Designing Solutions: Our 6 Steps to Get You There

Written by Meredith Lazowski, Product Designer and Laraine Domingo, Senior Designer.

Approach Overview:

After years of designing healthcare IT solutions at RL Solutions, we have learned a lot and have continued to refine our processes when approaching problems and creating solutions. One of the most valuable lessons we’ve learned, is that these processes are much more consumable when we break them down into small pieces.

That’s how we arrived at our current 6-phase, high-level current approach for designing solutions using our versions of design thinking methodologies. Based on what we have learned in both current and past projects (both large and small), we have provided some suggestions as to what to cover for each phase and some key tips on how to approach them.

We have pulled many of our session tools from the great IDEO design kit. Check them out for some great material to bring back to your organization.

Approach Steps:

1. Discovery

Research: Take the time to research and discover as much about the topic as possible through various research methods in groups or individually.

Knowledge share: If you step away to do some self-discovery, get the group together to have a knowledge share with everyone’s findings. Knowledge share sessions can be done many ways. We have found that a way that works for us is to have an in person meeting where everyone takes a turn sharing their findings and write important findings on post-its (one finding per post-it). We have found that this helps us later group findings into themes easier.

Summarize & re-identify: Take the time to gather everyone’s thoughts and summarize your findings in a format that you can continue to reference throughout the project. Based on these summaries, create either one or various ‘How might we…’ statements to define what it is you are hoping to solve in the ideation stage.

Tips & tricks:

• Be a sponge: Take the time to be a sponge and learn everything you can about the subject/ problem you are working on.
• Be open-minded: Don’t come into this phase with a full idea or solution.
• Parking lots: If someone involved in this phase is already starting to form ideas, try to keep them on track with discovery but don’t discourage ideas. Have a ‘parking lot’ area for ideas or items that come up through discovery that are important to remember for later phases. This help acknowledge that they are important ideas, yet not needed for the current phase of the project. We typically have a piece of chart paper or a area with post-its with ideas on them.
• Include multi-perspectives: Depending on the problem you are solving, it is very helpful to have representatives who can bring different perspectives into the mix.

2 . Ideation

Identify your audience(s): Using all of the discovery research and ‘How might we…’ statements, take the time to narrow down who you are solutioning for. This will help ideas have more of a focus and keep ideas human centered.

Collective idea generation: As a group and utilizing your ‘How might we…’ statements, run exercises like the Power of 10 Option (you can do in 8 , 6 or 4 even) to help spark quick ideas for solutions. Once you have many ideas on the table, start to eliminate, combine & refine certain concepts.

Tips & tricks:

• Let everyones voice be heard: It does not matter if you are the designer, boss or co-op, everyones ideas in this phase should be heard and seen as important to get the ideas off the ground. Once everyones ideas have been heard, that is when certain roles can continue to expand and ideate on those concepts.
• Bring in the typically ‘non-creative type’: They may feel like they will not be able to contribute in sessions like these, but you would be surprised to see the ideas they can help contribute. Just keep the sessions very simple and short.

3. Prototype

Rapid prototyping: Using these ideas, further conceptualize them into either low-fi or high-fi prototypes to quickly test concepts and ideas. Use this time to help define areas of assumptions that you may need validation on to better create your prototype concepts.

Testing: This step can be done at various phases of your project. Take the time to get feedback from not only your team, but the actual users and anyone else who can provide insights & validation. There are may different ways to approach testing, use what works best for what you are trying achieve and the type of project output.

Iterate: Based on feedback & research from the prototypes, continue to review, iterate the concepts to conceptualize into a more refined version(s).

Tips & Tricks:

• Know your audience: By knowing who you are presenting and getting feedback from, you can determine how hi-fi or low-fi you need your prototype to be to get meaningful feedback. This is always a hard decision to make, and it is not always a cookie-cutter decision.
• Rinse & Repeat: This phase may continue as you approach other phases.

4. Build

Identify requirements: Based on the concept, identity (and document) what the intended requirements needed to build and how the idea is broken down into pieces.

Plan & output: Determine what is the intended MVP(if needed) and work with the needed resources to create the solution (varies based on what the actual solution is).

Iterate: There are always things that are going to come up in the build stage, make sure to account for adjustment and changes as they come up.

Tips & Tricks:

• Keep requirements updated: As a concept is getting built and requirements continue to adjust, make an effort to document or adjust the initial requirements to keep up to date for refrence.
• Dream big, but be realistic: It is great to think about all the possibilities for your solution and how it could evolve and grow. This is actually a good thing so you don’t pigeonhole your idea for future, but make sure to create a focus and start with what is realistic and what makes sense as a start.

5. Implement

Rollout plan: At this phase, we tend to ask many questions such as; Who do we start with first? How do we roll it out to the rest? What do we start with? How do we promote it? Where does it live? What resources or materials are needed to support it? Basically, we are trying to determine how all the puzzle pieces work together to make a great solution. Some of these questions we will usually approach at earlier phases as well if we know they will take time or help define a focus.

Tips & Tricks:

• Keep everyone aligned & updated: Depending on the scope of the project and the output, make sure to get the necessary departments or groups involved to fill in the blanks for what is needed to release, promote, support and adjust successfully.

6. Analyze

Identify KPI’s: Know what you want to measure, why and how.

Identify tools to use to help analyze: Know what tools or methods are going to help facilitate this understanding.

Continue a maintenance plan: based on analyzing findings, determine plan to help enable the ability to make adjustments and changes overtime or for the next time

Tips & Tricks:

• Don’t let this fall by the wayside: Launching any solution does not guarantee in its success, you have to adapt and move with the people you are building it for to continue to make it successful.
• Don’t just have one method or tool for analyzing: Have multiple modes of ways to analyze and understand the feedback coming in. Data can help drive some decisions, but also understanding from conversation directly, heat-maps and other modes.

Conclusion:

This is our approach of how we typically will design digital solutions, but this is also utilized for other outputs too, such as events, booth experiences at conferences, print material, marketing campaigns & emails and even workflow adjustments and changes. Its meant to be an approach that can be applied to both large and small projects for various needs and reasons. Sometimes there are steps of the phases we don’t need for certain projects and sometimes there are some we add.

Take our suggestions for things we have learned on our approach, and we hope you can utilizes them or think twice when you start or are in the midst of a project.

Thanks for reading!