Overview
The goal of this project was to make the design process accessible to non-designers, students, and community leaders.
Project involvement: Concept and visual design
Collaborators: Veronica Cuppy, Mark Woychick, and Allison Skillbred
Collaborators: Veronica Cuppy, Mark Woychick, and Allison Skillbred
The Problem
The process of designing usable, useful, desirable, and valuable products requires designers to understand the user context, specify user requirements, and produce and test solutions. The design firm IDEO uses terms such as empathize, define, ideate, prototype, and test to refer to the different phases of user-centered design mentioned above. While the literature on user-centered design and design thinking provides valuable insights into the process of design, non-designers often find it difficult to digest and utilize such material.
The High-Level Goals
1. Explain the design process in a plain language.
2. Create a design research tool that is easy to carry and disseminate.
2. Create a design research tool that is easy to carry and disseminate.
The Target Audience
The target audience belonged to three main groups.
1. Non-designers
2. Design students
3. Community leaders who want to tackle social problems
1. Non-designers
2. Design students
3. Community leaders who want to tackle social problems
Process
We surveyed several design methodologies, including design thinking (IDEO), design sprints (Google), and challenge-based learning (Apple). We interviewed three professors who teach design thinking at Boise State University. We observed 30 students for 16 weeks as they conducted user testing and prototyping, which gave us a glimpse of how students comprehend the various design methodologies.
Insights from the Field
While all of the design methodologies mentioned above provide useful insights into the design process, they use different terminology to refer to the same stages of the design process. As a result, students and non-designers find it difficult to identify the commonalities between the different ways of conceptualizing the design process. Using terms such as ideate and empathize makes it difficult to grasp the core concepts.
Outcomes
We sketched and tested several different solutions to address the two high-level goals. One of the solutions involved designing a one-page fold-out that guided the users through the process of design. We designed the fold-out in such a way that it was easy to disseminate and carry. Once printed and folded, the entire document could fit into a person’s pocket. We used a plain language to explain the various stages of the design process.
Evaluation
We distributed the fold-out to a group of non-design majors (N=45) at Boise State University, asking them to use the document to solve a design problem. In a post-task survey, we asked the participants to evaluate the following statements:
1. The foldout helped me with the design challenge.
2. I would use the foldout to help me work on other challenges.
1. The foldout helped me with the design challenge.
2. I would use the foldout to help me work on other challenges.
Responses:
The Design Thinking brochure helped me with the design challenge
Strongly agree: 5
Agree: 26
Neither agree nor disagree: 10
Disagree: 4
Strongly disagree: 0
I would use the Design Thinking brochure to help me work on other challenges
Strongly agree: 3
Agree: 20
Neither agree nor disagree: 13
Disagree: 6
Strongly disagree: 2
The Design Thinking brochure helped me with the design challenge
Strongly agree: 5
Agree: 26
Neither agree nor disagree: 10
Disagree: 4
Strongly disagree: 0
I would use the Design Thinking brochure to help me work on other challenges
Strongly agree: 3
Agree: 20
Neither agree nor disagree: 13
Disagree: 6
Strongly disagree: 2
We noticed that some of the students carried the document in their pockets and book-bags even when we did not ask them to do so; they brought the document with them to the next class.
Reflection
The preliminary survey suggests that the students found the foldout useful while working on a design challenge. The survey does not provide any insights into why the foldout was useful; was it the plain language, or was it something else? The survey raised several other questions. For example, why did half of the students say that they would not use the foldout in the future? Why did they bring the foldout to the next class if they did not want to use it? We need rich ethnographic data (field observations and interviews) to answer the questions mentioned above.