Follow the 6 rules of design thinking during workshops to help participants embrace the core principles of design thinking and ensure successful outcomes.
Empathy maps can be used to plan for future research studies, capture insights during current user research, and communicate research insights from research that has already been conducted.
The 6 stages of the design thinking process can be supported by a very wide range of UX methods and activities. Don't limit yourself to the most commonly mentioned methods.
Mapping can help UX practitioners synthesize insight into one place and visualize the problem space. This video covers 3 maps that are often utilized during the discovery phase of a UX design project: ecosystem maps, experience maps, and process maps.
Our research with UX practitioners found 3 main areas of frustration with service-blueprint projects. Here are recommendations for overcoming or alleviating these problems.
Research with people who are learning Design Thinking shows that they progress in a nonlinear manner through 4 phases of increasing competency and confidence. Understanding these phases helps both learners and educators/managers.
Teams who don't know much about UX, often ask you "so when will you give us the design?" during the early design-thinking stages. Areej Aljarba used design thinking itself to overcome this misconception. (Video from 'Back in the Real World' panel with past UX Conference participants.)
A general technique that's helpful in many kinds of UX workshops and design ideation is to first have team members work independently to create diverging ideas and solutions. Then, as a separate step, everybody works together to converge on the final outcome.
In UX design, you always have to prioritize. Features, personas, usability problems, and the list goes on. Dot votes are a simple way to find the group's sense of what's the most important.
The facilitator of a UX workshop, meeting, or other team activity anywhere in the design process has the job of enhancing the group's performance by optimizing the process through structure, activity, and guidance.
To solve big-scale design problems, Don Norman recommends engaging with the community that has these problems and leveraging existing creativity and experience.
Human-centered design has 4 principles: understand the problem, the people, and the system, and do iterative design. But what if you don't have time to do all 4 steps?
What's the difference between service blueprints and customer-journey maps, and what are the goals of service blueprinting? These and other common service-design questions are answered.
Before you draw a single pixel, define what user need you're trying to solve with the (next-step) user-experience design. UX should be grounded in real user needs.
To maintain focus in a UX workshop, set aside ideas in a "parking lot" if they diverge from the stated agenda. Parked ideas should be discussed later when they won't slow the team's momentum in addressing the meeting's main topic. Here are 3 guidelines for making the most of a parking lot.
