Design Thinking 101 – Innovative Problem solving

Design Thinking 101 – Innovative Problem solving

Duration

2 Days

Course Fee

688 SGD

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Design Thinking 101 – Innovative Problem solving

Course Description

Think of a problem or challenge you had to solve at work recently. How did you approach it? Did you find yourself overwhelmed with the number of possible solutions? Were you unsure how to even start? Design thinking can help.

Design thinking is a five-step human-centered process for creative problem solving. It was popularized by the Stanford school and IDEO, and has been used by organizations around the world to solve knotty problems. It is all about understanding your user’s needs and solving the right problem. By using this human-centered design approach, you can develop products and services that truly help your user.

This course is meant to serve as an introduction to the principles of design thinking and touches on ways you can implement it in your workplace. The material is best suited for students who are new to design thinking or want a refresher on the core concepts. Luckily, design thinking can be applied to almost any field; no matter what your profession, design thinking can help you discover and implement the best solutions to problems you encounter.

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Target Audience

This course is suitable for anyone who wants to understand Design Thinking. It is particularly valuable for:

  • Aspiring designers
  • Graphic designers and professionals working in other design sub-disciplines looking to transition into a career in UX Design.
  • Software engineers
  • Students
  • Business owners and entrepreneurs
  • Product managers
  • Marketers
  • Anyone curious about UX design and looking to apply the principles to various industries

Prerequisite

You are required to have basic computer navigational skills such as opening and closing of files, dragging, and dropping of widgets, copying, and pasting of files.

Learning Outcomes

By this end of this course, you will be able to:

  • Explain the Design thinking process and its value in organizations
  • List the key qualities that Design thinkers should have to be successful
  • Apply the Design thinking process to a business model / organization and state some potential areas of improvement
  • Compare the various methods of empathy research
  • Interpret the information collected from research and identify potential problems / opportunities
  • Analyze the research data from the Empathize phase and create a problem statement
  • Examine your problem statement and identify a root cause
  • Create solution ideas based on your problem statements
  • Evaluate your potential solutions and prioritize them using the prioritization tool
  • Explain the value of prototypes in organizations
  • Develop a prototype based on one of your ideas listed earlier
  • List the type(s) of tests you would conduct for your prototype and explain its key benefits
  • Conduct a brief test to gather some information and analyse your findings

Course Highlights

You will learn:

  • Apply the 5-step design thinking process to a design challenge in your organization.
  • Empathize with your users through interviews and observations, in order to take a human-centered approach to a challenge.
  • Define your core problem by synthesizing and analyzing information gathered during your empathy work.
  • Ideate solutions to your problem by brainstorming using “How might we…” statements.
  • Prototype your ideas rapidly to identify the best possible solution for your problem.

Test your prototypes with users to gather feedback on your proposed solution.

Course Outline

  • What is design thinking?
  • Who is design thinking for and what makes someone a Design thinker?
  • The 5 core design principles
  • Why is design thinking so important? https://online.hbs.edu/blog/post/what-is-design-thinking
  • The design thinking process
  • Applying design thinking to your business
  • ROI of User Experience
  • Step 1 of The Design thinking process  – Empathize
  • Why do we need empathy?
  • The value of empathy research
  • Methods for Empathy research
    • User Personas
    • Customer journey maps
    • User flow maps
    • Empathy maps
  • Interpreting the data
  • Step 2 of the Design thinking process – Define
  • Design thinking as a problem-solving method for everyone to use
  • Benefits of design thinking vs. traditional problem-solving
  • What sort of problems can design thinking solve?
  • With the research data gained, you can clearly define your problem via a problem statement or a business hypothesis for you to test.
  • Root cause exercise
  • 5Ws exercise – Who’s involved
  • What is Ideation?
  • Ideation is about finding new angles
  • Start with big wild ideas, then narrow them down and make them “feasible”
    • Activity: Based on your problem statements, braindump (individual brainstorm) in a uncensored way, and list down 3 ideas
    • We’ll then do a round robin, go to the next person’s ideas and add to them
    • Choose a feasible idea, and storyboard / visualize the problem + design + solution
  • Other Idea generation methods (K8, A7)
    • SCAMPER method – Substitute, Combine, Adapt, Modify, Put to another use, Eliminate and Reverse.
    • Movement – You take a “what if?” approach to overcoming obstacles in ideation and finding themes/trends/attributes towards reliable solutions.
    • Prioritization / categorization methods (A4, A7)
    • Note and Vote
    • Affinity Grouping
  • Tips on How to improve ideation
  • What does prototyping entail? – taking these ideas to life (K7, K8)
  • What is a prototype?
  • Why we need to prototype?
    • Prototype for the other 4 steps
    • Purposes that prototypes fulfill
  • How prototyping works
  • Methods of prototyping (K7, K8, A5, A6, A7)
  • Hifi / Lofi Prototypes
    • Pros of Low-fi  prototypes
    • Cons of Low-fi prototypes
    • Pros of high-fi  prototypes
    • Cons of high-fi prototypes
  • Storyboarding
  • Paper Sketches and Diagrams – New user flows, processes etc
  • Card Sorting – For organizing data
  • Storyboarding – Role Plays – useful for service scenarios where human-to-human interaction is essential
  • Physical Models (for physical products)
  • Guidelines for prototyping
  • Why is testing so important (K4, K8)
  • Benefits of testing (K4, K8)
  • Guidelines for conducting a test
  • Methods of testing (K4, K8, A7)
    • Concept Validation – early stages for flows and processes
    • Usability task analysis (digital)
    • First click testing (digital)
    • Card sorting – Process and categorization
    • User Feedback (interviews / surveys post trial)
    • Split testing (A/B testing)
    • Other forms of testing