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d.

bootcamp

bootleg

Check this out —

It’s the d.school bootcamp bootleg.

This compilation is intended as an active toolkit to support your design

thinking practice. The guide is not just to read – go out in the world and try

these tools yourself. In the following pages, we outline each mode of a human-

centered design process, and then describe dozens of specific methods to do

design work. These process modes and methods provide a tangible toolkit which

support the seven mindsets — shown on the following page – that are vital

attitudes for a design thinker to hold.

The bootleg is a working document, which captures some of the teaching we

impart in “design thinking bootcamp,” our foundation course. An update from

the 2009 edition, we reworked many of the methods based on what we learned

from teaching and added a number of new methods to the mix. The methods

presented in this guide are culled from a wide range of people and organizations

who have helped us build the content we use to impart design thinking. Think of

this guide as a curation of the work of many individuals, who hail both from the

d.school and also from other far-reaching areas of the design world. We thank all

the people who have contributed to the methods collected in this guide.

This resource is free for you to use and share – and we hope you do.

We only ask that you respect the Creative Commons license (attribution, non-

commercial use). The work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-

NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License. To view a copy of this

license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/

We welcome your reactions to this guide. Please share the stories of how you

use it in the field. Let us know what you find useful, and what methods you have

created yourself – write to: bootleg@dschool.stanford.edu

Cheers,

The d.school

MODE

WHAT is the empathize mode

WHY empathize

Empathy is the foundation of a human-centered design process. To empathize, you:

- Observe. View users and their behavior in the context of their lives. - Engage. Interact with and interview users through both scheduled and short ‘intercept’ encounters. - Immerse. Experience what your user experiences.

As a human-centered designer you need to understand the people for whom you are designing. The problems you are trying to solve are rarely your own—they are those of particular users; in order to design for your users, you must build empathy for who they are and what is important to them.

Watching what people do and how they interact with their environment gives you clues about what they think and feel. It helps you to learn about what they need. By watching people you can capture physical manifestations of their experiences, what they do and say. This will allow you to interpret intangible meaning of those experiences in order to uncover insights. These insights will lead you to the innovative solutions. The best solutions come out of the best insights into human behavior. But learning to recognize those insights is harder than you might think. Why? Because our minds automatically filter out a lot of information in ways we aren’t even aware of. We need to learn to see things “with a fresh set of eyes” – tools for empathy, along with a human-centered mindset, is what gives us those new eyes.

Engaging with people directly reveals a tremendous amount about the way they think and the values they hold. Sometimes these thoughts and values are not obvious to the people who hold them. A deep engagement can surprise both the designer and the designee by the unanticipated insights that are revealed. The stories that people tell and the things that people say they do—even if they are different from what they actually do—are strong indicators of their deeply held beliefs about the way the world is. Good designs are built on a solid understanding of these kinds of beliefs and values. Engage to:

• Uncover needs that people have which they may or may not be aware of
• Guide innovation efforts
• Identify the right users to design for
• Discover the emotions that guide behaviors

In addition to speaking with and observing your users, you need to have personal experience in the design space yourself. Find (or create if necessary) experiences to immerse yourself to better understand the situation that your users are in, and for which you are designing.

Empathize

MODE

The define mode is when you unpack and synthesize your empathy findings into compelling needs and insights, and scope a specific and meaningful challenge. It is a mode of “focus” rather than “flaring.” Two goals of the define mode are to develop a deep understanding of your users and the design space and, based on that understanding, to come up with an actionable problem statement: your point of view. Your point of view should be a guiding statement that focuses on specific users, and insights and needs that you uncovered during the empathize mode.

More than simply defining the problem to work on, your point of view is your unique design vision that you crafted based on your discoveries during your empathy work. Understanding the meaningful challenge to address and the insights that you can leverage in your design work is fundamental to creating a successful solution.

The define mode is critical to the design process because it explicitly expresses the problem you are striving to address through your efforts. Often, in order to be truly generative, you must first reframe the challenge based on new insights you have gained through your design work. This reframed problem statement can then be used as a solution-generating springboard.

As a test, a good point of view (POV) is one that:

• Provides focus and frames the problem
• Inspires your team
• Provides a reference for evaluating competing ideas
• Empowers team members to make decisions in response to the high-level goals of the team
• Fuels brainstorms by suggesting “how might we” statements
• Captures the hearts and minds of people you meet
• Saves you from the impossible task of developing solution concepts that are all things to all people
• You revisit and reformulate as you learn by doing
• Guides your innovation efforts

WHAT is the define mode

WHY define

Define

MODE

Traditionally prototyping is thought of as a way to test functionality. But prototyping is used for many reasons, including these (non-mutually-exclusive) categories:

• Empathy gaining: Prototyping is a tool to deepen your understanding of the design space and your user, even at a pre-solution phase of your project.
• Exploration: Build to think. Develop multiple solution options.
• Testing: Create prototypes (and develop the context) to test and refine solutions with users.
• Inspiration: Inspire others (teammates, clients, customers, investors) by showing your vision.

Many of the goals of prototyping are shared across all four of the above categories. We prototype to: Learn. If a picture is worth a thousand words, a prototype is worth a thousand pictures. Solve disagreements. Prototyping is a powerful tool that can eliminate ambiguity, assist in ideation, and reduce miscommunication. Start a conversation. A prototype can be a great way to have a different kind of conversation with users. Fail quickly and cheaply. Creating quick and dirty prototypes allows you to test a number of ideas without investing a lot of time and money up front. Manage the solution-building process. Identifying a variable to explore encourages you to break a large problem down into smaller, testable chunks.

Prototyping is getting ideas and explorations out of your head and into the physical world. A prototype can be anything that takes a physical form – be it a wall of post-it notes, a role-playing activity, a space, an object, an interface, or even a storyboard. The resolution of your prototype should be commensurate with your progress in your project. In early explorations keep your prototypes rough and rapid to allow yourself to learn quickly and investigate a lot of different possibilities.

Prototypes are most successful when people (the design team, the user, and others) can experience and interact with them. What you learn from those interactions can help drive deeper empathy, as well as shape successful solutions.

WHAT is the prototype mode

WHY do we prototype

Prototype

MODE

To refine your prototypes and solutions. Testing informs the next iterations of prototypes. Sometimes this means going back to the drawing board. To learn more about your user. Testing is another opportunity to build empathy through observation and engagement—it often yields unexpected insights. To test and refine your POV. Sometimes testing reveals that not only did you not get the solution right, but also that you have failed to frame the problem correctly.

Testing is the chance to get feedback on your solutions, refine solutions to make them better, and continue to learn about your users. The test mode is an iterative mode in which you place your low-resolution artifacts in the appropriate context of the user’s life. Prototype as if you know you’re right, but test as if you know you’re wrong.

WHAT is the test mode

WHY test

Test

MODE

WHY use What? | How? | Why?

HOW to use What? | How? | Why?

What? | How? | Why? is a tool that can help you drive to deeper levels of observation. This simple scaffolding allows you to move from concrete observations of a particular situation to the more abstract emotions and motives that are at play in that situation. This is a particularly powerful technique to leverage when analyzing photos that your team has taken into the field, both for synthesis purposes, and to direct your team to future areas of needfinding.

Set-up : Divide a sheet into three sections: What?, How?, and Why?

Start with concrete observations (What) : What is the person you’re observing doing in a particular situation or photograph? Notice and write down the details. Try to be objective and don’t make assumptions in this first part.

Move to understanding (How): How is the person you’re observing doing what they are doing? Does it require effort? Do they appear rushed? Pained? Does the activity or situation appear to be impacting the user’s state of being either positively or negatively? Use descriptive phrases packed with adjectives.

Step out on a limb of interpretation (Why) : Why is the person you’re observing doing what they’re doing, and in the particular way that they are doing it? This step usually requires that you make informed guesses regarding motivation and emotions. Step out on a limb in order to project meaning into the situation that you have been observing. This step will reveal assumptions that you should test with users, and often uncovers unexpected realizations about a particular situation.

What? | How? | Why?

METHOD

User Camera Study

METHOD

WHY do a user camera study

HOW to do a user camera study

In empathy work, you want to understand your users’ lives, and specific tasks within the context of their lives. A User Camera Study allows us to understand a user’s experience by seeing it through their eyes. It will also allow you to understand environments to which you might not normally have access.

1. Identify subjects whose perspective you are interested in learning more about.
2. Briefly explain the purpose of the study, and ask if they would be willing to take photographs of their experiences. Get permission to use images they take.
3. Provide a camera to your subject and instructions such as: “We would like to understand what a day in your life feels like. On a day of your choosing, take this camera with you everywhere you go, and take photos of experiences that are important to you.” Or you could try: “Please document your [morning routine] experience with this camera.” Or, “Take pictures of things that are meaningful to you in your kitchen.” Frame your request a little broader than what you believe your problem space might be, in order to capture the surrounding context. Many insights can emerge from that surrounding space.
4. Afterwards, have your subject walk you through the pictures and explain the significance of what they captured. Return to a good empathetic interviewing technique to understand the deeper meaning of the visuals and the experience they represent.

Interview for Empathy

METHOD

WHY interview

HOW to interview

You want to understand a person’s thoughts, emotions, and motivations, so that you can determine how to innovate for him or her. By understanding the choices that person makes and the behaviors that person engages in, you can identify their needs, and design to meet those needs.

Ask why. Even when you think you know the answer, ask people why they do or say things. The answers will sometimes surprise you. A conversation started from one question should go on as long as it needs to. Never say “usually” when asking a question. Instead, ask about a specific instance or occurrence, such as “tell me about the last time you ______” Encourage stories. Whether or not the stories people tell are true, they reveal how they think about the world. Ask questions that get people telling stories. Look for inconsistencies. Sometimes what people say and what they do are different. These inconsistencies often hide interesting insights. Pay attention to nonverbal cues. Be aware of body language and emotions. Don’t be afraid of silence. Interviewers often feel the need to ask another question when there is a pause. If you allow for silence, a person can reflect on what they’ve just said and may reveal something deeper. Don’t suggest answers to your questions. Even if they pause before answering, don’t help them by suggesting an answer. This can unintentionally get people to say things that agree with your expectations. Ask questions neutrally. “What do you think about buying gifts for your spouse?” is a better question than “Don’t you think shopping is great?” because the first question doesn’t imply that there is a right answer. Don’t ask binary questions. Binary questions can be answered in a word; you want to host a conversation built upon stories. Make sure you’re prepared to capture. Always interview in pairs. If this is not possible, you should use a voice recorder—it is impossible to properly engage a user and take detailed notes at the same time.

Intro Intro Project Yourself

Build Rapport

Evoke Stories

Explore Emotions

Question Statements

Thank & Wrap-up

:: 10 :: Visual adapted from Michael Barry, Point Forward

Extreme Users

METHOD

WHY engage with extreme users

HOW to engage extreme users

Designers engage with users (people!) to understand their needs and gain insights about their lives. They also draw inspiration from their work-arounds and frameworks. When you speak with and observe extreme users, their needs are amplified and their work-arounds are often more notable. This helps you pull out meaningful needs that may not pop when engaging with the middle of the bell curve. However, the needs that are uncovered through extreme users are often also needs of a wider population.

Determine who’s extreme Determining who is an extreme user starts with considering what aspect of your design challenge you want to explore to an extreme. List a number of facets to explore within your design space. Then think of people who may be extreme in those facets. For example, if you are redesigning the grocery store shopping experience you might consider the following aspects: how groceries are gathered, how payment is made, how purchase choices are made, how people get their groceries home, etc. Then to consider the aspect of gathering groceries, for example, you might talk to professional shoppers, someone who uses a shopping cart to gather recyclables (and thus overloads the cart), product pullers for online buyers, people who bring their kids shopping with them, or someone who doesn’t go to grocery stores.

Engage Observe and interview your extreme user as you would other folks. Look for work-arounds (or other extreme behaviors) that can serve as inspiration and uncover insights.

Look at the extreme in all of us Look to extreme users for inspiration and to spur wild ideas. Then work to understand what resonates with the primary users you are designing for.

:: 11 :: photo: flickr/bitchcakesny

Story Share-and-Capture

METHOD

WHY story share-and-capture

HOW to story share-and-capture

A team share serves at least three purposes. First, it allows team members to come up to speed about what different people saw and heard in the field. Even if all the team members were present for the same fieldwork, comparing how each experienced it is valuable. Second, in listening and probing for more information, team members can draw out more nuance and meaning from the experience than you may have initially realized. This starts the synthesis process. Third, in capturing each interesting detail of the fieldwork, you begin the space saturation process.

Unpack observations and air all the stories that stick out to you about what you saw and heard during your empathy fieldwork. Each member in the group should tell user stories and share notes while other members headline quotes, surprises, and other interesting bits – one headline per post-it. These post-its become part of the team’s space saturation, and can also be physically grouped to illuminate theme and patterns that emerge (See “Saturate and Group” method card). The end goal is to understand what is really going on with each user. Discover who that person is and what that person needs in regard to your problem space.

Saturate and Group

METHOD

WHY saturate and group

HOW to saturate and group

You space saturate to help you unpack thoughts and experiences into tangible and visual pieces of information that you surround yourself with to inform and inspire the design team. You group these findings to explore what themes and patterns emerge, and strive to move toward identifying meaningful needs of people and insights that will inform your design solutions.

Saturate your wall space (or work boards) with post-its headlining interesting findings (see “Story Share-and- Capture”) plus pictures from the field of users you met and relevant products and situations.

In order to begin to synthesize the information, organize the post-its and pictures into groups of related parts. You likely have some ideas of the patterns within the data from the unpacking you did when producing the notes. For example, you may have seen and heard many things related to feeling safe, and many things regarding desire for efficiency. Within the group of ‘safety’, go beyond the theme and try to see if there is a deeper connection that may lead to an insight such as “Feeling safe is more about who I am with than where I am”. Maybe there is a relation between groups that you realize as you place items in groups – that safety is often at odds with users’ desire for efficiency. Try one set of grouping, discuss (and write down) the findings, and then create a new set of groups.

The end goal is to synthesize data into interesting findings and create insights which will be useful to you in creating design solutions.

It is common to do the grouping with post-its headlining interesting stories from fieldwork. But grouping is also useful to think about similarities among a group of products, objects, or users.

Journey Map

METHOD

WHY use a journey map

HOW to use a journey map

To gain empathy for a person or understanding of one’s process through an experience, consider the details of that process to illuminate areas of potential insights. Creating a journey map is an excellent way to systematically think about the steps or milestones of a process. A journey map can be used for your own empathy work, or to communicate your findings to others.

Create diagrams that capture multiple observations, e.g. a map of a user’s day, a map of a user’s experience, or a map of how a product moves through space and time (from manufacturing to store shelf to user’s hands). Consider a process or journey that is relevant, or even tangential to, your problem space. For example, you could consider your user’s morning breakfast routine. You could capture every event of one person’s exercise in a month – and consider who she was with, where she came from, where she exercised, and where she went afterwards. Or perhaps you are developing a dating service website; you could document every communication between two people before the first date. One important concern is to be comprehensive within the variables you choose to capture. (Don’t overlook the opening of the window shades in the morning breakfast routine.) What seems meaningless, could actually be the nugget that develops into a stunning insight. You can create a journey map based on observation and interview – or you might ask a user to draw a journey map and then explain it to you.

Organize the data in a way that makes sense: a timeline of events, a number of parallel timelines that allows for easy comparison, a series of pictures, or a stack of cards. Then look for patterns and anomalies and question why those themes or events occurred. Push yourself to connect individual events to a larger context or framework. It is often the pairing of an observation with the designer’s knowledge and perspective that yields a meaningful insight.

Composite Character Profile

METHOD

WHY use a composite character profile

HOW to use a composite character profile

You can use the composite character profile to bucket interesting observations into one specific, recognizable character. Teams sometimes get hung up on outlying (or non-essential) characteristics of any of a number of particular potential users, and the composite character profile is a way for them to focus the team's attention on the salient and relevant characteristics of the user whom they wish to address. Forming a composite character can be a great way to create a "guinea pig" to keep the team moving forward.

The composite character profile is a synthesis method whereby the team creates a (semi)-fictional character who embodies the human observations the team has made in the field. These might include "typical" characteristics, trends, and other patterns that the team has identified in your user group over the course of your field work.

In order to create a composite character profile, a team needs to have unpacked its field observations and saturated its team space. After this is done, a team should survey across the individual users it encountered in the field to identify relevant dimensions of commonality and/or complementarity – these dimensions could be demographic information, strange proclivities and habits, or sources of motivation, to name only a few. After several dimensions of commonality have been identified, list these features of the user; if there are any dimensions of complementarity (those which may not be shared by all users, but are interesting to the team and not necessarily mutually exclusive), the team should add these as well. Last, give your character a name, and make sure every member of the team buys into the identity and corresponding characteristics that the team has created.