How to Apply Design Thinking in Everyday Life — Part 2
In this second part of “How to Apply DT in Everday Life” duology, we will talk about how to use the fourth and fifth stage of design thinking — “prototyping” and “testing” in our everyday lives.
Prototype & Testing
Prototyping and testing in a business sense involve designing a simplified version of your idea which will be tested with users that fit the target market. The goal is to obtain feedback quickly and most cost-effectively. Prototyping and testing are often intertwined as it doesn’t make sense to do one without the other. Prototyping and testing help you determine how usable and valuable your solution is.
This will help you ensure that your time, money, and effort will go into creating the right product. In addition, making modifications and improvements from the feedback you receive will be faster and easier with a prototype than with a real product.
For example, Luke wants to start eating healthily, and he has come up with three ideas on how to do it. The first is to become a vegetarian, the second is to eat more home-cooked meals and the third is to grow his own food. Now the metric to measure the impact of these ideas would be his weight and his energy levels, but the only way to find out which method is both impactful and feasible is by testing a simplified version of those ideas.
For the first idea, Luke can spend one week only eating vegetarian meals and measuring his weight and how he feels after. In the next week, he can try to eat only home-cooked meals. And for the following week, Luke can try his hand at gardening and growing his own vegetables. And by the end of the third week, Luke will have insights and learnings from all of those ideas and will be able to determine which method is the best to adopt for the long term.
Essentially, what you will do is narrow down your ideas down to a select few, and then you will turn them into prototypes or “scaled-down” versions of the product or concept you want to test. By testing them, it enables you to see where your idea works well and where it needs improvement. Based on user feedback, you can make changes and improvements before you spend time and money developing and/or implementing your solution.
When you want to start prototyping for yourself, you first need to have a clear goal in mind which means knowing exactly what you want to learn and therefore test. Because of its situational nature, prototypes can take various forms such as:
- Basic paper models
- Interactive digital wireframes
- Wizard of Oz prototypes — is a method where target users interact with a prototype that they believe to be autonomous, but in reality, is controlled by a human operator that is not visible to the target users (https://think.design/user-design-research/bodystorming/)
The “Listening Typewriter” is an example of a Wizard of Oz/Mechanical Turk prototype. The user sits in one room and is instructed that if he speaks into the microphone, his words will be transcribed. Meanwhile, the “Wizard” sits behind the scenes typing what the user is saying so it appears on the user’s screen as if it was done by the prototype itself.
And when you do begin testing your prototype, make sure you take these additional steps:
- Observe your target users as they interact with your prototype, some key insights can be extracted by how they physically react to your prototype
- Do not defend your prototype — if a user points out that something is not right or gives negative feedback, there is no need for you to justify why your prototype is the way it is, the main objective is to gather feedback to further improve your prototype and not force your target users to like it at first sight.
- Jot down the feedback and insights you can gather from your target users so that you can analyze them and incorporate them into the next version of your prototype
Now that we have covered all 5 stages of the Design Thinking process, here is an example of a common problem that most of us face in our everyday life and how we can apply Design Thinking to help solve it.
I noticed that my girlfriend, Devi, was feeling stressed while packing her clothes for our vacation. I asked her what was wrong, she explained to me that she felt uncomfortable to send our pet cat, Cougar, to the animal boarding facility because there is no family member or friend that could take care of it. I proceeded the ask more questions to better understand what were the reasons that she made her feel uncomfortable. It was because she did not like the idea of trusting her pet with a stranger. Hoping to come up with an alternative solution, I came up with some ideas and tested them out:
- Installing a baby camera at home to monitor him
- Sending Cougar for boarding for one day and getting the pet caretaker to call us every 2 hours to give us an update on Cougar
- Placing a walkie-talkie at home so that Devi can talk to Cougar whenever she wants
After completing these tests over two days. The results of the tests were:
- We were able to monitor Cougar’s behavior and track his eating habits with ease and speak to him
- After dropping off Cougar, the pet caretaker did call after the first 2 hours. After that, the caretaker was unable to call consistently as he was busy tending to other pets
- We kept Cougar in a room and went outside the house. When we were outside, we tried to communicate with him through a walkie talkie, we found that Cougar doesn’t respond to Devi’s voice. Although Cougar seemed to respond to Devi’s voice, we couldn’t monitor his condition which didn’t help with Devi’s anxiety of leaving Cougar behind with a stranger.
We decided that the best solution was to fit a baby camera inside Cougar’s cage so that Devi and I could monitor Cougar while he was in the boarding facility.
I hope that this article was able to show you how you can apply Design Thinking in your everyday life. If you would like to see more of these articles or would even like to suggest some topics I could talk about. Please share them with me at sharwinluke97@gmail.com