Design Thinking

Handbook
By Eli Woolery
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What is design thinking? More than a
methodology or framework, design thinking
combines the problem-solving roots of design
with deep empathy for the user. The design
thinking-based framework popularized by the
Stanford d.school can help your team take
on the thorniest challenges with insightful
solutions.

In this guide, you’ll learn how to put design

thinking into practice in your organization.
Contents
Why we need design thinking
Tackle complex challenges

Empathize
The heart of design

Define
Reframe the problem

Ideate
Beyond basic brainstorms

Prototype
Get smarter, faster

Test
Early and often
Chapter—01

Why we need
design thinking
Tackle complex challenges
In 1958, 4 months after Sputnik launched and President

Eisenhower created NASA, a Stanford engineering professor

named John Arnold proposed that design engineering should

be human-centered.

This was a strange thing for Arnold to introduce. It was an

era in which engineers were largely focused on twin Cold

War driven goals: the space race and the optimization of the

hydrogen bomb.

Inspired by Arnold’s work, engineering professor Bob

McKim, with the help of art professor Matt Kahn, created

an engineering program called Product Design. Within this

program, McKim and others helped create a design thinking

process that became the foundation for Stanford’s d.school,

as well as the guiding framework for design-driven companies

like IDEO.

Just as the space race resulted in the invention of Velcro and

satellite communications, design thinking plays a large role in

how we interact with computers (the mouse and notebook),

how we deliver our healthcare, and how we do our banking now

and in the future.

"Design thinking is a human-centered
approach to innovation that draws from the
designer’s toolkit to integrate the needs of
people, the possibilities of technology, and the
requirements for business success."

Tim Brown — IDEO

Why has design thinking been embraced not only by forward-

thinking innovators like IDEO but large enterprises like

IBM? For one, it brings everyone into the process, not just

designers; using the design process helps companies solve

wicked problems with clear eyes.

Design thinking also helps scale the design process through

large organizations. Business leaders who use the shared

vocabulary and toolset of design thinking can confidently

create better, human-centered user experiences and

disruptive products.

“Design thinking is making organizations think

about how to move faster…with iterative speed.”
John Maeda — Automattic

Finally, design thinking helps to instill a bias towards action,

balanced with a user-centered perspective that guides the

team towards the right outcome.

The design thinking process is not necessarily linear, nor is

there one canonical way to approach it; it is an iterative system

with many variations. However, Stanford’s d.school teaches a

framework that can help jump-start the process for almost any

problem:
Stanford d.school’s design thinking framework.

We’ll walk you through the 5 steps of this design thinking

framework, which will provide a toolkit for design challenges

large and small in your organization.

The core of the design thinking approach is a focus on

empathy, or using a beginner’s mindset and immersing

yourself in the user’s experience to uncover deep needs and

insights.
Defining the problem with a point of view (POV) is a key part of

the process: who is your user (with as many specific details as

possible); what is their deep, unmet need; why is this insightful

(what insights did you glean from your empathetic needfinding

process?). Often, reframing the problem using a unique POV

will lead to more innovative solution spaces.

The design thinking process goes through a cycle of

generative flaring and selective focusing. In the definition

phase, we narrowed down to a specific Point of View; now, in

the ideation phase, we flare out and generate as many ideas as

possible.

For many designers, prototyping is where the fun begins.

Sometimes the key to good empathy is sharing or co-creating

a prototype with your users and getting feedback. Prototyping

helps us learn, solve disagreements, and test hypotheses

quickly and with minimal repercussions.

By testing our prototypes with real users and getting feedback,

we can refine our POV, learn more about our users, and make

the next iteration of the product that much better. As they say

at Stanford’s d.school: “Prototype as if you know you’re right,

but test as if you know you’re wrong.”

These steps should be considered a way to get started with

design thinking. Over time, you will adapt them to your working

style and make them your own. With this flexible toolkit,

you’ll be prepared to tackle any project, from a new app to—

perhaps—new NASA moonshots.

With thanks to Bill Burnett, executive director of the Design

Program at Stanford, for giving the lecture that inspired this

introduction.
Chapter—02

Empathize
The heart of design
Imagine that you live in a remote village in Nepal. It’s winter

and freezing sleet pounds the nearby roads, making them

nearly impassable. You’ve just had your first baby, a little girl,

and she’s premature and severely underweight. The room

that you’re in, while warm to you, feels like an ice-bath to the

baby. Without help soon, she will almost certainly die from

hypothermia. What do you do?

Worldwide, about 15 million premature babies are born every

year and the most common preventable cause of infant

mortality is hypothermia. As designers, we solve the problems

of others, and solving the problem of infant mortality due to

hypothermia seems like an extremely worthy design challenge.

This is exactly what a team from Stanford’s d.school set out

to accomplish as a project for the class Design for Extreme

Affordability (often known just as “Extreme”).

The team ended up with a novel, innovative solution—but

they never would’ve arrived there if they remained within the

bubble of Stanford’s campus. They needed empathy to see the

problem clearly from the perspective of hospital staff, doctors,

and most importantly, parents of the child in danger.

Initially, the design team thought redesigning existing hospital

incubators to be simpler and more cost effective would be

the easiest solution. But when team member Linus Liang

toured a hospital in Nepal, he noticed something strange—the

incubators were sitting empty. After interviewing a doctor

about this, he learned that many homes where these babies

were born were 30 or more miles away on rough rural roads,

and that the parents faced the fight for their babies’ lives at

home, without much hope of making it to a hospital.

The Extreme team used this insight to inform their decisions

about the product’s direction. Instead of a cheaper incubator

(the initial concept, but likely ineffective given the evidence)

they decided to design something to help babies at home: a

portable incubator, much like a tiny, heated sleeping bag, which

they named Embrace.

"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

While prototyping the Embrace, the team interviewed many

moms, healthcare workers, and shopkeepers who helped them

iterate on solutions. By showing prototypes, they learned

about critical barriers to adoption:

• In a village in India, a mother explained they believe

Western medicines are very powerful, so villagers

often halve doses. The warmer on the Embrace had a

temperature indicator, and this mother indicated that

other mothers would only heat it halfway to the ideal

temperature. This information led the team to iterate on the

design, removing the temperature strip and changing the

design to showcase an “OK” indicator.

• The team also learned that in many communities,

electricity is unavailable or unreliable. So they designed a

version of the warmer that could be heated using hot water.

Figure 1: The Embrace infant warmer.

With these insights, the team was able to create a product that

was easy to use correctly in the locations it was designed for.

They formed a company based on this product, grew it to 90

people, and have helped over 3,000 babies.

By using empathy and focusing on the people who would use

the product—in this team’s case, a literal journey that exposed

them to the feelings and challenges of their users—the

Embrace team came up with a product that saves lives.

Practicing empathy
Empathy is the foundation of the whole design thinking

process. Using a beginner’s mindset and immersing yourself

in the user’s experience is a great way to uncover deep needs

and insights. It also ties directly to the Guess less principle

of product design. In this Empathize section of our course,

we’ll dive into a case study where empathy helped create

an innovative product for Bank of America. We’ll then walk

through some exercises you can employ to gain more empathy

for, and insights from, your own users.

How can empathy help us design better products? To find out,

try this exercise, adapted from the Wallet Project exercise

taught at Stanford’s d.school. It should only take about 15

minutes. (Go ahead, we’ll wait for you.)

Design the ideal wallet — VIEW EXERCISE

Case study: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

Let’s try a thought experiment. Put yourself in the state of

mind of someone living paycheck to paycheck. For some of

us who as designers spent time freelancing and waiting … and

waiting … to get paid by clients, this might not be a hard thing

to imagine.

What are some of your biggest fears? Getting your water or

heat shut off because you can’t pay bills on time? Maybe things

are bad enough that you worry you won’t make rent and could
get evicted.

You probably don’t have time (or the means) to worry about

setting up a savings plan. A 2013 study at Princeton showed

that being in this state of mind actually impairs the brainpower

needed to navigate other areas of life.

So how do you go about designing a banking product for

someone stuck in this vicious cycle? In 2004, the design firm

IDEO tackled exactly this challenge for Bank of America. Their

target users were not restricted to people in this demographic,

but the insights that lead to Bank of America’s innovative

“Keep the Change” program came in part from extreme users.

Such users had unconventional ways of solving banking

problems, which gave the IDEO team ideas for a banking

service that would help address the needs of people having a

difficult time achieving a sense of control over their finances.

"There was an almost unexpected and very

emotional effect from this new service …
people who previously never had savings
suddenly did … and it wasn’t the amount that
mattered; even a small amount of money in
their savings account gave them a sense of
power and control over their finances."

Faith Tucker — SENIOR VICE PRESIDENT & PRODUCT DEVELOPER

AT BANK OF AMERICA DURING THE KEEP THE CHANGE PROJECT

IDEO was given the challenge by Bank of America to find novel

ways to entice people to open accounts. The bank was hoping

that IDEO’s human-centered, ethnographic-based approach

to design would bring innovation to an industry that’s typically

very conservative and reluctant to change.

Erika Hall, Mule Design

Listen Online: Defining ethnography

To accomplish this, IDEO embedded themselves into the

Bank of America team and conducted observations in several

cities across America. They spoke to families and individuals,

learning about spending and banking habits. As IDEO

synthesized their observations, they began to notice some

interesting patterns.

Often, mothers were in charge of the finances. This was during

the early 2000s, before online banking and mobile devices

had more or less replaced the idea of a balanced checkbook.

Some moms had a practice of rounding up the number in their

checkbooks; this made addition easier, but it also gave a small

buffer in spending.

Armed with this insight and the knowledge that many of these

families had difficulty saving what money they had, IDEO

came up with a service idea. People could enroll in a savings

account that would round up purchases made with debit cards.

Then, the overage would be transferred to a savings account

automatically. In addition, the bank would match the money

transferred to savings to a certain dollar amount.

As you might imagine, this program became very popular—and

not only with people who had trouble saving money. Ever since

the program launched in September of 2005, more than 12.3

million customers have enrolled, saving a total of more than 2

billion dollars. Of all new customers, 60% enroll in the program.

When we interviewed Faith Tucker, the former Senior Vice

President & Product Developer at Bank of America, she was

clearly proud of the emotional impact this service had on

people who found saving money difficult. The amount was

largely inconsequential—it was more about the change

in mental state and feeling of empowerment that these

customers gained.

To a certain degree, it removed the feeling of shame that came

along with being unable to save money, which was replaced

with pride at taking more control over finances.

“It’s painful, and it helps us understand where

the shortcomings in our product are…”

Julie Zhou — FACEBOOK, FEATURED IN THE DOCUMENTARY

DESIGN DISTRUPTORS

In the film DESIGN DISRUPTORS, Julia Zhou (VP Product

Design, Facebook) and Mia Blume (Product Design Manager,

Pinterest), talk about the importance of having empathy for

your user.
Establishing empathy
remotely: the camera study
Product teams need to move fast, and they’re often working

on a strict timeline. It can be hard to convince stakeholders

that user research—in the form of an ethnography—can be

completed quickly and still have an impact.

However, there are some great techniques available to do

exactly that. If you’re highly constrained on time and budget,

try a Minimum Viable Ethnography, pioneered by user research

expert Erika Hall of Mule Design.

Erika Hall, Mule Design

Listen Online: Minimum viable ethnography

A camera study can be a great substitute for

rapid empathy work, but getting buy-in from the
participants is an essential, and not always easy
piece.

Bobby Hughes — AARDVARK DESIGN LABS

If you have a little more time, try a user camera study. The

advantage of this approach is that you get a semi-unfiltered

view into the day-to-day environment of your users and you

gain insights that may not be available via a phone or video

interview.

Here’s a step-by-step guide for the study:

Camera studies & user permissions — VIEW EXERCISE

Empathy as the heart of design

Empathy is a journey into the feelings of others. Sometimes

it’s a physical journey, like the one the Embrace team took to

Nepal. Other times, it’s a virtual journey, where users share

their screens with you or collect pictures of their environment

in a camera study. Whatever your methods include, a good

empathy study will give you new perspectives on the lives of

your users—including the challenges they face, the things that

keep them up at night, and the moments that delight them.

Having this empathy can give you the insights you need to

solve hard, worthwhile problems.

Without empathy, IDEO would not have been able to help

Bank of America create a product that helped their financially

strained customers feel empowered about saving money.

Embrace wouldn’t have been able to create a product that’s

saved the lives of thousands of premature babies. Empathy

connects designers to the people who will use our products,

empowering us to create products that ultimately meet real

human needs.

As humans, we evolved to have a powerful sense of empathy.

The primatologist Frans de Waal writes that the power of

empathy to help people collaborate is one of the reasons

we became so successful as a species. Wield this power as

a designer and you’ll have the foundation, and the heart, to

create great products for humans everywhere.

“I’m trying to solve a problem I see in every
industry, where the person in the room who
talks about the customer wins.”

John Maeda — AUTOMATTIC

Further reading
Interviews aren’t the only way to gain empathy

D.school Wallet Project

Just Enough Research

Creative Confidence

Wired to Care
Chapter—03

Define
Reframe the problem
In 1968, when Apollo 8 became the first spacecraft to

circumnavigate the moon, the crew had one photographic

mission: to capture detailed images of the moon’s surface. As

the astronauts rounded the dark side, Earth became visible—a

brilliant blue and white marble. Earth was remarkable not only

for its serene beauty from this perspective but also for its

apparent fragility. The only life-sustaining planet in our solar

system is dwarfed by the vast emptiness of space.

With the photograph from this event, which became known

as “Earthrise,” the Apollo 8 astronauts inadvertently sparked

a spontaneous reframing of the environmental problems

threatening our planet. No longer were we on a vast planet with

seemingly endless resources, but rather a small, very finite

lifeboat in an infinite universe. This change in perspective

helped charge the modern environmental movement, inspiring

the creation of Earth Day in 1970.

Figure 1: Earthrise: image of Earth from NASA’s Apollo 8 mission.

Reframing the way that a problem is viewed can inspire a

movement, as it did in this case. It can also be a powerful way

to create innovative design solutions to challenging problems

and even create new and disruptive business models. During

the Empathize phase of the Design Thinking process, you

collected stories and insights from your users. This Define

phase will give you an opportunity to synthesize these findings

and come up with a problem statement, called a point of view

(POV), that can help you reframe the problem and open new

and innovative solution spaces.

Developing a point
of view (POV)
A POV is composed of 3 elements:

• Who is your user? (Note as many specific details as

possible.)

• What is their deep, unmet need?

• Why is this insightful? (List the insights you gleaned from

your empathetic needfinding process.)

As an example, below is a POV from the founders of

AwesomeBox, a gift-giving platform, used in the early days

of developing their product. They were trying to design for

people who have a hard time giving thoughtful gifts. They

interviewed and observed hundreds of potential customers,

from which they created POVs like the following.

Figure 2: An early POV from the founders of the gift-giving platform

AwesomeBox.

Let’s create some hypothetical POVs using Netflix, as they’re

a good example of a company that disrupted an existing

business model by reframing the problem for users.

In the early days, Netflix might have framed their POV like this:

“Caroline is a 26-year-old single mom who loves sci-fi movies.

She needs a way to rent DVDs that doesn’t clutter her already-

busy schedule, while making her feel relaxed after a long day of

work and taking care of her daughter.”

Using this point of view, Netflix certainly could have come

up with a solution that only delivers DVDs by mail—but the

solution space would have been constrained and they might’ve

missed a larger opportunity.

Now consider how Netflix could have reframed the problem

with a different POV.

Caroline is a 26-year-old single mom who loves sci-fi movies.

She needs a way to access new and entertaining content in

a way that allows her to consume it at her own pace, while

making her feel excited about discovering new shows to share

with her friends.

With the problem statement rewritten, Netflix opened up all

kinds of opportunities for innovation. Let’s unpack them.

“She needs a way to access new and entertaining content … ”

This doesn’t even mention DVDs! In the early days, a mail

delivery solution may have worked, but over time Netflix

developed the streaming services that helped make them

so popular. Also, “new and entertaining” doesn’t necessarily

limit them to licensing content. Netflix could also develop and

distribute their own shows.

“ … in a way that allows her to consume it at her own pace … ”

Again, mail delivery of DVDs would be a partial solution to this

constraint, but with streaming as an option, there’s an even

bigger opportunity. Add in original content, and now Caroline

can binge-watch House of Cards while her daughter sleeps.

(We never said that innovative solutions always have a positive

social impact.)

“ … while making her feel excited about discovering new shows

…”

Netflix famously developed a “recommendation algorithm” that

helps viewers discover new content based on the shows they

already watch—and the ratings they give to each. This feature

wouldn’t have necessarily stemmed from the previous POV.

“ … which she can share with her friends.”

This last insight, while minor on its surface, is a huge reason

for the viral growth of Netflix—especially after the company

began developing original content. Once rave reviews about

shows began to surface—with the only way to access them

being Netflix—the continued growth was almost assured.

Andy Law, Netflix

Listen Online: Reframing to scale

Clearly, there would have been a lot of value left on the table

had Netflix used the first POV to guide their designs. In addition

to helping you reframe a problem, a good POV can align your

team, provide a way to compare competing ideas, and help fuel

brainstorms. In fact, the d.school at Stanford came up with a

great checklist of all the things that a good POV should help

you accomplish:

Point of view (POV) checklist

Your POV should:

• Provide focus and frame the problem

• Inspire your team

• Provide a reference for evaluating competing ideas

• Empower team members to make decisions in response to

the high level goals of the team

• Fuel brainstorms by suggesting “how might we”

statements

• Capture the hearts and minds of people you meet

• Save you from the impossible task of developing solution

concepts that are all things to all people

• Allow you to revisit and reformulate the POV as you learn

by doing

• Guide your innovation efforts

In the remaining sections of this chapter, we will dive into a

case study where developing a POV provided inspiration for

a healthcare project with a lot of impact. Then, we’ll share an

exercise to help you quickly generate POVs of your own.

Leah Buley, author of The User Experience Team of One

Listen Online: Synthesizing Research

Case study: GE Healthcare

MRI redesign
We first met Doug Dietz when doing the research for

this chapter. Over the phone, Doug is a kind, affable

midwesterner—the sort of guy you imagine it would be fun

to go to a Milwaukee Brewers game with. But beneath his

unassuming presence is a formidable design mind with over

25 years of experience at GE Healthcare. First as a principal

designer and now Innovation Architect, Doug has helped

develop medical equipment such as MRI and CT scanners for

one of the world’s largest corporations.

In 2008, Doug ran into a problem. He was at a hospital where

one of his new MRI machines had recently been installed. The

machine had won a prestigious industrial design award and

Doug was eager to see the machine in situ.

Before he had much of a chance to ask the technician about

the machine, he was asked to step outside of the room, as a

patient was scheduled to come in for an appointment. What he

witnessed in the hallway changed the course of his career and

helped him reframe the MRI user experience.

A young family walked in, their 7-year-old daughter obviously

distressed. As the family got closer, Doug could see that she

was weeping. The father leaned over and said, “Remember, we

talked about this, you can be brave.”

Doug peered into the room where the young girl was about to

enter the scanner. Crouching down, he had a new perspective

on the room—and on the machine that he had so proudly

designed. He could immediately understand why the girl was

terrified: warning stickers plastered the machine and yellow

and black tape marked the floor like a crash-test scene. The

machine itself looked like a beige “brick with a hole in it.”

Given this new perspective, it’s no mystery why many children

have to be sedated to get MRI or CT scans. Everything about

the experience can be frightening, from the room and the

machine to the claustrophobia and loud noises. Doug came

away with a new mission: to understand how GE might redesign

this experience for children so that it’s a positive experience

and not something to be dreaded.

Doug’s boss recommended he attend an executive education

workshop at the d.school at Stanford to get the Design

Thinking toolkit and help him solve this big, emotionally-

charged problem. The workshop helped him frame the problem

as a POV, in the form of a Madlib which was structured in the

following way:

“We met … ”

“We were amazed to realize that … ”

“It would change the world if … ”

Using this framework, Doug and his team were able to iterate

on their POV until they came up with a statement more aligned

with the goal.

“We met scared families trying not to fall apart during the
hospital visit.

We were amazed to realize that they have to sedate 80% of

children between 3 and 8 years old, in order to have them

scanned.

It would change the world if we could capitalize on the child’s

amazing imagination to transform the radiology experience

into a positive, memorable adventure.”

By reframing the problem using this POV, Doug and his team

realized that the beginning of the user experience started at

home, when the parents were trying to figure out what the

procedure was like and how to explain it to their children. They

were able to outline the whole user journey for the family and

determine the different touchpoints that they could influence

or redesign.

Doug Dietz, GE Healthcare

Listen Online: The experience is the product

The team didn’t have the budget to do a full redesign of

the machines, so once they had identified a few promising

opportunities, they decided to implement a low-fidelity

prototype. By applying decals to the exterior of the machine

and the walls of the scanning room, they were able to

transform the dull, monotone experience into a colorful

pirate adventure, where the captain’s helm led to the inside

of the “ship” (this feature had the added benefit of making the

opening seem much larger and less claustrophobic). They

created a script for the operator, who led the children through

the pirate adventure.

Figure 3: By reframing the problem, Doug Dietz created a positive

experience for children facing stressful MRI and CAT scans. Photo

courtesy Children’s Hospital of Pittsburgh.

The results from this redesign and from others like it were

no less than amazing. Sedation rates dropped from 80% to

fractions of one percent. But to Doug, the human stories

behind the numbers are just as important.

While visiting the pirate-themed scanner, Doug talked to the

parents of a little girl about the room’s piña colada scented

aroma, something they were getting a kick out of. The little girl

came up to the mom and tugged at her shirt. “Can we come

back tomorrow?” she asked.

For at least one family, Doug and his team had transformed

the experience from something terrifying to something to look

forward to. By using their POV as a way to reframe the problem,

his team was able to change the world.

Using Madlibs to generate POVs — VIEW EXERCISE

The exponential power

of reframing
In their wonderful 1977 film for IBM, designers Charles and Ray

Eames explored how perspectives change by looking at the

relative scale of objects. For example, the film zooms out from

a man and woman on a picnic blanket to the grass surrounding

them.

The short film Powers of Ten by designers

Charles and Ray Eames

A film dealing with the relative size of things in the universe and the

effect of adding another zero.

The film quickly progresses through Earth to the edge of the

universe, then zooms back into the nucleus of a carbon atom.

In the process, viewers get a wonderful understanding of

extremes at both ends of the scale, but also of how reframing

your viewpoint can create a new perspective on something

familiar and ordinary.

As designers, we can leverage the power of reframing to help

us innovate and solve wicked problems. We can create POVs

to help guide our product design process and connect us to

our users. And if we’re lucky, we might just see the world in a
new light along the way.

Further reading
How Reframing A Problem Unlocks Innovation

Three Ways to Reframe a Problem to Find an Innovative

Solution

Reframe: Shift the Way You Work, Innovate, and Think

Designing features using Job Stories

Don’t Make a Journey Map: 9 archetypes

Chapter—04

Ideate
Beyond basic brainstorms
The Apollo 13 Mission Control team faced a huge number of

seemingly insurmountable obstacles after an oxygen tank

exploded on board the 1970 mission to the moon. They needed

to find a new route that would get the astronauts back to Earth

quickly with a limited supply of life-supporting fuel and power.

The most pressing problem was a buildup of carbon dioxide

in the ship. Without a replacement scrubber, stored out of

reach in a different module in the craft, the crew would soon

asphyxiate from their own exhalations.

Figure 1: The NASA Houston mission control team discusses the

emergency filter prototype ‘mailbox.’

In the 1995 movie version of this dramatic event, Apollo 13,

Flight Director Gene Kranz (played by Ed Harris) assembles

the top engineers and scientists in a room for a brainstorming

session. He tells the group to forget the flight plan, and that

they would be “improvising a new mission.” Standing in front

of a chalkboard, he quickly sketches the original route of the

ship. Then, when one of the engineers suggests a new route,

Kranz alters the original route to show a slingshot approach

that would use the moon’s gravity to whip the astronauts back

toward Earth.

In a later scene, a group of engineers tasked with devising a

new filtration system dumps the same items aboard Apollo 13

onto a table. They proceed to prototype a fix that the crew can

build from the objects at hand, ending up with a literal “duct-

tape solution.”

Figure 2: The ‘mailbox’ filter as created by the astronauts on board

the Apollo 13 mission.

In each case, the route to resolving the problems seemed

relatively straightforward, if fraught with urgency: get a bunch

of smart people in a room, and have them collectively come up

with ideas until the best solution was found. We can assume

that the film was faithful to what happened in the real life

control room in Houston, but what conditions created such a

successful environment for brainstorming?

The term “brainstorm” was popularized by the ad agency

executive Alex Osborn in his 1953 book Applied Imagination

(though he had outlined his method in a 1948 book, Your

Creative Power). Osborn claimed that by organizing a group

to attack a creative problem “commando fashion, with each

stormer attacking the same objective,” creative output could

be doubled.

Osborn created 2 main rules for a successful brainstorm:

01. Defer judgement

02. Reach for quantity

Deferring judgement reduced social inhibitions in the group—

no one would be stigmatized for shouting out a crazy idea. By

reaching for quantity, participants would boost their overall

creative output and increase the likelihood of coming up with

innovative solutions.

As we discussed in Pencils before pixels, brainstorming in a

group might not work as well for original ideas, as compared

to individuals working independently. However, brainstorming

adds value to the creative process in ways that don’t just

involve coming up with ideas.

Brainstorming isn’t about

new ideas, really

I don’t believe the value of brainstorming is the

ideas generated; I believe it is the shared value/
evaluation context created. The experience of
brainstorming creates a group of people with
a shared perspective, and an understanding of
each other’s communication styles, who are
then capable of providing a useful and powerful
critique of future work on the topic.

Tim Sheiner — SALESFORCE

It turns out that the power of brainstorming doesn’t really

come from spontaneously generating new ideas. Rather, the

real strength in brainstorming stems from the process’s ability

to:

• Quickly generate lots of ideas, to help get an overview of

the conceptual landscape. These are not necessarily new

ideas (or good ideas). They may have been brewing for a

while as individuals considered the problem beforehand.

These ideas can become the seeds for solutions, to be

investigated with prototypes.

• Gather a team into a physical space where everyone can

share perspectives on the problem and become aware of

the potential solution spaces as they are surfaced. Done

well, it can energize a team (and done poorly, it can deflate

one).
• Get clients or stakeholders to buy into the design

process, and also learn what is important to these decision

makers.

"[Brainstorms are] excellent at helping clients

buy into the creative process…they get to
join in on the brainstorms, they see lots of
ideas, they get to vote for their favorites and a
dialogue happens during the voting process
that is crucial. Some kind of sorting always
follows a brainstorm, and it’s during this
process that one can learn from the client.
What have they already done or are currently
doing? What can’t they do? Won’t they do? And
most importantly, what are they excited about?"

Yona Belfort — VITAL INNOVATION

Generating ideas, sharing perspectives, and gaining

stakeholder buy-in are lofty goals. To achieve them via

brainstorming requires careful planning. In the next few

sections, we’ll cover how to properly set the stage for success.
[The] goal is to give you a mass quantity of
ideas quickly … not solutions, but the seeds
to possible solutions. Solutions take real hard
work. Brainstorming gets you the lay of the
land quickly for possible solution areas to
investigate. But good solutions are like body
building, there’s no way to cheat the hours of
the gym you got to put in.

Art Sandoval — LUNAR DESIGN

Prepare for brainstorming

success
Before we dive into suggestions for making your brainstorms

more successful, a caveat—just like any other creative tool,

there are a lot of ways to run a brainstorm, some of which

might work better for certain types of problems. The only

way you’ll learn which technique works best for you is to

experiment with a few.

You’ll remember from our introduction that Alex Osborn sets 2

guidelines for a successful brainstorm:

01. Defer judgement

02. Reach for quantity

While these are fundamentally important, there are a few

additional guidelines that will make your brainstorm more

successful.

Before the brainstorm

A key part of the brainstorming process is the facilitator—

someone who will lead the session, keep track of time, and

set up the space for the group. This facilitator can also make

sure that the group comes prepared with a mission framed by

problem statements.
Irene Au, KHOSLA VENTURES

Listen Online: Design sprints and brainstorming

Set a mission

Your brainstorming session should have a clear goal. What

problem(s) are you surfacing ideas for? What is the best

method for coming up with this goal?

Recall that Stanford’s d.school design thinking framework

(below) alternates between generative (flaring) and selective

(focusing) phases. As you Empathize, you gather data and

stories from your users, generating insights and flaring out.

As you begin to synthesize that information and come closer to

Defining your point of view (POV), you become selective about

the solution space you will pursue, and you focus.

Figure 3: An illustration of the design thinking process, showing

flaring and focusing phases, from the Stanford d.school’s visual

resource guide.

In the current Ideate phase, you flare out again as you generate

a multitude of ideas and select promising solutions for

Prototyping. Doing this helps your team step beyond obvious

solutions, harness the collective creativity of the team, and

discover new and unexpected areas to explore.

How do you go about generating those ideas? The POV that

you generated in the Define phase is a great platform to help

start the process. Using your POV problem statement, come

up with “How might we … ?” topics that are subsets of the

entire problem. If your POV is well constructed, these topics

should fall naturally out of it.

For example, let’s go back to Doug Dietz’s POV.

“We met scared families trying not to fall apart during the

hospital visit. We were amazed to realize that they have to

sedate 80% of the children between 3 and 8 years old, in order

to have them be scanned. It would change the world if we could

capitalize on the child’s amazing imagination to transform the

radiology experience into a positive, memorable adventure.”

With that POV, you can pretty easily come up with problem

statements like “How might we make the MRI scanner a more

imaginative space?” or “How can we reduce anxiety before

appointments by sparking children’s imaginations?” With these

topics, you can then set up brainstorming sessions to surface

a lot of ideas.

Set up the space

For a good brainstorm to happen, the energy in the

room needs to be right. First, pick a space that has large

whiteboards or room on a wall to set up poster-sized Easel

Pads. The room should also be somewhat enclosed if there is

a worry about bothering other teams (brainstorming can get

boisterous)—but there are alternate techniques for a quiet

brainstorm, which we’ll get to a little later.

Get into the right headspace

If you’re coming into a brainstorming session from individual

work, it can be a little jarring to adopt a collaborative

mindset—and hard to ramp up your energy level accordingly.

The facilitator should spend a few minutes getting everyone

acclimated. There are quick, improv-based techniques for this,

like Sound Ball or Knife, Baby, and Angry Cat. You can also use

the 30 Circles Exercise that we outline later in this article.

Limit the time

A brainstorm can quickly run out of steam if the facilitator

doesn’t establish time limits and keep the conversation

moving. Setting a time limit for each topic is a good idea (15–20

minutes works well, depending on how many topics you need

to cover). You can also set a goal for the number of ideas

per topic (e.g., 100 ideas in 20 minutes). Use a Time Timer so

everyone has a visual indicator and benefits from adrenaline-

powered sprints as the time begins to run short.

During the brainstorm

When the brainstorm kicks off, the moderator’s job is to keep

the momentum going, stay on topic, and make sure all ideas

are captured.

Always say yes

To keep the energy high and the ideas flowing, a good

brainstorm shares a lot in common with the improv technique

of “Yes, and … ” When an idea is put forth, participants should

be encouraged to build on it, putting a positive spin on the

contribution. Critical energy can be diverted into productive

ideation in this way. For example, “Yes, I like that idea, and we

could go even further by … ”

Stay on topic

In the heated environment of a brainstorm, it’s easy to get

sidetracked and start diving down rabbit holes that have no

relation to the problem statement at hand. It’s important for

the facilitator to gently guide participants back to the current

topic. Sometimes this is best done by noting adjacent topics

and mentioning that the group can come back to it later or

during a future session.

Be visual and headline

One way to run a brainstorm is to have the facilitator serve as

scribe, logging all the ideas as they come. Another is to arm

the group with sticky notes and sharpies, so that they can walk

up to the board, verbally share an idea, and put a summary of

the idea on the board.

Either way, it’s important to be visual. Encourage quick

sketches— these will help to clarify and group ideas.

Also, ideas should be headlined as they are produced. A

participant can say, “We could create a way for the user to

leave feedback for us directly via a comment form,” which

someone would then summarize as “Feedback comment form.”

Whatever method you choose, ideas should be shared one at a

time. This allows the scribe to write them, or the participant to

be heard as they post their idea to the board.

After the brainstorm

When the brainstorm is finished and there are a hundred ideas

on the board, it’s easy enough to give high fives all around and

walk away without really having accomplished much. Leave a

little time after the brainstorm to review and capture the ideas

that were shared.

Narrow down, but not too fast

If you’ve run a productive brainstorm, you’ll likely have a lot

of different ideas on the board—some funny, some weird,

perhaps some verging on insane. It can be tempting to cut any

idea that isn’t feasible, but by doing so you may be tripping up

the ideation process. Sometimes good ideas can come from a

place that initially seemed silly.

Instead, give the participants a way to select ideas across

multiple criteria. One way to do this is to use color-coded

sticky dots or pieces of colored Post-its. Each color can signify

a person’s top choices in each category, such as the lowest

hanging fruit, most delightful, or the long shot.

Capture and move to prototyping

Once you’ve selected ideas in each category, carry them

into prototyping, ensuring that you don’t walk away from the

session with just the safest choice. Use a phone to photograph

the whole board, and then extract the top ideas in a document

which can be used to kick off the prototyping process (Google

Docs is great for this).

Prototyping is a flaring part of the design thinking process.

Even if a selected idea is so crazy it doesn’t seem worthy of a

test, figure out what’s attractive in that solution, and use that

to inspire a prototype. The goal is to come into the Prototype

phase with multiple solutions to build and then test.

Remember that brainstorming is just 1 step in the process of

coming up with a solution. In all likelihood, you won’t come out

of a brainstorming session armed with the exact idea that you’ll

bring to your users. But you will hopefully compile an overview

of the conceptual landscape, gain a shared perspective on the

problem with your team, or get key stakeholders to buy into

the design process. All of these things will help seed the minds

of your team.
PRO TIP — Brainstorming at IDEO

Peter Macdonald has run countless brainstorms during his

23-year tenure at IDEO as a design lead. Peter says: “You can’t

have a good brainstorm without setting it up right—having

everyone feeling safe and heard. A key element is trust,

consistent with IDEO’s culture of trust. Bullies and blowhards

are not tolerated.”

Here are some more insights from Peter Macdonald on how

brainstorming at IDEO has evolved over the years:

“Our favored approach today is to start with everyone working

heads-down for 5 minutes to begin brainstorming around each

key question. Then we have people share those ideas with the

group and continue with a classic brainstorm process.

“It ensures a diversity of ideas and prevents the first ideas

from setting the direction of the entire brainstorm—it also

helps the group build strong momentum.

“At IDEO we aren’t dogmatic about creative techniques.

You should use whatever process or format works for you.

Sometimes different approaches work better for different

problems.
“Our industrial designers often hold “design-storms” where

everyone is sketching form or design ideas at the same time

and sharing back as they finish each sketch. Instead of Post-

its, they use 8.5” x 11” sheets or half sheets (8.5″ x 5.5″) and

a variety of pens, pencils, and markers so they can add more

details.

“Our toy invention group does “tinker-time” where they build

in 3D together. Every team is encouraged to experiment and

create and evolve new techniques.”

Brainstorm warm-up: 30 circles — VIEW EXERCISE

Alternatives to brainstorming
You may have noticed that the “classic” brainstorming

method we described requires a fair amount of coordination,

and ultimately practice, to run well. It also relies, as Peter

Macdonald from IDEO notes, on a “culture of trust.”

But what if you don’t have the resources to pull this off, or are
working with a new team or client and don’t have the time to

build this culture from repeated brainstorming sessions? There

are ways to get around this.

Sketching

In Sprint, Jake Knapp outlines a method for sketching and

discussing ideas in a group (listen to Daniel Burka talk about

this technique in the clip below). The GV team explicitly does

not call this brainstorming (which they have some strong

opinions about)—but the point is to find a process that

functions within your workflow and organization.

Performing ideation with individual sketches—which are

reviewed by the group silently, voted on, and not discussed

until the end of the session—is a way to address situations

where a strong collaborative culture may not yet be

established.
Daniel Burka, Google Ventures

Listen Online: Flipping soft vs. hard skills ketching in design

sprints

Mindmapping

What if you’re on your own, with no one to run a brainstorming

session with? In that case, mindmaps are your friend! The

concept is simple, but mindmaps can be a powerful way to

move from conventional ideas to unpredictable, innovative

ones. The following version of this technique is adapted from

David and Tom Kelley’s Creative Confidence. You can start with

a problem statement like, “A better birthday party for a 1-year-

old.”

Write your topic or problem statement in the middle of a

piece of paper, and circle it. Make connections to that central

node, and write them down. In this example, you might write
down “cupcakes to devour” and “make it for the adults” as 2

directions to investigate.

Figure 4: Mindmapping a birthday party for a 1 year old.

Each connection should spur new ideas (“make it for the

adults” could inspire “baby birthday adult beverages,” for

example). If an idea becomes a new cluster, circle it to indicate

that it is a new node in the map. Be visual where possible;

simple sketches can inspire new directions. You’re done when

the page is full, but you can always continue the mindmap by

reframing the topic and starting a new map.

Mindmapping will help you get the early, obvious ideas out

of your head. It can help you look for patterns, reveal the

structure of a subject, and—once you have an opportunity

to move beyond a solo mission—communicate the ideas and

process to others.

Related: Ideate with Craft Freehand

Sowing the seeds

of innovation
In 1869, the Russian chemist Dmitry Mendeleev fell asleep

at his desk. He was in the midst of a 3-day working sprint,

during which he was trying to arrange the elements in a logical

manner. He was stuck.

Asleep, Mendeleev dreamt of a solution. “I saw … a table

where all the elements fell into place as required. Awakening, I

immediately wrote it down on a piece of paper.”

Figure 5: Mendeleev’s 1869 handwritten sketch of the periodic table.

Dreaming helps our brains organize and consolidate the

information that we are exposed to throughout our working

day. Much like taking a shower or a long walk, it’s a time during

which solutions to the problem at hand come to mind.

But these solutions only appear after the hard work of

exposing your mind to a lot of diverse ideas. Ideating, whether

through brainstorming, sketching, or mind mapping, can help

you and your team seed this field of ideas—which you can

carry into the prototyping process.

Further reading
When brainstorming fails, throw an imaginary cat

Graphic Design Thinking: Beyond Brainstorming

How IBM brings forward ideas from its teams

How to Fly a Horse

Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop

Talking
Chapter—05

Prototype
Get smarter, faster
"You must not fool yourself, and you are the
easiest person to fool."

Richard Feynman

One day in the early 1980s, the computer scientist Danny

Hillis was having lunch with the Nobel-prize winning physicist

Richard Feynman. Hillis mentioned that he was going to create

a startup, with the goal of building a parallel computer that had

a million processors. In typical Feynman fashion, the physicist

responded that it was “positively the dopiest idea I ever heard.”

But he was intrigued, and by the end of lunch had agreed to

spend the summer working at the company.

During the first few months on the job, Feynman worked

on the router circuits. These would allow the processors to

communicate and were far more complex than the processors

themselves. The routers—tasked with ferrying information

from point to point—had to find a free path through a

20-dimensional traffic jam between the processors, or hold the

message in a buffer until the path was clear. A critical question

was whether the design had allowed for enough buffering to

operate efficiently.

Feynman began studying the circuit diagrams and was willing

to listen to explanations of why things worked. But he far

preferred to use pencil and paper to simulate the action of

each circuit and figure out things for himself.

Feynman’s work on the routers helped the team discover

the potential of the computer—which they had dubbed the

Connection Machine—for complex numerical computing

and physical simulation. This was useful for modeling things

like the behavior of fluids and the simulation of artificial

life, programs which other computers of that era were not

designed to perform efficiently.

The team had initially assumed that their machine would not be

capable of these types of number-crunching calculations, but

Feynman argued that the assumption was worth challenging.

To settle the argument and find out how well these

computations would work in practice, Feynman had to create

a prototype program to run. He was only really familiar with the

programming language Basic, so he made up his own version

of Basic that would run on the parallel processors. He would

write the program, and then simulate it by hand to estimate

how fast the Connection Machine could run it.

Feynman treated these challenges like a game, starting with

very basic questions like, “What is the simplest example?” He

would then continue to ask questions until he had boiled the

problem down to something he thought he could solve—which

he would attack with pencil on paper.

Feynman’s contributions eventually helped the company

become a leader in parallel computing, generating tens of

millions of dollars in revenue.

Figure 1: A production version of the CM-1 Connection Machine.

When Hillis reminisced about his work with Feynman, he

realized that in almost everything they collaborated on, they

were amateurs. From neural networks to parallel computing,

they didn’t know what they were doing—but these things were

so new that no one else did either.

By distilling complex problems down into simple ones and

using prototypes to answer critical questions, they were able

to drive innovation that even they themselves didn’t know was

possible.

Prototype like a physicist

Although Richard Feynman was a physicist and not a product

designer, he intuitively understood the power of prototyping.

Prototyping helps us learn, solve disagreements, and test

ideas quickly and cheaply. Feynman began the design process

with sketches, which helped him understand the problem and

identify critical questions that the prototype needed to answer.

Building a prototype gave Feynman a chance to settle the

argument he made for the capability of the Connection

Machine to solve complex calculations. Without it, he and his

colleagues might have sat in front of a chalkboard, endlessly

throwing equations at each other and citing research papers.

Finally, instead of taking the time to teach himself a more

complex language, he used familiar tools to quickly build a

program which simulated the efficiency of the machine. If he

had failed at this point, it only would have cost days or weeks

instead of months.

Framed in this way, it’s clear why design-driven companies

prototype early and often, throughout the design process, to

create better products. In the remainder of this article, we’ll

look at a case study where Uber prototyped to help them build

better products for multilingual use, and we’ll run through

some techniques that can help you and your team instill a bias

towards prototyping from the beginning of the product design

process.

Case study: Uber goes

international
"The reason that these prototypes are really
useful is that when we don’t have a live product
built, but we need to get feedback, we can send
them to researchers on the ground … it allows
us to get feedback not just from drivers in San
Francisco, but from all around the world."

Molly Nix — UBER

Uber, the increasingly ubiquitous ride-sharing service, boasts

some impressive statistics. As of the writing of this article, 1+

million Uber drivers—or “driver partners,” as Uber prefers to

call them—had given more than 2 billion rides to more than 8

million users. No matter what destination you travel to, you’re

likely to find an Uber driver—they’re present in more than 400

cities in 70 countries.

Designing Uber’s app to work seamlessly for the drivers and

riders in this multitude of countries offered a unique set of

challenges. There are differences in language, of course, as

well as with symbology and wireless access speeds. All of

these variables had to be taken into account as Uber worked

on a ground-up redesign of its driver app in 2015.

The team began with lightweight prototypes of the app in

English, using Sketch and InVision. As they worked through

these flows, the team had to also take into account their global

audience, so they would go back into the Sketch files and

update the languages to reflect Hindi or Chinese versions of

the InVision prototypes.

With prototypes in hand, the team could test with users in each

country and begin to answer critical questions about where

the app might be confusing or fall short of an excellent user

experience for the drivers. They began with the navigational

structure. What were the important functions to drivers,

and how should they organize the content of the app? In the

evaluation phase, they asked whether terms like “earnings”

and “ratings” would translate appropriately into the other

languages.

"A good prototype is a prototype that facilitates

answering the questions you have."

Molly Nix — UBER

Along the way, they made some interesting discoveries. For

example, one of the icons for Earnings was a bar chart, which
represented what the Earnings screen looked like when you

tapped into it.

However, when they tested the prototype in India, drivers

there thought the icon would take them to network settings.

High latency and slow speeds kept the network at top-of-mind

for Indian drivers—and the Earnings icon closely resembled

common signal-strength icons you might see in the status bar

of a smartphone.

This discovery allowed Uber designers to alter course and

create an icon more representative of cash, which solved the

problem before it had a chance to crop up in a live product.

Figure 2: The original Earnings icon for the Uber driver app was

confusing for drivers in India. Via Molly Nix on Medium.

Another discovery, also related to the low speed networks,

was the scenario in which a driver was starting their shift and

going online to begin accepting trips. At this point, the team

had moved from low-fidelity prototypes, through higher-fidelity

interactive and animated prototypes, to early functional builds.

In these initial builds, there was no feedback to the driver after

tapping the button to go online—just a delay while the app

called to the server to verify that the driver could accept trips

in their current area. To the driver, the app appeared frozen.

Figure 3: An animated transition helped Uber drivers understand the

app wasn’t frozen when going online. Via Molly Nix on Medium.

In this case, adding an animated transition, which normally

might be considered non-critical “polish” of the app, was

critical to its function. The animation resolved this problem and

improved the user experience for drivers.

One important thing the Uber team did throughout the design

process was match the fidelity of their prototypes to the

questions that they had to answer. Early in the process, low-

fidelity prototypes were used to get a better handle on how

the product translated into other languages. As the product

direction solidified, higher-resolution, functional prototypes

ironed out some of the potential user experience roadblocks.

"Timeboxing [a prototype] forces you to focus

on the right things."

Daniel Burka — GOOGLE VENTURES

Prototyping earlier
As a designer, you’ve almost certainly built prototypes of a

product before releasing it, but you may be looking for ways to
insert prototyping earlier in your process. When considering

the fidelity of a prototype, it’s always important to consider

the kinds of questions that you’re trying to answer and to be

cautious about interpreting the results of testing very low-

fidelity prototypes with users (see Daniel Burka’s sidebar about

prototype fidelity).

That said, if you are working out the flow of a new feature or

trying to communicate ideas to team members, sketches and

paper prototypes are completely valid ways of moving forward.

Here, we’ll outline a number of techniques and ideas for moving

prototypes to the beginning of your design process. Some can

also be found in the Stanford d.school Bootcamp Bootleg.

The timeboxed prototype

Create a low resolution prototype of a feature that you’d like to

test with your team, before investing the time to build a higher-

fidelity version to test with users.

Challenge yourself to work quickly. Set aside an hour and

create 2–3 variations of the prototype. Screens can be

sketched by hand, captured on a smartphone, and brought into

InVision to be made interactive. Alternately, you can use the

Prototype on Paper (POP) app.

Prototype to decide

Settle an argument amongst your team about what direction to

take a product or feature.

Just like Richard Feynman and Danny Hillis, your team might

have differing points of view around the direction a product

may take. To make a decision, build prototypes of the

competing solutions.

If your users are going to judge, try to get to a level of fidelity

that will elicit a genuine observable reaction from them—but

don’t spend any more time than necessary. Distill the problem

down as much as possible and isolate the variable you’re

testing.

“Typically we will go to a higher fidelity, earlier

on in the process…”

Andy Law — NETFLIX

Wizard of Oz prototyping

Build a prototype faster by using humans on the back-end to

save time and resources.

The music-streaming service Pandora has an almost magical

ability to create playlists of the songs you like, just by rating

a track or two with a thumbs up or down. The company likes

to give credit to its Music Genome Project, which attempts to

categorize all music by attributes (tempo, vocals, etc.) and then

sort them using a complex algorithm.

Early on, however, the company realized it needed a human

touch to make the playlists resonate with human ears. Much

like the Wizard of Oz, there’s a human behind the curtain,

categorizing and describing each song as part of the

“algorithm.”

You can take advantage of this technique, too. If you’re building

a chat-bot, for example, have a human on the other end

supplying the replies until you better understand the needs of

the user. Or if you’re trying to build an on-demand service (let’s

say Uber for dog walkers), you and your team walk the dogs

yourselves before you build out the infrastructure to summon

actual dog walkers on demand. Tools like IFTTT and Zapier can
connect the services needed to build prototypes like this—

pushing a button can simply send a text right to your product

team.

Wizard of Oz prototyping allows you to learn a lot about how

your users communicate before the commitment of writing any

back-end code.

Related: Prototyping in Sketch with Craft Prototype

Prototype to teach
In 1986, 7 astronauts lost their lives when the space shuttle

Challenger broke apart 73 seconds into its flight. In the

aftermath of this tragedy, Richard Feynman participated in a

Congressional hearing investigating the cause of the disaster.

In what has become a famous anecdote, he sat in front of the

congressional panel and demonstrated what happened to

the shuttle’s O-rings in the colder-than-normal launch day

temperature. Using a glass of water and dropping a clamped

O-ring into the glass, he showed how O-rings become brittle

and inflexible when exposed to the cold.

Contrast this simple demonstration with the complex charts

produced by engineers in an attempt to warn about the

dangers of O-ring exposure to cold temperatures.

Figure 4: Complex charts, filled with ‘chartjunk,’ proved to be more

confusing than enlightening to those investigating the Challenger

disaster.

Once again, Feynman’s ability to distill a problem down to

its essence, and to create a prototype which tested his

hypothesis, was critical to his ability to share this experiment.

We prototype to learn—but we can also prototype to teach.

Challenge yourself to find new ways to insert prototyping

into your design process—it might teach your team a fresh

approach to a challenging idea. Sometimes the act of building

is the best way to raise energy and surmount a problem. Just

be clear about the questions you’re trying to answer and the

level of fidelity you need to do so.

For many hands-on designers, prototyping is where the fun

begins. And even though it’s the 4th phase of this Design

Thinking framework, it can just as easily be a starting point

(remember, the process is not always linear). Sometimes the

key to good Empathy is sharing or co-creating a prototype with

your users and getting feedback.

In the next chapter, we’ll talk about how to use these

prototypes to test your hypotheses so you can channel your

inner Feynman to overcome the problem at hand.

Further reading
Prototyping Lessons from a BMX backflip

The Lean Product Playbook

The Skeptic’s Guide To Low-Fidelity Prototyping

10 Tips on Prototyping UIs with Sketch

How I Built This (NPR): Instagram

A Guide to Prototype Fidelity

Chapter—06

Test
Early and often
If you’ve ever been to a spin class, you may think there isn’t

much variability in the experience: a dark room, music with a

beat, an instructor yelling to change the level to 8 and keep

pushing. SoulCycle offers something different.

From the minute you walk in the door, SoulCycle fosters

a sense of community. Heading into class, you pass by

the lockers where the previous class is exiting—giving a

chance for serendipitous encounters. The instructors shout

inspirational quotes as you pump up a hill and hover above

your saddle.

With this emphasis on the whole user experience, it’s no

wonder that SoulCycle has garnered something of a cult

following, even at 34 bucks a class—which sell out quickly.

“On Mondays at noon—when the upcoming week’s schedule

for SoulCycle is released—if you’re not on the computer hitting

the keys right then like an eBay addict on the hunt for porcelain

figurines, you’re often out of luck.”

–From a Vanity Fair article on SoulCycle

Obviously, this part of the experience doesn’t seem to be

in line with the brand. SoulCycle decided to create a mobile

app so riders wouldn’t have to be glued to their desktops in

anticipation of booking a class.

Prolific Interactive, the agency that SoulCycle hired to create

the app, went through the entire design thinking process, from

empathy-based user research to testing—using InVision along

the way for testing prototypes and getting feedback from

stakeholders.

The Prolific team worked out at SoulCycle twice a week,

manned the front desk at the studio, and “interviewed the

founders, staff, and frequent riders to understand the inner

workings of the company.” Getting insights from these

observations and interviews guided them as they began

working on early solutions.

Beginner’s mind
Figure 1: Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind by Shunryu Suzuki (image via

Meditation Los Angeles).

Adopting a beginner’s mind is valuable at every step of the

design process. To test early solutions and not be blinded by

assumptions, the Prolific team needed to tackle their challenge

with fresh eyes. The Zen teacher Shunryu Suzuki writes that,

“In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities, in the

expert’s mind there are few.”

As you Empathize, it allows you to be open to the experiences

of people from different backgrounds and see things from

their perspectives. When you Define, it helps you reframe your

point of view to see a problem from a different angle. As you

Ideate, a beginner’s mind prevents you from being judgmental

about ideas that seem trivial or silly, but which may spur new

approaches to a problem.

Building your Prototype, a beginner’s mindset helps remind

you that the purpose of a prototype is to answer critical

questions quickly—not to highlight your mastery as a designer.

And when you test your prototype, a beginner’s mindset opens

you to both the many possible directions of your design and to

the ways it might address real human needs. Each step along

the way affords an opportunity to rethink, relearn, and reboot

as needed. The design process is rarely linear.

Test early, test often

If prototyping is where the fun begins for many designers,

testing is where it can get a little scary. Getting your product

ideas in front of real users for feedback can be daunting. But

the whole basis for prototyping early and often is intended to

keep us from forming attachments to ideas that may or may

not be worthwhile.
By testing our prototypes with real users in context, observing

their reactions, and getting feedback, we can refine our POV,

learn more about our users, and make the next iteration of the

product that much better. As they say at Stanford’s d.school,

“Prototype as if you know you’re right, but test as if you know

you’re wrong.”

It’s important to test prototypes early in the design process

so you can quickly correct course if your product hypotheses

are incorrect. As we discussed in Fast feedback, testing these

assumptions early will help you build better products faster.

"While testing the app prototype, we ultimately

realized that speed was critical; some of the
bikes get booked in 30 seconds, so designing
the flow in such a way that people wouldn’t get
caught up at any step was really important."

Christine Lee — PROLIFIC INTERACTIVE

Once the Prolific team started building prototypes, they tested

them on site. The great thing about this situation was they

didn’t have to do any user recruiting. SoulCycle welcomed the

team to run prototypes by their riders as often as they liked

(while being respectful of their time, of course). This also had

the benefit of mirroring the context where users were booking

a class.

Figure 2: Early wireframes of the SoulCycle app.

There was already some anxiety about getting into class

on time, so users were forced to go through the app test

in a hurry, which quickly revealed speed bumps in the flow.

The team eventually moved on to more formal user testing

sessions, observing users in a conference room as they went

through a few scenarios while thinking aloud.

"We started out by testing our prototypes in
SoulCycle studios with riders. That gave us
a sense of the real constraints: distractions,
unstable internet connections, and time
crunches. User testing challenged our
assumptions and we got to get out of our own
design-focused heads to see how our designs
fared in the real world."

Christine Lee — PROLIFIC INTERACTIVE

Throughout the process, the Prolific team relied on a rapid

prototyping and testing cycle and kept the SoulCycle

stakeholders updated with new insights and observations,

rather than “keeping the research and design process

hidden behind a curtain for weeks before revealing it in a

comprehensive research report that no one would end up

reading.”

The app is a huge hit with riders, and it’s largely thanks to the

collaborative effort between Prolific, SoulCycle, and users who

helped test the prototypes.

Keeping a beginner’s mindset

The older you get as a designer, the more you

realize that you just don’t know anything … if
you can embrace that you don’t know, but you
know how to go find out, that makes you very
effective.

Daniel Burka — GOOGLE VENTURES

The Tega is a cuddly, expressive robot that MIT researchers

developed as a personalized educational assistant for

young children. Designed to act as a peer in digital learning

environments, Tega’s facial expression recognition allows it

to mimic a child’s demeanor, which the MIT team hoped would

help the robot and child bond during learning sessions.

They could have tried to test this hypothesis in the lab, but

they would have had no clue whether young kids would

actually find the robot charming, scary, or boring. So they

brought a Tega prototype to a classroom to test in context with

preschoolers.
The results were fantastic. Team member Goren Gordon

said, “After a while the students started hugging it, touching

it, making the expression it was making and playing

independently with almost no intervention or encouragement.”

And even more crucially, Tega was able to increase the

children’s positive feelings toward it with its physical

behaviors—leaning over like it was interested or making happy

noises.

Erika Hall, Mule Design

Listen Online: Focus Groups

These parameters are critical. They were testing the prototype

in context (at a preschool, with kids in the target demographic),

and were able to observe the reactions of the users in real-

time. They didn’t rely on a survey or focus group about the

experience (which with children at this age wouldn’t have

worked anyway). Observing these gut reactions is what makes

testing with a prototype so powerful; it’s hard for people to

fake enthusiasm or hide frustrations when interacting with a

product, and so the signal is clear.

With these tests, the MIT team was able to determine that

Tega was a promising platform for other educational contexts,

such as helping students with learning disabilities. And they

never would have discovered this if they hadn’t brought the

prototype out into the real world, embracing the fact that they

didn’t know what the results would be.

Having a beginner’s mindset and testing assumptions early in

the design process will help you design better products faster.

It can be just as important to carry this mindset to later tests,

when a product is more developed, to answer questions about

critical scenarios. This is exactly what the Google Ventures

team did to help robotics company Savioke (see the interview

with Daniel Burka below).

Daniel Burka, Google Ventures

Listen Online: Testing Savioke's Relay robot

It takes a lot of effort to round up participants for in-person,

one-on-one tests, but the results are compelling. Below we

outline some testing techniques and suggestions for a variety

of timeline and budgetary considerations.

Setting up your test

Set objectives

What specifically are you testing, and what do you want to

know? This drives everything that comes next: the questions

you ask, the people you recruit, and how you determine

success.

Recruiting users

As we’ve seen in the examples above, running user tests in

person is the ideal situation, but recruiting users to come to

your office (or better yet, to visit in-situ where they will be using
the product) isn’t always feasible. In the Fast feedback section

of Principles of Product Design, we run through some ideas for

recruiting both in-person and remote users.

Erika Hall’s Just Enough Research also has some fantastic

tips for recruiting users. She highlights the importance of

setting the parameters for a good research participant (e.g.,

“shares the concerns and goals of your target users” and

“can articulate their thoughts clearly”). She also outlines how

to create a screener, so you can “weed out the ax murderers

and the fatally inarticulate.” And she gives some great tips on

places to post a link to the screener—friends and family can be

a great resource for sharing (assuming they are likely to reach

your target demographic), and Craigslist (along with social

media) is your friend.

If you’re constrained to remote testing, services like ethn.io

and UserTesting can provide you with users in fairly targeted

demographics.

Testing the prototype

Once you’ve recruited your users, create an experience for

them that puts the prototype into a context as close to real life
use as possible, whether it’s before a workout like SoulCycle

or testing in a hotel like Savioke. You want your users to react

to the experience, not to an explanation of the prototype. The

more real-life it feels, the more natural these reactions will be.

It’s also important to show, not tell. Once your user is set

up with the experience, prototype in hand, don’t explain

everything right away. Give them a chance to figure things out,

and observe how they use the product. Is it intuitive, or are

your users confused or frustrated? What kind of questions

do they have? Look for smiles or frowns as they work with the

prototype.

Finally, remember in the Ideate phase where you came up

with several ideas to test? It can be helpful to bring multiple

prototypes to a testing session. This will give users more

fodder to react to and compare against (e.g. “the version of

the SoulCycle app that introduced the trainer with a video

was great, but I really just need to book my session as quickly

as possible, so I’m more inclined to use the version without it

because it’s faster.”)

Capturing video and audio of your users in action with the

prototype will be helpful in the next step. You don’t need

anything fancy—just use the equipment you have at hand

(smartphones and screen recording software will work just

fine). Michael Margolis at Google Ventures outlines a slightly

more elaborate setup, which can be handy if you’re testing

mobile prototypes.

Reviewing and synthesizing observations

After you’re done with testing sessions, it’s important to take

the time to review and synthesize your findings. Again, Just

Enough Research is a great resource for this. In her section on

analyzing the data from user research, Erika Hall outlines how

to structure the session (summarize goals, pull quotes and

observations), the space and supplies you’ll need (sticky notes

and sharpies!), and the types of data to look for (user goals and

priorities).

Another great resource for debriefing and synthesizing is from

Brendan Mulligan at Cluster. Mulligan outlines some great

tips and techniques for holding a viewing party and capturing

insights from your team, and identifying and bucketing

patterns as a group.

Once you’ve had a chance to synthesize the data and group

patterns, take a look at how they support or contradict your

original POVs. This is an iterative process. Testing your

prototypes should give you a chance to refine your original

hypotheses and make the product that much better in the next

round.

Empathy and compassion

The beginner’s mind is the mind of

compassion. When our mind is compassionate,
it is boundless.

Shunryu Suzuki — ZEN MIND, BEGINNER’S MIND

Empathy is the heart of design, as it allows us to experience

the situations our users find themselves in. Empathy lets

us discover opportunities to make those experiences less

frightening—like Doug Dietz did for children needing MRIs—or

more delightful, like the Savioke team did with Relay.

Compassion in tandem with a beginner’s mind helps us

translate empathy into action. If we instill a sense of duty

toward users in our designs, we can align our products with the

humans who use them—and perhaps improve their lives along

the way. We can remain open to the possibility that our first

ideas weren’t our best ideas, and that by taking an iterative

approach and gaining insights from our users as we test

prototypes, we can make better products.

As designers, we have a real impact on how our products take

shape, how users experience them, and the consequences

of their use. We hope that you have a chance to use these

opportunities with empathy and compassion, and design

products that you’re proud to bring into the world.

Further reading
Just Enough Research

How to run live user testing Part 3: the debrief

The GV Research Sprint: Interview participants and summarize

findings

Remote User Testing at Vox