Design Thinking

Apply Design Thinking to Learner Experience Design

Design thinking is beautiful in the way it gently guides one back to being “Human”, to “Empathy”.

In a series of three articles, I’d like to share my journey about design thinking, steps to use design thinking in Learner Experience Design and a live use case.

How I became a fan of HCD? Human centric design (HCD), was the buzz and news in the social and professional world I interact and engage with. Organizations and people were using it to solve business problems, social problems and improve experience.

I wondered what is “Experience” and “Co-creation”.

As I researched more about HCD, I learned that it is associated with taking more than one approach to a situation, working with a cross-section of participants in a group, and keeping the user at the center and not so much our own opinions and bias. In other words, HCD was about innovation, co-creation, being iterative, and user. Front and center being the user.

At this point, I wondered how different that from audience analysis and the process that is followed in designing learning solutions.

So, I decided to dive into the self-learning world, Internet and research. Reading and learning from courses did not elevate the uniqueness of HCD. Am a learn by doing person and with HCD even any amount of reading about use cases or conceptual application did not give me the hook.

Eventually, I decided to attend a two-day program. This is where the magic happened.

A key learning was that HCD was learned and applied in the same way- by “Doing” — and my mentor in HCD always says, make sure your learners are “writing, drawing, doing” are “thinking deep-what really is the problem and not take things at face value”.

Initially, I struggled, and then came the Aha moment! It was the coffee cup experience that required a group of us to design a coffee mug to designing the experience for a user to drink coffee.

In that moment, several insights zipped through in my mind and I could see the way in which the entire learning solutions methodology had to transform and shift to a more open and inclusive approach.

This required letting go control, which can be hard for some who believe they know exactly what people need and how people learn. This required “designing solutions” become a co-creation journey with the business and client and it required a balance in the way of driving this shift.

Welcome design thinking, a human-centered, collaborative, and iterative approach to deeply relate to audience and their feelings, emotions in order to generate relevant solutions.

So, my view about HCD is that design thinking is the practice of taking and applying thinking to anything so as to innovate your products or your services or offerings.

At this point, there was no conflict in what practice of compassion embeds and design thinking, it is to have compassion for your user. Shift the focus from yourself, your idea to that of what does the user really feel and need.

Thereafter, I have used design thinking in numerous ways to co-agree on one way forward, to arrive at a solution, to shift the way technical product training is designed and delivered.

Here is a summary of key insights,

• Design thinking is human-centered; about feeling, emotions and unconditional thought for the user. In design, we have strong opinions, such as micro-learning — 5 minutes or dig deep and you infer that learners want it longer than 5 minutes.
• Keeping that as the core principle, the other difference was in the way one architected that experience. It is co-creating and iterative in nature. The standard process is waterfall, from analysis, design to delivery and it stops here.
• While, I do analyze the users, overtime, the amount of time spent on that had dramatically reduced in some cases.
• Include the user, and I learned that observing user engage with the product is a powerful method. Seeing the users engage with the product brings up the points that you missed and reveals bias to your idea. Including the user puts the evolution of design on auto mode.
• You need to dedicate resources, to facilitate the process, adopt this way of thinking as a core. I will address how these relate to applying design thinking to learner experience design in later series.
• Question the problem, ask what the problem is really. Your client wants to increase use of payments via mobile apps by micro-merchants. Before jumping to solve, ask what is really the problem, is the users belief about “Cash” or is it the app design.
• Get back to drawing board, draw, use colors, bring back the coloring pencil box, the colors, the unique smell of each color and draw go back to being a child who did not worry about mountains being brown or green, it could be purple.
• Break the hesitation to engage with user. It might seem time consuming initially, doing it repeatedly becomes a habit. This is truly an easy way to reach the outcome.
• Give a voice to the users’ feeling as well as the team doing the designing.
• Offer a way for people to work together that is a key to answer questions about human occupations that don’t exist today. It requires one to either create those skills and jobs or prepare humans to do find ways to use these technologies.
• Meanwhile, use Design thinking to run meetings, to give voice to everyone in a group and move quickly to arrive at a solution.

Words are not adequate to get across the impact of Design thinking; I urge you to use this way of thinking.

• Instructional design models promote an analytical thinking approach to find solutions. Integrating Design thinking enhances these techniques and further enables HCD.

This was my thinking at the end of my induction into human centered design thinking. My hypothesis is to use design thinking to entirely shift the nature of coming up with learning solutions to weave learning into the DNA of how everyone thinks. Make this transition simple and so inconspicuous that it becomes a habit in jiffy.

It can be breathtaking to envision designing for thousands of users, you wonder, where do you start?

In my next article, I will cover where I started this journey and the steps in a clear and substantial way, so that you can apply these in your context.