Reflection on Design Thinking Exercise

As an engineer, I was often told the importance of design before you start building, but through this exercise, I can truly appreciate how much thought goes behind designing a product and how design is more than just its functionality. The AI user profile was the first step of the exercise, which focused on creating a persona of the user and it helped us create a clearer picture of what the user might need as a result. The biggest challenge our group had throughout the exercise was to not come up with a solution since we were still exploring. In the end, the exercise definitely helped us think features we would have never thought of normally.

Personally, creating the AI user profile was my favorite step out of all. I‘ve had a similar experience in engineering courses where we would create a user persona, but it was nowhere as detailed as AI user profile. The fact that we can create details about the user was quite fun and these details gave life to the profile making it seem more realistic than personas. These details eventually helped us, the problem solvers, see a clearer picture of our user and as a result, we were able to understand the user need better.

Throughout the exercise, the biggest challenge we faced as a group was not being able to come up with a product solution. Anytime we were able to come up with new ideas, we were tempted to create a solution for the product, which can often limit the potential of what the product by imposing an assumption. For example, we came up with few features, which would alarm the user based on their schedule and this led us to think what our medium of the product. Thankfully, we caught ourselves from coming up with a design for the product and went back on focusing on the feature. If we haven’t, then we would all fallen assumption that our product will use a certain medium and our ideas wouldn’t have been as creative since certain features might be limited because of that specific medium.

Overall, I do think this exercise helped us to be more creative than we expected. It was definitely not easy at the beginning since a lot of these concepts can be ambiguous if it’s not clarified. However, once we went over the initial hurdles, we were definitely able to come up with new features we never thought of before and these features can lead our product to a completely new path than what we had thought.