Notes on IDEO’s “Field Guide to Human-Centered Design”

Exploring methodologies to create innovative solutions rooted in people’s actual needs.

Table of Contents

• Mindsets
• Methods: Inspiration Phase
• Methods: Ideation Phase
• Methods: Implementation Phase

Mindsets

Creative confidence is the notion that you have big ideas and that you have the ability to act on them. — David Kelley, Founder, IDEO

Creative Confidence

• The quality human-centered designers rely on when making leaps, trusting their intuition, and chasing solutions.
• It drives you to make things, test them out, to get it wrong, to keep going, and to find the answer.
• Process: make it, learn from failure, empathy, embrace ambiguity, optimism, iterate iterate iterate.
• Remember: failure is inherent to the process; ambiguity allows designers to innovate; and design is inherently optimistic.

After adopting the mindset, designers must go through the process to create real impact.

Methods: Inspiration Phase

• Frame Your Design Challenge: Ask yourself if your challenge drives toward ultimate impact, allows for a variety of solutions, and takes into account the context. Refine until you can identify a specific challenge.

• Create a Project Plan: Get organized, understand your strengths, and start identifying what your team will need (budget, staff, skills, etc.)

• Build a Team: Build an interdisciplinary team with thinks, makers, and doers.

• Secondary Research: Research by searching online, reading books, crunching numbers, etc.
• Interview: Talk with people to understand their mindsets, behaviors, and lifestyles.
• Group Interview: Aim to hear everyone’s voice, get diverse opinions, and represent different populations.
• Expert Interview: Get filled in a specific topic with key insights.
• Define Your Audience: Who are you targeting?
• Conversation Starters: Using sentence stems and general ideas to encourage creativity and out-of-the-box thinking.
• Extremes and Mainstreams: Design a solution for extreme users and those in the middle of your target audience.
• Immersion: Spend a day shadowing the people you’re designing for, be a fly on the wall, etc.
• Analogous Inspiration: Isolate elements of an experience, interaction, or product and apply to your specific challenge.
• Card Sort: Put a deck of cards, each with a word or single image, in someone’s hands and then asking them to rank them in order of preference.
• Peers Observing Peers: Empower the people you are designing for to do some research and share it with you.
• Collage: Have the people you’re designing for make and explain a collage can help you understand their values and thought process.
• Guided Tour: Take a Guided Tour through the home or workplace of the person you’re designing for can reveal their habits and values.
• Draw It: Let the people you’re designing for to make a quick sketch, a graph, a timeline, etc.
• Resource Flow: Ask the people you’re designing for to make a list of every asset that comes into a household and how those assets are spent.

Methods: Ideation Phase

• Share Your Learnings with Post-its (Download Your Learnings): Each team member shares their ideas on Post-its and cluster the similar ones.
• Share Inspiring Stories: The goal is to build a repository of stories for your team to draw from, tell, and retell.
• Top Five: Share your Top Fives and cluster similar ideas to prioritize, communicate, and strategize.
• Find Themes: Look for patterns and relationships between your categories and move the Post-its around as you continue grouping. The goal is to identify key themes and then to translate them into opportunities for design.
• Create Insight Statements: Take the themes and rephrase them as a short statements.
• Explore You Hunch: Human-centered design is an inherently intuitive process — start testing your hunches.
• How Might We: Translate your insight statements into opportunities for design by reframing them as “How Might We” questions.
• Create Frameworks: Frameworks like 2x2s, relational maps, and journey maps help you start to visualize patterns, understand the perspectives of the people you’re designing for, and help you unpack the context you’re working in.

• Brainstorms: Brainstorms work best when the group is positive, optimistic, and focused on generating as many ideas as possible.

• Bundle Ideas: Try different combinations; keep the best parts of some, get rid of the ones that aren’t working, and consolidate your thinking into a few concepts you can start to share.
• Get Visual: Incorporate drawing, sculpting, and building into the Ideation phase can unlock all kinds of innovative solutions.
• Mash-Ups: This is more of a thought exercise, a chance to pose bold, even unreasonable questions to speed your thinking. The trick is to layer a real-world example of the quality you need onto your design. Ex: “What’s the farmer’s market version of a cafeteria?”
• Design Principles: Use design principles to describe the most important elements of your solution and give integrity and form to what you’re designing.

• Create a Concept: Move from a handful of ideas and insights into a fully-fledged concept, one that you’ll refine and push forward.
• Co-Creation Session: The purpose of a Co-Creation Session is to convene a group of people from the community you’re serving and then get them to design alongside you. You’re not just hearing their voices, you’re empowering them to join the team.
• Gut Check: Look at your ideas through a more critical lens and decide which ideas truly merit your efforts.
• Prototyping: Make simple, scrappy prototypes to not only save time, but to focus on testing just the critical elements.
• Storyboard: Visually plotting out elements of your product or service.
• Role-Playing: A quick and tangible way to test an idea or experience is to get into character and act it out.
• Business Model Canvas: This simple sheet asks you key questions like what’s your revenue stream, what are key partnerships you’ll need to forge, and what resources are vital to your operation.

• Get Feedback: Share what you’ve made with the people you’re designing for and see what they think. Iterate upon feedback.

Methods: Implementation Phase

• Live Prototyping: Stress test your solution in realworld conditions. It can run from a few days to a few weeks, and is a chance to learn how your solution works in practice. Live Prototypes are all about understanding the feasibility and viability of your idea.
• Roadmap: A Roadmap helps you gather the key stakeholders in your project and collectively figure out a timeline, assign responsibility for each element of the project, and establish milestones.
• Resource Assessment: Understand what is the distribution of your solution, the partners you might need, and the capabilities necessary to execute.
• Build Partnerships: Build partnerships to get your idea running.
• Ways to Grow Framework: Identify whether your solutions are incremental, evolutionary, or revolutionary and whether your solutions extend, adapt, or create a totally new offering.

• Funding Strategy: Design a Funding Strategy into your project from the start, though having a great design project can help you raise money along the way.
• Pilot: If a Live Prototype is a quick look at how your solution behaves in the marketplace, a Pilot is a sustained engagement. Pilots can last months and will fully expose your solution to market forces.
• Define Success: Setting key milestones will keep you on course and give you something to work toward.
• Create a Pitch: Create the story to rally for your idea.

• Sustainable Revenue: Build a simple spreadsheet that shows all of the costs that the solution would incur, from staff to marketing and production. If you’re relying on grants or donations, think critically about how you’ll raise money and how reliable your funding sources are. Think about scaling the project.