Dear Diary,
The rainy May has arrived. Today was very inspiring at the lecture. I’ve always been curious about what Design Thinking is and what options it offers. I did some preliminary research on the topic and opened the links provided by our mentors in the presentation. Human-Centered Design (IDEO) really caught my interest! It’s a fascinating way to approach design thinking. I will share here some observations that we exchanged in the session with Yunis and Hamis. I posted a link regarding the differences between the two models I was contemplating.
IDEO’s main tenet is empathy for the end-user of their products. They believe that the key to figuring out what humans really want lies in doing two things:
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- Observing user behavior: Try to understand people by observing them. For example, if you’re designing a vacuum cleaner, watch people vacuum.
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- Putting yourself in the situation of the end-user: IDEO does this to understand what the user experience is really like; to feel what their users feel.
The six phases of the IDEO design process
1: Observation: observing the end-user, learning, and being open to creative possibilities
Identify patterns of behavior, pain points, and places where users have a difficult time doing something—these all lend to tremendous opportunity. If you can, put yourself in their situation so you can see what their experience is, and feel what they feel.
2: Ideation: brainstorming ideas with your team based on what you learned from your observations and experiences, come up with as many ideas as you can.
3: Rapid prototyping: quickly build a simple prototype of your idea
What can I spend the minimum amount of time building that will allow me to get user feedback as quickly as possible? The purpose isn’t to create the perfect solution; it’s to make sure your solution is on target.
4: User feedback: most critical phase of the human centered design process. Without input from your end-user, you won’t know if your solution is on target or not, and you won’t know how to evolve your design.
5: Iteration: Keep iterating, testing, and integrating user feedback until you’ve fine-tuned your solution
6: Implementation
I am impressed by the way people think about the implementation process and ideas, and how they can try to realize their projects.
I am thinking about my own idea:
Problem: Lack of awareness about OER (Open Educational Resources) in Serbia.
Observation: Teachers are active on social media, which provides a good channel for communication with them as they often comment and engage in discussions. There are large groups with 30,000 members, and I myself have over 3,000 followers on Facebook. Perhaps this can be utilized to inform teachers about OER.
Target audience: Teachers and individuals involved in education. Information channel: Social media. Utilize your influence and the large number of followers you have on social media. Task: Actively spread the story about OER. Ideation: Create short, clear, and engaging posts on social media that teachers can comment on. Slowly and patiently introduce this topic. Share interesting materials, videos, and anything you find on the internet with a license! Oh, yes, licenses… An important part of the story is to explain what OER licenses are and what „open“ means. Open is not necessarily free, and free doesn’t necessarily mean open.
Rapid prototyping: I have profiles, I have followers, I just need to create interesting posts:
Tasks:
- Find or create content for the posts.
- Find interesting images that illustrate the phenomenon I want to present.
- Plan the timing of the OER-related posts.
- Respond to comments.
- Monitor the increase in the number of comments.
User feedback: The best way will be to monitor comments and the statistics of post visits. Teachers will point out the problems and uncertainties they have, or they may simply choose not to react. However, every feedback is valuable. I just need to find a way to resist negative comments and toxic remarks.
Iteration: If this succeeds on a small post level, it should be expanded to a website about OER in Cyrillic. Gather all materials and resources in one place.