Class Session 2 - Empathizing, Defining & Ideating

• Role-Playing to Test our Character Profiles

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Developing Point of View (POV) Statements

• Defining the Need that You’re Designing a Solution For

💡Point of View Statements - Tips

• Divergent Thinking - How Might We? strategies
• Convergent Thinking - Selecting and Grouping specific feature ideas
• Brainstorming Techniques
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Using Tree Diagrams
Create a tree diagram that maps out your thinking process as you move from a POV statement to specific features ideas.
• Start with your POV statement at the left side.
• In the middle column, list as many strategies as you can by asking “How might we…” questions.
• In this phase, we’re using Divergent thinking to come up with a vey broad list of all the alternative strategies that might be use to address the need identified in your POV.
• Note that as you building out your tree, some answers to “How might we…” questions may lead to additional “How might we…” questions as you dig into various ways to implement that strategy.
• As you move to the right, start listing specific Feature ideas that might be part of implementing a Strategy branch.
• You don’t need to fully flesh out all the Strategy branches.
• Focus on the branches that you decide are the most attractive strategies.
• After you’ve used Divergent thinking to building out a very rich tree of options, shift to Convergent thinking to identify the feature ideas that seem the most promising to implement as part of your design.
• These feature ideas can come from several different branches of the tree.
• A good solution often uses several strategies synergistically in parallel to help meet the needs.
• Draw a box around all of the feature ideas that you’d like to include in your design.
• Identify the MOST ESSENTIAL feature ideas for meeting the needs identified in your POV statement. These very short list of absolutely essential features will be you Minimum Viable Product.
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Using Post-It Notes to Capture Divergent and Convergent Thinking
💡Brainstorming - Tips💡Selection - Tips

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Identifying your MVP

As you're developing your design idea, it's very tempting to keep embellishing and adding features to the core concept.

We've all done it... You find yourself thinking, "well, as long as I'm doing X, wouldn't it be cool if I also did Y, and how about Z too!"  This is known as "feature creep", and it's a real danger in most design projects.

As you develop your creative design solution, it's critical to stay focussed on the core features of your design that address the needs you identified in your point of view.  You'll be prototyping these features and testing their effectiveness, and you can't let yourself get distracted by adding bells and whistles that dilute your attention.

You can consider adding in some of those extra features -- at a later time -- but only after you've fully designed and testing your core features.

To help you stay focused, it's useful to outline the features of your Minimum Viable Product (MVP) -- the essential features that you proposed design must provide.   Some define it as "the smallest thing that you can build that delivers customer value".

Try to keep the list very brief and concise.  This isn't a full product spec -- it's a bullet list of essential items to help remind you of what's absolutely essential for your product to provide.

Here are a few blog posts that describe how thinking about the Minimum Viable Product can help lead to to better designs:

Minimum Viable Product (MVP) and Design - Balancing Risk to Gain Reward

The idea of the minimum viable product (MVP) has been around for some time. The term itself was coined by Frank Robinson but was made popular by two influential names in product design - Steve Blank, a serial-entrepreneur and academic, and Eric Ries, the pioneer of the Lean Startup movement.

www.interaction-design.org

medium.com

medium.com

Assignment 2.1: Define Your POV Define a POV statement for Your Selected Composite Character Profile

Assignment 2.2: Identify your MVPMinimum Viable Product (MVP) or Maximum Value Product

Get ready to prototype your idea at our next class session!