INTRODUCTION TO DESIGN THINKING

Subject Code: ME100

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 EMPATHIZE MODE
• "Empathy is at the heart of design. Without
the understanding of what others see, feel,
and experience, design is a pointless task.“
Tim Brown — IDEO

• Empathy is the centerpiece of a human-

centered design process.

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 Why Empathize?

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 Why Empathize?
• As a design thinker, the problems you are
trying to solve are rarely your own—they are
those of a particular group of people.
• In order to design for them, you must gain
empathy for who they are and what is
important to them.
• Observing what people do and how they
interact with their environment gives you
clues about what they think and feel.

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 Why Empathize?
• The best solutions come out of the best
insights into human behavior.
• But learning to recognize those insights is
harder than you might think.
• Why?

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 Why Empathize?
• The best solutions come out of the best
insights into human behavior.
• But learning to recognize those insights is
harder than you might think.
• Why?
• Because our minds automatically filter out a
lot of information without even realizing it.
• We need to learn to see things “with a fresh
set of eyes,” and empathizing is what gives us
those new eyes.
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 HOW to empathize
• Observe.
• Engage.
• Watch and Listen.

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 Practicing empathy

• Empathy is the foundation of the whole design

thinking process.
• It also ties directly to the Guess less principle
of product design.
• If you are going to solve the problem, you
want sufficient information to solve it.

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 Embrace Team
• Worldwide, about 15 million premature babies are
born every year and the most common preventable
cause of infant mortality is hypothermia.
• Solving the problem of infant mortality due to
hypothermia seems like an extremely worthy design
challenge.
• They needed empathy to see the problem clearly
from the perspective of hospital staff, doctors, and
most importantly, parents of the child in danger.

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 Embrace Team

Fig: Embrace- Infant warmer

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 Conducting Research

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 Conducting Research
• To help you identify your product's
competition, as well as to identify and
understand your product's users.
• Then, you build a “better” product than your
competitors by understanding the problem
better than they do.

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 Conducting Research
• In the field of business, science and
technology, economics, etc.., they use two
standard ways of conducting research. One is
qualitative research and other is quantitative
research.

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 Qualitative Research

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 Qualitative Research

• Qualitative research is used to gain an

understanding of human behavior, intentions,
attitudes, experience, etc., based on the
observation and the interpretation of the
people.

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 Qualitative Research
• This kind of research is usually done to understand the topic
in-depth.
• It is generally expressed using words.
• It has open-ended questions.
• The qualitative research needs only a few respondents.
• The data collection methods involved are interviews, focus
groups, literature review, ethnography.
• It develops the initial understanding of data.
• The data taken in the Qualitative research method is pretty
verbal.
• The objective of this research method is to engage and
discover various ideas.

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 Quantitative Research

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 Quantitative Research
• Quantitative research method relies on the
methods of natural sciences, that develops
hard facts and numerical data.
• As the results are accurately and precisely
measured, this research method is also
termed as “Empirical Research”.

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 Quantitative Research
• It is expressed using the graphs and numbers.
• It has multiple choice questions.
• The quantitative research requires many
respondents.
• The data collection methods involved are
experiments, surveys, and observations expressed in 
numbers.
• It recommends a final course of action.
• The data taken in this method is pretty measurable.
• The main objective of Quantitative research is to
examine the cause and effect between the variables.
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 Ethnography

• Ethnography is a type of qualitative research

that involves immersing yourself in a
particular community or organization to
observe their behavior and interactions up
close.
• The word “ethnography” also refers to the
written report of the research that the
ethnographer produces afterwards.

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 Case study 1: IDEO and Bank of America’s
Keep the Change program

"Ultimately, people want to feel that they are

in control … managing money is not generally
something people like to deal with … [this
project] was about helping people build better
habits, but also relate to their money in more
positive ways.“
Christian Marc Schmidt — INTERACTION AT
IDEO DURING THE KEEP THE CHANGE PROJECT

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 Case study 2: Establishing empathy
remotely: the camera study

• Product teams need to move fast, and they’re

often working on a strict timeline.
• User Research- in the form of Ethnography
• Minimum viable Ethnography

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 Customer Needs Identification

• Customer Needs Identification is the process

of determining what and how a customer
wants a product to perform.
• Customer Needs are non-technical, and they
reflect the customers’ perception of the
product, not the actual design specifications,
although frequently they are closely related.

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 Customer Needs Identification

• Customer Needs Identification has two major

goals
– To keep the product focused on customer needs
– To identify not just the explicit needs of the
customer, but also the latent needs

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Customer Needs Identification Process
Gather raw data from customers
The art of eliciting customer needs data
 How much data to be collected?

• Griffin & Hauser(1993) found that conducting

9 interviews for about 1 hour will usually
reveal about 90% of customer needs.
• Some companies will conduct as many as 50
interviews when preparing new products.

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 Suggestions to conduct interviews effectively
• Prepare questions, but don’t be afraid to deviate
if appropriate
• Use visual stimuli and props
• Suppress preconceived hypothesis about the
product technology
• Have the customer demonstrate the product
and/or typical related tasks
• Be alert for surprises and the expression of latent
needs
• Watch for non-verbal information
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 2. Interpreting Data
• Translate the vague statements of the
customers into a useful list of needs
• Make use of multiple Analysts to work on the
interpretations
• How exactly one transform what the customer
says into something you can work with?

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 Suggestions for expressing the data
• Write the needs in terms of what the product
has to do, not how it might do it.
• Express the needs as specifically as the raw
data
• Use positive phrasing
• Express the needs as an attribute of the
product
• Avoid the words must and should

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 3. Organizing Needs
• After interpreting the data, organize them
• Group similar needs together, prioritize them
• Decide what is truly important to the
customer
• Define the “critical needs”
• But, how to organize the needs and prioritize
product features?

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 Kano Method/Kano Model
• In the 1980’s Professor Noriaki Kano
developed a categorization system called the
Kano Method
• Kano Model helps a product development
team understanding the customer’s
requirement and behavior
• Kano method reduces the product and service
development time by eliminating or adding
the features as per customer demand

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 Kano Method
• Kano method classifies customer preferences
into 5 categories
– Must-be Quality
– One-dimensional Quality
– Attractive Quality
– Indifferent Quality
– Reverse Quality

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 Kano Method

Fig: Kano Analysis Model

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Tips on Organizing the Needs into Hierarchical List
Tips Descriptions

Wall/White board Perform prioritization process

Post-It Notes Record each need statement on card or Post-It note

Delete Dispose of redundant need statements

Redundancies
Group Notes Group notes having similar need

Organize by customer need, not technology

Choose Label Select label to describe each group

Create Super If necessary, group small groups into larger groups

groups

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 4. Establish the Relative Importance of the Needs
• Establish the relative importance of the needs
identified in steps 1 to 3
• Useful in making trade-off decisions between
Cost vs Speed vs Accuracy (How?)
• Assign the numerical importance weights for
needs
• Responses from the customer survey can be
used to assign value to need statements
• Ask customers to indicate importance during
the interview
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 5. Reflect on the Results and the Process
• Reflect on what has been done
• Consider the statements that have been
gathered and study the interpretations
• Try to evaluate how the process was executed
• Ask yourself
– Have all types of customers been interviewed?
– Do any customers require follow-up interviews?
– Could the process have been done faster?
Remember, as of now there are no product
specifications!
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 5. Reflect on the Results and the Process
Topic Questions
Interaction Have we interacted with customers in target market?

Latent Needs Did we capture latent needs, not just obvious ones?

Follow-Up Should we conduct follow-up interviews?

Key Customers Which customers should we contact during design?

Surprises What surprising needs did we discover?

Collaboration Did we engage everyone in our organization?

Improvement How might we improve our efforts in future?

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 Case Study 3: Electrostatic Printer
• How helpful it can be to properly identify
Customer Needs

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