Forget about $30: pay yourself 30mins for a product design course everyday
Saving money by designing your own 30-min course everyday.
Yesterday I broke my routine to wake up at 5AM for a run with my friend. We got a 30-minute run in a park nearby whilst chatting, and I remember him saying that he got inspired to run everyday as he discovered he could learn from it, old as principles of the earth, but still true:
- Don’t run for rewards, run for objectives
- Giving up is addictive, which leads to successive giving-ups
- …
As we kept running with our free minds, I started thinking about how our daily life can really teach us something, or to say it better, how we could really make use of our daily routines to derive lessons from them.
And I realized that most of my practicing with product design thinking, I got it from my day-to-day experiences.
What I learn
The core principle of product design is prolem solving. And what I practice everyday, is spending some spare time of mine finding solutions to problems around me.
1. I learn from my own cases.
My day-to-day routine includes accessing my iPhone for applications. And as
- My need is quickly accessing the app I need
- My psychology is I remember apps by its icon color
So I “designed” an iPhone screen interface that would help me find the app I need quicker. As you can see, the first one is for white icon apps, second one is for black-based ones, and last one is for colored ones, with arrangement due to rainbow scheme.
2. I learn from other people's cases
The story from my mom:
I’m crazy about chilli sauce, and I consume like 3 bottles of this per month. On some days the chilli sauce nearly runs out and we don’t have time to go out to buy a new bottle, so my mom always asks me to make use of the rest. But the sauce stays in the bottom, and with a firewall-design like this it’s hard to cut the bottle to take the rest sauce, so my mom invented this pose.
And I guess this is also the reason why they invented Heinz bottle, for people to savor every drip of sauce they love :”>
Then how to practice product design thinking?
1. Finding problems and use cases.
Spend some time of your day seeing how your mom use tools in kitchen, how your dad uses computer, or even what you do every day that hasn’t satisfied you yet.
- How long does it take you and your colleagues to decide what to eat every lunch?
- Do you stand 30mins in front of the mirror everyday to choose your clothes to work?
- How does your mom go through the buying process on an e-commerce site?
- ….
Observe, and you’ll find some dark sides of products that need improving.
I’ll have an example with myself:
I drink a lot of juice everyday, and always with ice. After a while the ice melts and leaves a lot of water on the wooden table, which makes me annoyed because it ruins the table.
2. Understand users’ need.
After catching the problems that your mom, your dad or even you have, ask them or ask yourself what you actually need.
I need “something” to stop water running from my glass to my table.
3. Ideation
What could be done to solve the problems? Try to come up with some solutions that put an end to problems you found.
In my case it would be:
- Let the ice melt and absorb it: Putting the glass on some napkin/plate/…
- Prevent the ice from melting: Use thermos material container
- …
But back to users understanding, as drinking juice is my daily activity but not something I would invest much in, and thermos container would exceed my paying capability, I would use napkin to solve my problem.
And that’s why they invented coasters too, I think :”>
Necessity is the mother of invention.
Make it your daily habit
Simple as that process. The real process of product design in real life is surely more complicated than that, but if you can practice with smaller scale like mine everyday, may you come up with excellent ideas that could become excellent products, and at the same time revising theories you learn from $30 courses with real life experience.
Now look around you. What annoys you most?
