ME30294

Course:

Course Introductions & Understanding Users

• Voice of the Customer - The Traditional Way of Understanding Customers : The usual method any organisation or inventor uses to work out what they should do is to ask their customers or target users. The problem is… people don’t know what they want!

• User Observations and Testing - A more expert driven rather than data driven method : For any new project to succeed you need to understand the customer’s needs, intentions and actions, even if they don’t fully understand them themselves. A good way to do that is not to ask them, but to observe them and work out what they really want and need.

• Jobs to be Done - Outcome Driven rather than Solution Driven : An alternative view on working out what people really want is to approach the problem in terms of Jobs, what job is the user trying to achieve. Awkwardly there are two methods with the same name, both approach it slightly differently and both are good at different things.

How lots of this is put into action in a business setting: (Just for Interest)

• Minimum Viable Products - Testing the Most Important Element : The best way to test a market is through a series of quick experiments. MVPs are those experiments to test your assumptions and find product market fit, it is not about launching a bugger product quickly.

User-Centred Design

Check Elies’ Notes on Moodle

Some of my stuff on a related subject (just for interest):

• No One is Average : The world of average is all pervasive, but despite being a useful mathematical tool it’s a horrible method for understanding or designing for people.

Having Ideas - Theory & Practise

• Humans are Creative, We Can All Have Good Ideas - The History of Creativity : How we evolved to be creative and what the ancient world can teach us about technology development today.

• Everyday Creative Thinking - How Ideas Happen : Steven Johnson’s 7 traits of good ideas and why creativity ultimately is all about finding ways of untapping your unconscious mind.

• Tools & Methods for Generating Ideas on Demand - Brainstorming & Others : Tips, tricks and methods for having ideas when you need them.

• Tools & Methods for Exploring Problems - The Russian Method of TRIZ : The Russian theory of inventive problem solving. How to use a structured approach to find the real problem worth solving and narrow down the range of possible answers to only the ones likely to succeed.

• Good Ideas Need Diversity of Thought & Avoiding ‘Idea Fixation’ : A common problem for creative problems is becoming fixated on a single idea or approach. This is unhealthy for the project and there are ways to stop it happening.

Creativity in Action Example:

Watching others be creative gives you ideas about how to do it yourself. So here are some creative practitioners and teachers doing the same challenges we set our students:

Idea Generating Example - Improving and growing a local coffee shop and café

Choosing Ideas & Prototyping

• Marketing & Market Research : Market research is about finding the lock that opens the best chest, then making a key to fit. Not the other way around. Study your market so you know what they want and need.

• Choosing Which Ideas to Develop : All idea selection methods are basically an equation between value and effort but make reversible decisions very quickly, make irreversible decisions very slowly.

• Prototyping - How good ideas are not “Intelligently Designed” but Evolve from trial and error : Often thought of as model making, or producing a finished article for display purposes. Prototyping is one of the most important aspects of creative discovery and good idea generation. Prototype everything, often and as quickly as possible.

• Design & Opportunity Specifications : Technical documents that can be critical if you want to get other people’s help on your ideas.

Product Styling

Check Elies’ Notes on Moodle

Managing the Design & Development Process

The Traditional Taught View on Process Models:

• The Idea / Creative Lifecycle : The transformation of an idea from an incubating thought through to reality tends to follow the same pattern. Understanding this pattern is helpful in doing it faster.

• Creative Process Models - Maps of what to do next : Creativity is a very hard thing to predict and structure but lots of people have tried and some methods such as stage gates and design thinking are now common place corporate terms. I like to think of the prescriptive versions of these models as being like maps. Something to follow to help you get from A to B.

My Research & Developments on the Subject:

• The 2 Reasons Why Projects Fail and What That Means for You : There are countless ways to fail, but they can all be grouped together into two categories, HOW to do something problems or WHY you’re doing it problems.

Extra Resource - Step by Step guide to Novel vs Routine Project Management

• A Process Map for any Project - The ‘Fuzzy to Finished’ Development Model : Established design processes usually always start with a “define the problem” step and then a series of “solve the problem” steps. For Novel WHY problems this isn’t helpful. Both the defining and the solving need to be done in parallel.

• A Process Compass for any Project - A way of keeping track of the risks in your project : Always trust your compass, the map might be wrong or incomplete, but a good compass will always get you out of trouble. It’s the same with project management. Practise using a WHY / HOW compass to navigate any challenge.

Extra Resource - Compass Log Book - Log books and project diaries to keep everything in order.

Eco-Design & Human-Computer Interface

Check Elies’ Notes on Moodle

Systems Design

Check Elies’ Notes on Moodle

Staying Innovative

• Established Company Innovation - How large companies try to maintain that creative spirit : How success can be a trap, intrapreneurs and the challenges of new ideas. How to stay creative and dynamically innovative even as your company grows and becomes more bureaucratic.

• Soldiers & Artists - Balance these two roles like a gardener rather than a prophet : The different people and mindsets needed for any business to succeed at scale. They are different but must work together in balance. Also my own idea of different operating modes that aligns with this, Preservation vs Discovery.

• Good / Fast / Cheap - The Holy Trinity of better development : Moving faster improves your chances, methods and approaches to saving time and doing things faster.

Innovation Theory

• Radical & Incremental Innovation : Radical innovation is when you don’t know who the customer is and what they want (typically a novel problem) whereas incremental is a more routine and lower risk activity, although that doesn’t mean it’s boring or unimportant. It’s critical.

• Pioneers & Conquerors : Should you always try and be the first to market? If you’re a large company researchers don’t think so. They believe you have a better chance of making a long term success by swooping in quickly to conqueror a new market once you can see which design will be dominant.

• Disruptive Innovation : Christensen’s identification of a dilemma between creating something new that none of your customers want or doing what you know will be more profitable? If you don’t do both you risk being disrupted by someone who will.