Design Thinking — Chapter 6 Reflection

The human centered design process makes a lot of sense and is what I usually use to approach my designs. Utilizing four simple steps of observation, idea generation, prototyping, and testing multiple times over the course of design will lead to success. The step that I find the most helpful is simply observation, as it allows you to truly see the habits, uses, and problems that users have with a product. It often lets you see the main issue in a new light, or find other problems that have caused this underlying issue. The author even mentioned this earlier in the chapter, asking if you are solving the right problem. I was having issues with a payment structure for my events that often lead to issues with not having enough change. We would constantly reshape the pricing structure, but always ran into the same issues. After I observed a whole day of transactions at the registration booth, I noticed attendees would often ask to pay by card, paypal, or venmo. I realized that the problem wasn’t neccesarily with the payment structure, but with the lack of payment options. Once we added in those additional payment options, we had no issues with needing a large amount of change on hand.

As a programmer, I can see the benefits of linear design, as you want your whole program figured out before you begin programming. It makes sense to do it iteratively so that you don’t get stuck implementing the code and having to restart from scratch. However, for big, group projects, it does not make sense to do it linearly. That is because it would be incredibly hard to change the project once it is started. That is where human centered design is better than linear, in the fact that you can constantly return to idea generation or prototyping to try and find the best design without having done too much work on it already. I prefer this approach to programming complex products, as it allows me to adapt it on the fly when I come up with better and better ideas.