Over the past year as I have been learning about visual design and interaction design, I have worked on side projects for friends and organizations. One of the big pieces missing from classes has been knowledge around process and design thinking. What are good ways to approach a project in the initial stages? How do you discover a user need?
I was glad recently to have the opportunity to take General Assembly’s workshop on Design Thinking, and remove some mystery from the design process! Jim Ratcliffe, who has taught classes at Stanford’s d.school, and Olga Trusova of Blue Fig Labs led the workshop. After a quick recap on the design process, we split into pairs. Time to rapid prototype – on steroids!
Migraine Diary was my first mobile app design, and I approached it without a deep understanding of mobile design. I had a user need and idea in mind, but no idea of where to start. Developing the app was frustrating at times in consequence, and required many iterations and evolutions as I muddled my way through the process. I learned a lot, and am very happy with the final result, but would have also been happy to have learned about design thinking prior to the start of the project!
The goal of the workshop was to “design something useful and meaningful for your partner,” in this case, Jessica, a graphic designer and former class-mate of mine from GA’s User-Experience Design course. We started off by interviewing each-other for a few minutes on the mobile apps we enjoyed using. We were on a mission to discover insights into a possible unmet need or user problem.
I discovered through these short interviews that Jessica enjoys using Instagram, but would like a way to organize her photos. The next step was to define the problem statement:
“Jessica, a 25 year-old visual designer, needs a way to organize her documentary photos because there is no way to view her photos by subject matter on Instagram.”
We then moved on to sketching 5 radical ways to meet our user’s needs (in 5 mins!). With such a short amount of time allotted, I had to quickly put down ideas without judgement. I sketched a few different ways to organize photos in Instagram – via mobile device, a website or program on a desktop computer. Jessica reviewed my ideas, and offered feedback.
The next step was to reflect and generate a final solution based on Jessica’s feedback. We moved to paper prototyping, quickly sketching our final wireframes, then handing them off to test with our partner.
All in all, I was super impressed with how much I learned from just interviewing Jessica for 5-10 minutes. I really enjoyed walking through the process of rapid prototyping, and look forward to incorporating design thinking and rapid prototyping into my future projects!
We are studying the process of rapid prototyping at school, we are early in to the project its incredible to learn how this will change the world!