Understanding Point of View in Design Thinking
UNIT 6: POINT OF VIEW
What is Point of View?
Point of view (POV) in design thinking is the process of acquiring a shared vision of how a new product or service will work. It defines the design challenge to address in the ideation phase.
Defining the Design Challenge
Designers combine, cross-analyze, and interpret collected data to:
- Draw upon, interpret, and weight all findings.
- Acquire a deeper understanding of users, their needs, expectations, and insights.
- Redefine and rewrite the problem statement and design challenge, determining new patterns, opportunities, and constraints.
- Identify possible solutions, new design ideas, etc.
- Consolidate, integrate, and summarize all findings and insights.
Purpose of POV:
- Establishing a common knowledge for the solution space.
- Providing a common framework, guiding statements, and design boundaries for the next stages.
- Providing a wide enough scope for the team to think beyond the status quo.
Point of View Goals
A POV should never contain:
- Any specific solution.
- Any indication of how to fulfill user needs in the service, experience, or product.
A POV should provide:
- Design goals.
- A deep and wide view of the design challenge from different perspectives.
- A wide enough scope for the design team to think beyond the status quo.
- A well-framed design challenge that is half solved.
- A meaningful and actionable design challenge to maintain focus on the core essence of research results.
A) Redefining Personas as the Right Users
Personas are:
Fictional characters created by the design team based on user research to represent different user types (user segments) who might use the new service, product, site, or brand in a similar way.
Each created persona:
Represents a target group/ segment of users of your new service
Creating personas help us to fine tune our segmentation of consumers
B)DEFINING DIFFERENT POV OF THE DESIGN CHALLENGE: Point of view (pov) of the design challenge is an actionable problem statement used to summarize who a particular user is, a user’s need, and why the need is important to that user (goal or result of meeting that need).
Povs define what researchers want to solve before they move on to ideation and generation of potential solutions, in order to:
– Condense researchers perspective on the problem
– Align the team along a concise goal
– Provide a metric/ benchmark/ measurement for success to be used throughout the rest of design thinking process.
- Povs capture what designers want to achieve with their design, not how.
- Povs help advance designers presumptive solutions from specific features (such as a button or user interface implementation) towards deep insights about the problem that the user needs to solve. b) defining different points of view (povs) of the design challenge
Generating and analyzing a pov from every user will allow us to: Figure and picture different situations of potential use of our solution, Enhance the post customer relationship that will be much more narrow and tailoredDevelop a design challenge with a more defined shape with room for improvement
C)USER REGUIREMENTS SPECIFICATION: They state the important characteristics that the design must meet in order to be successful.
-They detail essentially some of the conditions that need to be observed in the ideation stage:
1) Usability and desirability goals for your new design in terms of: Sought effectiveness, efficiency, satisfaction, learnability, intuitiveness, Helpfulness/supportiveness, controllability, accessibility to information, Degree of personalization,
2)User interface/interaction design guidelines (physical, virtual and digital) in terms of: Simplicity, flexibility, consistency, control, shortcuts, Types of user interfaces and layout appearance (physical, virtual and digital),Aesthetics, style, noise level Modes of communication, relevance of the human 5 senses, Help and support facilities, supporting equipment, customer service
3)Design constraints in terms of:Budget, availability of physical constraints such as space and accessibility constraints, Compliance constraints to applicable laws, regulations and standards, Timelines, schedules Manufacturing, building, etc (availability of resources) Devices and technological constraints, compatibility constraints
4) Potential and plausible scenarios of use of your new design: To consider a range of possible situations, opportunities to exploit and problems and to pose them in the form ‘what would happen if…?’.This will allow you to test your design against such situations. The scenarios should be based on common situations of use, engaging situations of use, complex situations of use, and/or compromised or critical situations of use.