Human-Centered Design Workshop - a forrest of post-its

9/4/19

Second class! Today we had special guest Maria Scileppi visit our class. The topic of the day was Human-Centered Design Workshop.

Human centered design = a problem-solving method that puts the user’s needs 1st when tackling a challenge

It makes sense – it would be difficult to solve a problem without thinking of the person the problem affects. To do this, Scileppi gave us 3 important guidelines:

1. Know your user deeply

a. This means to think of a few personas that are in your target market and truly understand their likes, dislikes, motivations, and fears.

2. Empathize with a real problem they struggle with

a. By empathizing with the problem, it gives the issue significance. You may not struggle with it and so you as the researcher must learn exactly how it affects all stakeholders.

3. Come up with solutions they would embrace

a. You are creating solutions to a problem you might not deal with. Therefore, think of how it will be liked or disliked by your personas rather than based on your own personal opinion.

To practice this framework so we could apply it to our own pet projects, we were given the design challenge:

How might we make college less stressful?

A loaded question I know…

So where to start -> the research. We were given time on our own to ideate open ended, thought provoking questions to ask our group members in hopes of identifying a more specific problem. It was interesting to learn that what helped me the most in my practice interview experience was the use of follow-up questions.

My group members would answer the questions thoroughly, but going deeper into a detail of what they said opened up the issue for me.

Scileppi recommended to interview 12-15 people for around an hour in order to discover valid and deeper patterns. As we were asking questions, other group members wrote key notes on post-its. After the questions were over, we started grouping them by theme. It was difficult for me to see the importance in this until groups based on patterns started forming visually. We divided up the groups as stressors, personal solutions to stress, interpersonal solutions, balance, and lifestyle. From here we started to think of solutions. We wrote down as many as we could think of, voted on our favorites, and developed the four winners. My favorite idea was an app called “Take a Break” that would remind you to take breaks as your course load gets busy, and offers time limits for that break.

our 4 final solutions on how to make college less stressful

I am a visual learner so seeing everything organized and written down by post-its helped me learn the process of human-centered design research. My group had a great experience with this workshop and plan to use this as we organize our thoughts for our pet project. We are still playing with the idea of how dogs and veterans can help each other, but there are a lot of programs similar to our idea already out there…updates to come on this. However, this was an idea we fell in love with our first day and will most likely not be our final idea. Through our upcoming I+I research, we will combine our research and use this human-centered design process to hopefully come up with an impactful solution.

R.I.P. and thank you to the trees of the hundreds of post-it notes our class used. If we could make this an online resource or use a whiteboard (like the huge library ones) in the future, I would be more likely to use this method again.