Inclusive design thinking workshop delivered to Boston Accessibility group on October 1st, 2016 by Erich Manser and Moe Kraft from IBM Accessibility. The presentation walks the audience through a set of empathy building exercises.
Presenter: Moe
Prompt: "Take 1 minute and design an alarm clock"
(don't give the audience any constraints, or notion of users, experience design etc. After a minute, ask people to share their design. Choose two or three.
Note for the group that most if not all of the drawings are similar, uncreative, lack innovation etc. More importantly, note for the group that in most cases, they've made an assumption that their user can hear. They've taken for granted that their user has all of the same abilities they themselves have.
Crumple and throw away. Take responsibility as the facilitator for the fact that "the prompt I gave you was actually poorly formed. To get to a better outcome, now take 1 minute and design a better way for people to wake up in the morning-- some of your users are unable to hear."
Invariably, the design sketches are more innovative, more human-centered and substantive. We can host a very short reflection with the group on that.
Presenter: Moe
Presenter: Erika
We created IBM Design Thinking to help us:
Understand people’s needs.
Form intent.
Deliver outcomes at speed and scale.
Presenter: Erika
For many people, design is branding, or visual design, graphic design, advertising, interior design, or fashion design.
All of these things are valid interpretations of design, but none of them really get at design as design as we are practicing it here at IBM.
Presenter: Erika
Before we begin, let’s make sure everyone understands what we mean when we say “design”:
Design is the purpose, planning, and intent behind an action, fact, or material object.
What conditions can we create to bring great designs to life?
Presenter: Erika
But we’re not just interested in any outcome. We want outcomes that help people.
This requires us to understand the perspectives of the people whose future we are helping to shape.
We’re not interested in tech for the sake of tech, or even design for the sake of improving the trivial problems in our business.
Presenter: Moe
Presenter: Moe
Break into groups of 2 or 3.
Take a pair of low-vision goggles.
Take out your phone.
Assistance from your group is encouraged.
Presenter: Moe
Presenter: Moe
Your phone may have looked like this when wearing the low vision goggles.
Technology is a pervasive part of living today. Mobile devices, computers, digital media and IoT devices. You use technology in your home, the classroom, at work, the gym…you name it! Whatever you want to do or learn, there’s an app for that!
Presenter: Erika
A persona is something that captures empathy for your user. It captures who they are as people – what makes them happy, sad, proud, what gets them up in the morning.
This is a persona that focuses on the user’s job – both what he needs to accomplish and what issues and challenges he has to being effective in his job. This helps the designer to empathize with the problems that need to be solved in the design and focus on the goals of the user.
Keep the persona with you through out a project so everyone on the team knows who to focus on. If there are questions about what the user wants, you can always refer back to the persona.
So how do you create a persona? Where does this information come from? Well, you do research to figure out who your user is – who’s life are you trying to make better?
Once you gather data about the user, you can use an empathy map to understand the user as a team and then later create the persona.
Empathy Maps help to rapidly put your team in the
user’s shoes and align on pains and gains—whether
at the beginning of a project or mid-stream when you
need to re-focus on your user.
Don’t go it alone.
Empathy for users arises from sharing in the collaborative making of the Empathy Map. Everyone knows something
about your user, so use the activity as a means to gather, socialize, and synthesize that information together.
Involve your users.
Share your Empathy Maps with your Sponsor Users to validate or invalidate your observations and assumptions. Better yet, invite them to co-create the artifact with your team.
Go beyond the job title.
Rather than focusing on your user’s “job title,” consider their actual tasks, motivations, goals, and obstacles.
Here’s some more detail to help you with each quadrant.
Notice that the LEFT side of the Empathy Map (Says & Does) are things that we can implicitly OBSERVE. We could follow our user around with a tape recorder and know what she says, or we could follow her around with a video camera and know what she actually does.
But the RIGHT side (Thinks & Feels) are things that we might need to INFER. These ideas might be gleaned directly from user research — maybe our user mentioned how she’s thinking and feeling during an interview or a prototype walkthrough. But we might also have to make an educated guess here. That’s okay, as long as we go back later and validate our assumptions.
Presenter: Moe
Slide 31: 'Empathy map' is poor contrast - change color to match other slides. Suggest simplifying text. Fix 'an' to 'a' in #2.
Put on the goggles and...
1. Take a photograph of something in the room.
2. Share the photograph on social media. Feel free to tag us on Twitter!
#ibmaccess | @bo.campbell | @1mjmueller
3. Email the photograph with a brief description to:
bcampbell@us.ibm.com
4. Pass the goggles to the next person.
Presenter: Moe
If you feel adventurous pick another disability and write down your assumptions about that experience for a user.
Presenter: Moe
Write or sketch lots of your ideas on sticky notes before talking about them.
Start big—diverge to get everyone’s ideas out there. Remix to discuss, cluster, and seek patterns. Then converge to determine the strongest ideas.
Tell stories about users to keep them at the center of your attention.
Everyone has a Sharpie, everyone has a pad of sticky notes.
Avoid side conversations. Use a parking lot to capture issues that are off-topic.