.
Example: Being selected for a team
Step 4:
Explore how that analogous service, experience, or solution evokes that emotion. Get specific.
Example: Uniforms and matching gear help them display their identity as part of the team, they get to spend time with a new group of friends who share their passion, they have a coach who values them and wants them to be included
Step 5:
Fill in this madlib statement: How might we make (our service, experience, or problem) more like (analogous service, experience, or solution)?
Example: How might we make signing up for our school lunch programs more like being selected for a team?
Step 6:
Use this madlib as the framing for a second brainstorm to generate new ideas for your context.
Example: What if there was a role model or coach figure for kids to go to with questions, who made them feel part of something cool?
The longer we’ve been working in a particular context or system, the harder it can be to break out of familiar patterns and ways of solving problems. Looking for inspiration far outside our usual field of view can help spark new insights while keeping us grounded in the deeper emotional needs of the people we want to serve.
Teacher has teams unpack their findings on to post it notes, then coalesce notes into a character description.
Have student teams needs unpack their interview and field observations. After this is done, show the teams an example composite character like the one below.
After this the team should survey across the individual users it encountered in the field to identify relevant dimensions of commonality and/or complementarity – these dimensions could be demographic information, strange proclivities and habits, or sources of motivation, to name only a few.
After several dimensions of commonality have been identified, list these features of the user; if there are any dimensions of complementarity (those which may not be shared by all users, but are interesting to the team and not necessarily mutually exclusive), the team should add these as well.
Last, give your character a name, and make sure every member of the team buys into the identity and corresponding characteristics that the team has created.
Define Guide PPT (Teacher Resource)
A point-of-view (POV) is your reframing of a design challenge into an actionable problem statement that will launch you into generative ideation. A POV Madlib provides a scaffolding to develop your POV. A good POV will allow you to ideate in a directed manner, by creating How-Might-We (HMW) questions based on your POV.
Use the following the madlib to capture and harmonize three elements of a POV: user, need, and insight.
[USER] needs to [USER’S NEED] because [SURPRISING INSIGHT]
Use a whiteboard or scratch paper to try out a number of options, playing with each variable and the combinations of them. The need and insight should flow from your unpacking and synthesis work. Remember, ‘needs’ should be verbs, and the insight typically should not simply be a reason for the need, but rather a synthesized statement that you can leverage in designing a solution.
For example, instead of “A teenage girl needs more nutritious food because vitamins are vital to good health” try “A teenage girl with a bleak outlook needs to feel more socially accepted when eating healthy food, because in her hood a social risks is more dangerous than a health risk.” Note how the latter is an actionable, and potentially generative, problem statement, while the former closer to a statement of fact, which spurs little excitement or direction to develop solutions.
Students individually define Need Points of View (POV) based on the group empathy map.
1. Teacher shows the first Define Guide slide and then facilitate brief class discussion on why the why the last two examples are Non-Examples. Teacher has students individually define at least 1 user POV on the left side of their Define Worksheet using their empathy map for memory cues.
2. Teacher shows the second slide on ways to define a How Might We (HMW) question from a Need POV and has students define at least 2 HMW questions from the Need POV that students just created.
Students groups, with their group facilitator, use their HMWs to define a set of group actionable HMW problem questions.
Teacher has student groups decide on a facilitator for the activity. Teacher shows the last slide and then has student group facilitators work within teams to define actionable "How Might We...?" problem questions that will be used to prime the ideation session and fill in the action plan of who will facilitate future steps.
To help the designer clarify the specifics of what they are designing by developing a metaphor for what their what they will design for their user group.
10-20 min
Small groups 2-5
With a POV metaphor designers challenge themselves to come up with a comparison for what their user wants to help guide their process of ideation and prototyping. For example, a group looking to improve the experience in a retirement home may pose the question "How might we create a retirement home experience kindergartenesque?" if after interviewing their user group they find that their favorite time in life was when they were in kindergarten and they just want to go back to that time.
A point-of-view (POV) is your reframing of a design challenge into an actionable problem statement that will launch you into generative ideation. A POV Metaphor can be a concise and compelling way to capture how you define the design challenge (your POV!). A good metaphor will yield a strong directive of how you go about designing the final solution.
Use concise analogies to distill ideas. Metaphors can encapsulate your insights in a rich picture. Discover metaphors from the work you do in synthesizing information, and looking at analogies between your user’s situation and other areas.
For example, one metaphor from industry is:
“Personal music player as jewelry,”
which provides the directive for creating the iPod.Looking at the headset as jewelry, rather than simply speakers, allows the designer to create a product that users will enjoy as a projection of themselves, rather than merely a utilitarian device.
This potentially could have been seeded by building an insight about how a user views her music collection – that “her identity is linked to the bands she listens to, and her relationships are bolstered by shared music taste.”
A metaphor can also be embedded into a more comprehensive POV.
For example you may create the following POV:
“A works-hard-plays-hard young professional needs to be motivated at work with a job that is more like a first-person-shooter than Tetris.”
Materials: Notes from empathy stage, pens and paper.
Record insights/needs (5 min)
Give students 5 minutes to go through their notes from the empathy build part of the design challenge and record all of their major findings in regards to needs and insights.
Metaphor Brainstorm (5 min)
Challenge students to come up with a number of single metaphors that describe the needs and insights they recorded. During this stage as with most brainstorms encourage the students to go for volume in how many ideas they come up with.
Metaphor Check and Selection (5 min)
Ask students to select their top 5-10 metaphors to test. Students will test metaphors by crossing off as many needs and insights that they feel the metaphor describes. Finally challenge students to select 2-3 metaphors (most likely the ones that they have determined meet the most needs and insights. One or all of these metaphors will be used to guide a brainstorm during the Ideate phase.
Source: d.school
POV Want Ad Handout (Student Resource)
A point-of-view (POV) is your reframing of a design challenge into an actionable problem statement that will launch you into generative ideation. A POV Want Ad can be a good way to express your distilled findings in an intriguing format. The want ad format tends to accentuate a specific user, and her important character traits.
Students are instructed to embed their user, his or her need, and their team insights within a the format of a want ad. This way of expressing a POV is often more playful and nuanced than the simple USER+NEED+INSIGHT madlib, but should still have a clarity about how you have reframed the problem.
Try this format:
<Descriptive characterization of a user>,
seeks <an ambiguous method to meet a implied need>,
plus <additional flavor to capture your findings>.
Example: “High-energy teenager seeks awesome social network. Interests should include issues of societal importance (e.g. how much parents suck and also why being a vegetarian might be cool). Willingness to IM constantly during the school year is a MUST!”
Characterize User (5 min): Ask students to take 5 minutes to characterize their user. Students should think of a number of adjectives that describe the most pertinent characteristics of their user (Record on the left side of POV Want Ad handout).
Insights/Needs (5 min): Now have students record all of the most important insights and needs that they uncovered during the empathy stage of the process (Record on the Left side of attached handout).
Write Want Ads (5 min) Ask students to take the characteristics, needs and insights from the left side and develop creative Want-Ads on the right side of the handout. Encourage students to be creative and develop fun Ads.