#deisgn thinking

Interview user is a very essential skills that many researchers, designers marketers and business people are hoping to develop. For user experience designer especially, understanding users need and knowing their pains and gain is just the starting point to develop a good product. As a people person, talking to people and interview them come very natural to me. I love asking questions and learn about people and their perspectives on things. Designers or developers sometimes have difficulties to step out and figure out the exact need because we sometimes can get very excited about an idea and want to realize it immediately. It can be true that the need from user or market is exactly what we thought previously, interview is really help clarify and solidify the idea. From my perspective, user interview cannot be ignored because we may find many unexpected results that can help transform our perspectives. I still found the Design Thinking course I took at Stanford d.schoool back in 2009 very relevant to UX interview. During the course, I learned and practised two main research methods. 

I had three days from the opening of school to the backpacking trip to fill with my 7th grade humanities class, and I wanted to do something meaningful with them, but I struggled until I got an inspiration from my lame attempts to configure the room furniture for Orientation Night - have them redesign my room for me.

I wanted to give the kids a thinking process that would introduce them to some basic strategies for brainstorming and problem-solving that I wanted to use throughout the school year, and which would build on the previous night’s homework - a response to a blog post called “What’s the Point (of school)?” Moreover, it would hopefully introduce them to the idea of doing authentic work - that is, creating something that would have real value in the world.

The design process is a useful way to get students to push past a surface-level statement of a problem and to ask probing questions that involve real research.  As one goes through the stages, you see It’s laid out as a circle, which reinforces the idea that it takes multiple drafts of a thing to get something passable by the end.

I asked them to frame the problem first by thinking about the purpose of a classroom.  They wrote in silence for a few minutes, then pair-shared, and finally, broke out a general discussion.  The idea was to go beyond their own perceptions of the ideal learning space and talk to a broader group of stakeholders - including me.

We followed the same pattern in listing first the “needs” (or criteria) that the new classroom space would need to feature in order to meet these different notions of purpose, and then followed that by noting our constraints - the limitations that would prevent us from getting too wild with our ideas (our non-existent budget), and the obstructions they couldn’t move (two white boards on opposite sides of the room, and an intrusive pillar rising from the middle of the floor to the ceiling.)

They brainstormed for a while, thinking of different layouts and additions that would transform the current space into the one they wanted based on their needs, then they were asked to cull the list to fit within the confines of what was possible.

The final step was create a formal sketch of their room redesign and provide a written explanation for their choices, according to the plan below:

What is the problem presented by our current classroom layout?

The need and constraints - what the purpose of our classroom is and what it is meant to accomplish, versus the limitations imposed on us by the physical space and our equipment

Your “research” - since we don’t have technology access yet, you will discuss, instead, what you and your group think is important to have in terms of desk layout and classroom space:

Your solutions and the reason you chose the final plan you did - In other words, what is your design, and how does it meet the needs of the classroom and work around the constraints imposed by the space and the equipment

On the following day, each designer stood and explained their remodel to the whole class.  After the final presentation, each student voted for three different outcomes - their favorite desk configuration, their favorite decor ideas, and their favorite overall reorganization.

The purpose of all this is not really to design the room - although we will change things around a bit ... or more than a bit, depending on whether there is funding for some of the grander plans - but more as a formative assessment of how the students problem-solve.  Many of the kids made some fundamental mistakes in their designs, such as not drawing the room in the right proportions, or, because they failed to measure the desks, they placed them in configurations that clearly won’t fit in the space.

However, they also did many things right - such as thinking about room design in a way that would facilitate their learning, or working within the limitations of the room’s infrastructure.  More interestingly, they become absorbed in micro-investigations (“What is on the other side of that wall protrusion?  Can it be moved?”  “Which colors work the best for stimulating thought, or calming us down?”)  They went out and explored in the hallway, and others went off to borrow technology to research interior design.

The whole thing, really, is an attempt to create an authentic problem - something that inherently affects them and which can have a useful outcome - and give them a structure for figuring out the answer that we can use time and again.  

Why is this a problem, and for whom?

What do they want me to solve for?  What do I need to include in my solution?

What are the limitations I have to consider in my work?

What is my research that validates my ideas?

How do I test my model?  How do I improve it?