3 design thinking tools that can help your team come up with innovative big ideas

Design thinking is a set of tools and activities that help us reframe the way we think and create so that we might achieve better outcomes for the people we are designing for.

The OpenIDEO Austin Chapter invites members from the community to collaborate using these strategies to address local and global challenges.

On March 6th, the OpenIDEO Austin Chapter hosted our first design thinking workshop for 2019. We had decided to take on the city’s scooter problem and with SXSW around the corner, the timing was perfect.

Our facilitator, Devin O’Bryan, a designer at IBM’s Watson studio, did an awesome job energizing the room and getting us in the mood to tackle the challenge. Devin had the evening lined up with activities from his tool kit that would help us understand the problem, empathize with the user, think of big ideas, and storyboard how some of these ideas might actually play out. And with each activity time-bound, we had to prioritize quantity over quality to get those crazy ideas out!

If you feel like you are stuck with a project or just got a new brief and don’t know how to get started, these tools will help you facilitate your own design thinking session to help your team think differently and come up with creative solutions that really work.

As a facilitator, you will need to…

Identify the problem — We decided to tackle an issue that was broad enough to generate a spectrum of ideas, but relatable to everyone participating. Dockless scooters have become a real nuisance in Austin and for many cities so here is how we framed our problem:

“How might we communicate and execute a conscientious etiquette for dockless scooter culture in Austin, Texas?”

Remember, a problem well stated is a problem half solved!

Create Personas — Identify the key characters in your story and list their characteristics. Trying to solve a family issue? Uncle Edward and your annoying cousin Sarah are definitely two personas to take into account!

Personas help us understand a problem through the lens of a particular person’s goals and motivations. This helps us see the problem from different perspectives and make sure we are solving the right problem for the right people. For our use case, we identified 6 personas.

Get some supplies — You will need lots of post-its and sharpies (these are design thinking activities, what did you expect?). Additionally, Giant 3M Sticky Pads and some sheets of white printing paper are also helpful!

Okay, Let’s get this party started!

Once you have all the above it’s time to set a date and prepare your team! Ideally, you will assign 2–3 people per persona, or at least 2–3 personas most important to you and carry out the following activities.

Define the users' pain points

As-is journey maps help chalk out the journey of the user around the problem. Split into groups and assign each group a persona. Doing this activity in groups of 2 or more helps to get a collective understanding of the user's workflow. How do we create one? Good question.

A journey map created for the private driver

Take two giant 3M sheets and stick them next to each other.

1. Draw four rows and label each: Phases, Doing, Thinking, and Feeling.
2. Start filling the phases like chapters to a story. For example, a tech local would start by planning his day, getting ready, leaving the house, driving, parking and getting to the office. But if this doesn’t come naturally don’t sweat it! You can always add phases (or edit them!) later.
3. Now, think about what your persona is doing during the first phase in your story, and place one activity per sticky note onto your map. Don’t worry about what the “next activity” is; iterate through the scenario at increasing resolution until you are comfortable with the level of detail. Other team members can simultaneously fill in sticky notes what the user is thinking and feeling during this phase.
4. Time to call out the pain points. Draw big circles around them. Identify the low points of their experience and invite everyone to vote on the biggest problem areas. This helps you prioritize as a team where you want to put your creative energy!
5. And lastly, label any assumptions you are making or throw in some questions you might have about the user workflow. This can be validated with your users at a later date.

Participants playing back their As-is User journey as their Persona

Somethings to keep in mind:

• Rather than focusing on the user’s pathway through a product’s user interface, pay close attention to the tasks they actually perform in order to accomplish their goals. Are there any workarounds?
• It is important to consider the user’s actual current experience. Don’t neglect tasks or qualities that are not ideal or positive. Be honest and thorough.
• Make it time bound! We used 20 minutes to map and 10 minutes for playback. The goal is to generate a lot of ideas without worrying about perfection.

Solve for the pain points

By this time your participants know their users' pain points and are probably brewing with ideas. You as a facilitator want to channel their energy into coming up with not both practical and impossible ideas too! The tool Big idea vignettes is a great way for many people to rapidly brainstorm a breadth of possible ideas. Remember you want to go for quantity over quality.

Here’s how you put together a big idea vignette:

1. On one sticky note, write a brief overview of an idea or solution using very little detail. Try labeling it with a one- or two-word headline.
2. On a second sticky note, sketch a visual depiction. Think of this as a single frame of a storyboard — for example, a rough prototype of a user interface or depiction of a user.

Each team member should come up with as many big ideas vignettes as they can in 10 minutes and quickly share these ideas with their teammates. Then, using a whiteboard, start clustering ideas that are similar and circle them to create a map of overarching ideas.

Communicate the solution

Have teams internally vote on one big idea they want to pick for storyboarding. Storyboards help chalk out a story that establishes the conflict and the resolution which helps anyone seeing it immediately understand the value of the idea.

Individual team members can quickly create storyboards by:

1. Thinking of a scenario with your pain point and solution. It should have a beginning, a middle and an end.
2. Placing 6 sticky notes on a paper and using them as “frames” of your story.
3. Drawing these six frames and write brief captions for each

Ask teams to share their storyboards and start picking the best parts of each story to create a ‘master story’ that best represent their thinking.

While creating storyboards,

• Think of the six frames as part of a comic. Use thought bubbles and stick figures to communicate your story.
• Do not draw wireframes or go too much into detail!
• Use sharpies with post-its to help avoid participants from drawing out too many details.

From here you can pick the best parts of each storyboard and start putting together a realistic flow for your product!

Feel free to share your experience and learnings with us at the OpenIDEO Austin Chapter. Special thanks to my co-organizers Rupal Desai, Lesa Walker, and Erin Rainosek for making this workshop a success!