101 Design Methods: A Structured Approach for Driving Innovation in Your Organization

by Vijay Kumar

For each observation, write a small description as a factual statement of what is happening.

No interpretations or judgments should be made at this point while describing observations.

question why these observations are happening.

Find out people’s reasoning behind their actions and behaviors.

Document all “insights” and choose the most agreeable ones.

This method is really useful to use when making the mental model as well as personas. By looking deeper into observations and discovering insights, we can understand the participants more. By looking at the most common ones, we can form a persona for our poster.

concise and objective statement

general statement since it represents a higher-level learning from a specific observation.

many observations might lead to one insight or many insights could come out of one observation.

A common logic frequently used is how one insight is “similar” to another in terms of meanings they share. Reach

Define each cluster and describe its overall characteristics. Give each cluster a short title.

Are the insight clusters comprehensive enough to holistically address the project?

Are there apparent gaps that need to be filled? Are the clusters defined well enough to generate design principles?

I feel like, even though Amy said any fidelity of mental model is OK, that my group and I should talk about the clusters and see if there are any gaps to be filled, any overlap, or any better way of organization. This will help us gain better comprehension too

Osgood’s Semantic Differential used in social sciences that measures peoples’ attitudes about products, services, experiences, concepts, and similar entities.

Could be really useful and helpful when user testing, surveying people about potential design concepts, or doing research.

profiles are then compared, and patterns of clusters and gaps are analyzed for insights and opportunities for innovation.

Score each entity by placing markers on the semantic scales. Connect the markers vertically to form a zig-zag line profile for each entity.

Reminds me of the class activity we did with spectrums. This would be really helpful for any project where we are creating personas

different user types

Then, we determine the common characteristics of these user groups, define concise descriptive user group names, and write detailed descriptions for each group. This yields a more nuanced portrait of the user landscape.

This would be really helpful for creating my persona!! Since a lot of the most common characteristics from our spectrum exercise seem like they may not fit into a single persona, looking at the user landscape may help me determine if I should organize the insights into one persona or two.

Define each quadrant of the map as a user group and give it a descriptive name. In the example on the study of peoples’ reading habits, the user group names might be Professional Advancers, Spiritual Seekers, Self-Educators, and Active Escapists.

Four distinct user groups

five stages—attraction, entry, engagement, exit, and extension

This is really useful to have in mind for my Systems class, as well as Interaction Design and business and marketing. The first touchpoint and part of the user experience starts with attracting the customer, and ends with a souvenir or follow-up to try and increase the amount of return customers. Really agree!

Defined—Can you describe it? Is it bounded? Fresh—Is it novel? Does it startle, amuse, amaze? Immersive—Can you feel it? Can you lose yourself in it? Accessible—Can you try it? Can you get it to do what you want? Significant—Does it make sense? Does it make you remember, connect, think, grow?

Represent high-level activities as nodes and place them on a timeline as a flowchart. List the related specific activities under each of these nodes. Show arrows connecting the nodes to show the flow direction. If needed, include arrows showing feedback loops.

Reminds me of what we are doing in Systems right now!

pain points

concise summary of what activities took place, the insights gained from each one, and what these findings indicate about opportunities for the future. In addition, the Summary Framework shows how user/context insights lead to design principles that then can be used to guide the development of innovation concepts.

helps us turn our descriptive insights into actionable, forward-looking prescriptive statements.

can support easy concept exploration.

gain shared understanding about what is happening in a context and to build analytic frameworks useful for concept generation.

of using the observations and the insights already developed by the design team to align around the emerging patterns. They then can be turned into a set of Summary Frameworks that can later be used for concept generation. The workshop also provides a forum for generating new insights that arise as the result of discussion among participants.

It would have been great to do an analysis workshop after we finished all community participant interviews to discuss existing, overlapping/common, and new insights. Kind of complements the mental model making we did

different hierarchical levels like a tree diagram, or relatively position them in a position map diagram.