Putting people first and last
Reading Time: 2 minutes

After we formulate the right brief statement, gather the right team and create the proper environment to unlock creativity, we can now start our quest for answers. During this process, we must realize that design thinking is about putting people first and last. It is a user-centrist design made of three essential elements:

  • Observation: Observations is an important component of empathetic design. Observing our prospective users particularly extreme users in their natural habitat teaches us about our products and the triggers that pushes customers to use our products.  Moreover, we learn about customers interact with our product. Our goal is to record what we saw as it happened, to watch for triggers and pain points, and finally, to find hidden patterns.  Since observation takes time and require patient, we must avoid making judgement or unnecessary assumptions.
  • Empathy:  To properly observe, one must have or cultivate empathy; the attempts to “see the world through the eyes of others, understand the world through their experiences and feel the world through emotions”stated Tim Brown. Empathy requires humility, open-mindedness and a willingness to be and feel uncomfortable. It is the most efficient way to generate breakthrough ideas.
  • Insights: After observing while empathizing with our prospective users, we can now start deriving some insights. Insights are educated guess that derived from a holistic understanding. This phase is an important phase of the design process and the first step toward mapping out our respective observations.

In summary, the design team’s mission is to turn observation into insights and insights into meaningful products. During this phase of empathetic design, we conduct our research and develop an understanding of our users by becoming One with our Users. Instead of taking the customer in the laboratory, empathetic design pushes us to observe customer in their natural environment. Observation is an essential component of human centered design in general and provides the visual clues, habits and information that cannot be typically captured in a market research study.

 

 

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *


%d bloggers like this: