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.)
Pain points are problems that occur at the different levels of the customer experience: interaction level, customer-journey level, or relationship level.
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.
How to design a journey-mapping workshop that leads participants through current-state assumption mapping, pain-point identification, and future-state visioning.
Before beginning any journey-mapping initiative, teams must decide between (1) a current-state or future-state map, and (2) an assumption-first or research-first approach. A hybrid approach for each decision works well for most teams.
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?
A collaborative spreadsheet is an efficient, effective tool for virtual customer-journey mapping. Because of the format and structure it affords, almost everyone will be able to access and easily use it.
Even though in-person UX sessions are typically ideal, sometimes budget or travel restrictions necessitate remote UX work. This article presents guidelines for remote user research, UX workshops or presentations, and collaboration.
