The original dropbox-paper file can be found here..
For instructions on room setup and team roles see the Facilitator's guide..
(2 hours)
Empathy, Define
- Ask what kind of design activities people have done in the past and mix up the groups according to experience. Aim for diverse teams. Reshuffle.
- Have everyone make a name tag - 3 minutes
- 6 Word Story about your day Game - 7 minutes
- Tell a 6 word story about yourself
- Review agenda for today (using slides):
- Introduction: what are we doing? who are we?
- Design thinking stages we will be covering over two days - Empathise, Define, Ideate, Prototype, Test
- Mindset for the days: Creative confidence, empathy, embracing ambiguity, ‘make it’ attitude, optimism, learn by error.
- Empower - you are the experts, and this is your space. You are not here as service users but as experts.
- Create a safe space. Allow them to create some general rules of the room. “You are here because you are creating this” perhaps give examples like “not swearing.”
- Don’t feel a need to share anything personal. If you do about anyone particular try not to refer to them by name.
- Introduce the design challenge: “How can we use technology to reduce stigma around mental health?”
- What is stigma and how is it actualised in your environment? (Open discussion)
- Design Thinking Activity:
- Introduction: We are not going to get to go through the entire design process in one day, but instead, we are going to focus on empathy and define on the first day and ideate, prototype and test on the second day.
- Introduce Empathy (open discussion - 5 minutes)
- What is the definition of empathy?
- Why is empathy important when we design an app?
- If we are designing an app which is helping to solve a human related problem, could we skip the empathy as step? Why or why not?
Metaphor:
(Building an app is like giving a gift to someone. If you know them, their tastes, their needs, you’re more likely to give something they’ll appreciate. If you don’t it’s more likely to be a bad gift. You gave me x but if you knew me you’d know I wanted y.)
The goal is to introduce students to the concepts of observation and interviews through a pre-made video. It introduces the students to valuable empathy tools such as observation and interviews in a controlled environment and helps prepare them for performing their own interviews etc. It is also a great way to do empathy if you only have a limited amount of time because you can edit videos to highlight the most relevant points and thus squeeze the empathy stage of a design challenge into a relatively short amount of time. Finally, it is a really useful tool for bringing outside experts or potential users into a classroom when you can't bring the students to the user.
Materials: Computer, projector, access to the internet, pen and paper or post-its for taking notes
Group size: Whole class
Show Video(s) (5-10 min)
Before showing the video instruct students to write down everything that they hear that is important to the person being interviewed.
Debrief Video (5-10 min)
They watch the video and then they think about the person:
Ask students a selection of the following questions. The goal is for them to empathise with the service user.
- What did you learn about the user?
- What surprised you about the user?
- If you could ask additional questions what would you ask?
- How can we use what we learned in this video to inform designing for this user?
Materials: A1 paper, markers, pens, post-its, user-persona to screen (see slides)
Group size: Small groups (each table) / groups of 4
Now the participants have learnt a little about their target service user it’s time for them to come up with their own representation of them - an imaginary user called a persona.
Personas are representations of clusters of users with similar needs, goals, and behaviours. While a user persona is generally depicted as a single individual, this persona represents a group.
Good personas help communicate and synthesise user research findings. They are realistic and paint a clear picture of a user’s goals, needs, and behaviours. They don’t need to be complicated or long. In fact, succinct, relaxed stories tend to be more effective.
TASK:
In groups of four each group should hang up on the wall an A1 piece of paper and on it draw an imaginary user persona based upon their findings from the video observation exercise. Using either post-its or pens they should write around the character, fleshing them out, their story, in as much detail as possible.
- Who are they? Where are they from? (demographics- show example slides)
- quote
- What are their goals and motivations?
- What are their frustrations? How are they feeling?
- What are their aspirations?
- Things they like/dont like
- Technology- apps and social networks they might use
The goal of this exercise is to help the students develop deeper empathy through well thought out questioning and follow up.
Materials: Paper, Pencil, recording device, handouts with place to write the interviews for A and B
Group Size: Small groups/groups of 2
Give the design challenge:
Based upon what you’ve learned so far:
“How might we create a way to help young people reduce stigma around mental health?”
Divide the class into small groups and ask each group to brainstorm a list of five questions that they think they could use in their interviews. Remind the students to use questions that elicit stories and require more than yes or no answers.
Ask two students to role play interviews, one role playing their group’s persona, using examples from the questions the small groups generated. Rotate students and questions. Ask one of the students to come up and interview one of the facilitator’s to give as an example to the group to break the ice if necessary.
When the role play is complete, have students critique the questions, and, as a class, choose the best questions.
Tips for a good interview (to project on the projector)
The purpose of this activity is to help students synthesise information to develop point of view statements and to generate potential ideas.
Materials: Pen, Paper, notes from empathy, attached hand out + hand out 2
Group Size: Small groups / groups of 4
Tell the students that they are going to design a way for people to learn about the stigma surrounding young people and their mental health, so it is important to think about what they learned from their interviews. Host a class discussion where students share insights.
- Record Needs and insights (5 min) worksheet 1 worksheet 2
- Practice generating Point of View statements as a class using their group’s persona as the target user. Provide the students with the model sentence below. Remind students that ‘needs’ should be verbs
_______ needs a way to __________ so she/he can __________________.
Example:
Steve needs a way to talk to people with mental health difficulties because he feels awkward and uncomfortable around them.
Sara needs a way to start conversations with people who are having a hard time because she is shy and never knows what to say.
- Give students the handout and ask them to take 3-5 minutes to fill out the left side with the needs and insights that they discovered during the empathy build stage of the design process.
(2 hours)
Ideate, Prototype, Test
Ideas for an app which tackle the problem statement that was defined.
This exercise is for student groups to work together in order to generate a lot of ideas quickly. Given a problem that has many possible remedies, students try to come up with many different ways to solve it. There are no correct solutions or even one best solution that the students are trying to find; rather, they are simply using their imaginations to generate as many possibilities as they can and in the end, vote for the 2 or 4 that they are most excited about.
Materials: Pen, Paper, Whiteboards, 3m pads, or large pieces of paper work well.
Group size: 4
- Divide the class into small groups.
- Choose one or two of the students to capture all the ideas (quantity not quality).
- Tell the students to generate ideas for an app based on their Point of View statements. Not drawing the apps but pitching ideas for an app.
- After ten minutes of brainstorming, ask them to select the wildest idea, the safest idea, and the most feasible idea.
- Ask the group to vote by tally to decide which idea they would like to create prototypes for.
NOTE: Might be worth prefacing with discussion of what kinds of apps they’ve used or dreamed of and never seen.
Use the idea for a prototype that you came up with the day before.
Intro: If you prototype interfaces on paper, you can not only keep a physical record of what you've developed but you can also iterate on your design much more rapidly than if you commit to a digital interface. By approximating with paper, you enable your users to test the structure and flow without having to flesh out higher-resolution details. Paper frees you from having to consider irrelevant (in the beginning stages of design, anyway) details in the context of testing a larger system.
Materials: A4 papers, pens, sharpies
Group size: Individual activity
Round 1: Everybody folds a blank sheet of paper in half three times, then unfolds it, so they get eight panels. Then you have 5 minutes total to draw eight sketches, one in each panel. (about 40 sec per drawing!) Round 2: Do the same again!
Materials: A4 paper or whiteboard, Post-its, Markers, arts and craft materials like pipe leaners and magazines for collage, coloured paper, scissors etc.
Group Size: individual and then pairs.
The goal is to take the ideas we’ve generated so far and sketch an actual UI showing how a user would move through this part of the story — where they click, what info they enter, what they think, etc.
The story boarding exercise can be done as a collage, buttons can be lollipops, glue sticks - doesn’t need to be only with pen and paper.
Task for student: “Think about the stages of interaction you want your user to go through and create an ordered stack of papers that allow a user to explore your interface.”
- Start with a blank sheet of A4 paper, and put 3 sticky notes on it. Each sticky note is one frame in the storyboard. It’s kind of like a comic book that you’re going to fill in.
- Look back at your Crazy Eights and find the best ideas. you will illustrate at least one of them in more detail.
- draw the UI in the three frames of their storyboard showing a progression: first this, then that, then that.
- Give each part a name — Come up with a catchy title for your idea.
Hang them side by side (like an art museum) so people won’t have to crowd in too tight to see them.
The purpose of this activity is to encourage students to test their prototypes and then iterate based on the feedback from their users.
The quadrants mean what did the user like (upper left), dislike (upper right), what new questions do we have (bottom left), what new ideas do we have (bottom right).
Materials: Paper, Pencil, markers (if using big sheets), charts with the 4 quadrants labeled either as handouts or on big sheets
Group size: small groups
Group size: Pairs
Exercise:
- Ask the students to pay attention to what the person receiving the prototype says and does in response to the prototype.
- Have a student introduce a prototype to another student, stressing that the 'host' students should not over-explain the prototype and rather should let the other student do most of the talking.
- Once the 'test' is over (this should be only 1 or 2 minutes), ask the students what they noticed. Invite them to contribute post-its to the chart above in each of the four quadrants:
- What did the user like in the upper left
- Not like in the upper right
- New questions that came up in the bottom left
- new ideas in the bottom right.
- Iterate (10 - 15 min): Have students go back to their paper prototype and make changes based on the feedback they received from their test group.
Basic presentation is an introductory tool for testing. The activity has two over-arching purposes: One is to help students become more comfortable with presenting to others, the other is to begin to teach the subtleties of presenting an idea or prototype vs standard oral presentations. Some of the characteristics that make a prototype presentation different from a standard presentation are that students should be encouraged:
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Show don't tell about their idea/prototype.
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Explain their idea/prototype through stories.
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To get their audience interacting with the idea or prototype as soon as possible so that they can have their own experience with it.
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To develop a set of questions to solicit feedback.
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Presentation (5 min per student/group) Ask each group to present to the class for 2-5 min their solution to the design challenge.
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How we select what ideas will go forwards. Anonymous voting? Ask them to put stickers next to ideas they like and select the best elements from across all the groups projects?