Reflection on the Design Thinking Process

From this experience, I learned that to achieve innovation and progress, you need to be willing to get it 'wrong' before arriving at the best possible solution that meets the needs of the people you are solving for.

By Ashley Breton Posted: December 2021 Last updated: August 2022

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Image taken from Wix.com

Last week, I completed my first design challenge. Working as a team of two, my partner Katia and I employed the five-phase framework of design thinking (Empathize, Define, Ideate, Prototype, and Test) with the strengths of the instructional design ADDIE model (Analyze, Define, Develop, Implement, and Evaluate) and rapid, responsive aspects of the Agile methodology to address online assessment-related concerns currently experienced by educators and students in higher education.

Our team deeply engaged in the design thinking process and had incredible opportunities for collaboration, brainstorming, and learning to innovate something that institutions could use to address their complex challenge. Engaging in such an active approach to learning was the best part of the assignment, because learning by doing made the whole experience educational and fun. Two weeks later, I am still wrapping my head around the numerous steps and activities my partner and I engaged in, as I consider the most surprising thing I learned and the most rewarding part of the process.

Despite being a novice designer, I knew innovation was an essential pursuit for the advancement of humankind. However, once our team embarked on the design challenge, I quickly learned that competently solving design problems is not a gift everyone has. Lucky for me, this was not a concern, because the most surprising thing I learned from the creation process was that design thinking encourages failure, as long as you are willing to try again and do it better.

My partner and I initially saw our design problem and solution as straightforward: students need to be evaluated more appropriately in digital learning environments, so assessment methods needed to change. However, after engaging further in the process, we began to understand that without a critical instructional approach to our learning design, we risked reducing "the complexity of learning to straightforward methodologies that provide replicable results." (Morris, 2018, p. 5). We adapted our focus and aimed for maximum inclusion by practicing deep empathy for all those impacted by our design problem (Doorley et al., 2018; Morris, 2018). By rethinking the parameters of our target audience to understand the bigger picture and guide future design decisions appropriately, we expanded our scope to include instructors alongside students as we playfully explored and experimented with new ideas.

From this experience, I learned that to achieve innovation and progress, you need to be willing to get it 'wrong' before arriving at the best possible solution that meets the needs of the people you are solving for. And, although the prototype did not come together as sophisticated as my partner and I would have liked, the most rewarding part of the design process was finally seeing our work go from an abstract idea to a physical manifestation. In the end, we identified a more significant problem than we initially set out to solve, leading to a solution around that theory that addressed the needs of those impacted most. I could have never anticipated the number of steps it would take to bring our solution to life, but I think Tom and David Kelley, Creative Brothers at IDEO, summed it up best when they said, "If a picture is worth 1000 words, a prototype is worth 1000 meetings."

Design Principles

Whether developing an online ESL course or a corporate e-learning solution, instructional designers make countless decisions that require rules or principles to guide them in their design process (Cable, 2015). My partner and I leveraged Knowles' (1984) theory of andragogy, elements of the critical instructional design approach, and integrated the steps from an ADDIE-Agile mash-up (AGGIE) to identify relevant principles that we could apply in problem-solving situations. The following design principles are my Lucky 7, which relate to the five AGGIE components (Analyze, Generate, Glamourize, Innovate, and Evaluate):

Analyze

1. Place learners at the center of the design process.

The purpose of this principle is to ensure design teams actively involve learners throughout the design process as experts, designers, and co-creators of their learning experiences (Hartnell-Young & Morriss, 2007).

2. Invest as much time as possible in your audience analysis.

This principle ensures designers focus on the learners' pain points, placing solving their problems at the forefront of their design. Information collected from the target group through quantitative and qualitative analysis accomplishes this best (Branch, 2009). For example, an instructional designer may perform a quantitative analysis to look at the audience's capabilities from a skills gap perspective, then conduct an interview to focus on more qualitative components, such as: demographics, learning styles, prior knowledge and experiences, attitudes, technical skills, and explicit and implicit needs (Branch, 2009; Doorley et al., 2018; Kearsley, 2010 cited in Branco, 2018). Knowing this information ensures the designer creates a solution to solve the 'right' problem (Doorley et al., 2018). Persona profiles and empathy maps are excellent design tools for designers to become more aware of their audience, make sense of their needs, organize insights, and create effective solutions (Doorley et al., 2018).

Generate

3. Challenge the status quo.

This principle ensures designers embrace out-of-the-box thinking to be innovative. Designers have the freedom to let go of old instructional design ideas and long-held assumptions, think creatively, try out new processes, and freely discard standard problem-solving methods to reveal the learners' actual problem (Doorley et al., 2018; Morris, 2018).

4. Generate as many solutions (as possible) that will solve the problem.

This principle ensures designers recognize multiple ways to solve ill-structured problems (Stefaniak, 2020). Whatever the needs may be, brainstorming solutions on a mind map is an effective way for a design team to see the challenge from different angles and ensure they are not missing any opportunity areas or solving the wrong problem (Doorley et al., 2018).

Glamourize

5. Don't overlook the technology component.

This principle encourages mindfulness when selecting between different media and technologies for learners to engage with. Tony Bates (2015) created a framework for making such decisions called the SECTIONS model, which stands for:

· S tudents

· E ase of use

· C osts

· T eaching functions

· I nteraction

· O rganisational issues

· N etworking

· S ecurity and privacy

This framework allows designers to focus on how the learners are likely to use technology and engage with its content (Bates, 2015). That information determines which technology could produce the best outcome for the learner.

Innovate

6. Rapidly create prototypes and share them with the learners.

This principle ensures designers address the needs of the learners in the most cost- and time-efficient manner possible (Thurston, 2014). Svihla (2017) supports that rapid prototyping is more valuable than developing a polished prototype because the designer can create a simple visualization of ideas for the learner to review and then quickly implement that feedback without needing to worry about redoing a full-scale prototype. By starting with a low-risk medium (such as pen and paper or post-its), the designer can convey a general understanding of how their solution will look and feel without investing more than a set of their best ideas.

Evaluation

7. Gather insights from diverse perspectives and learn from them.

This principle ensures designers collaborate creatively with learners and people with diverse perspectives in other fields throughout the creative process, but especially in the test and evaluation phase. What people say and do is sometimes different. By including a range of views, including the voices of learners, subject matter experts, accessibility experts, tech support, technical writers, and so forth, a designer can collect valuable insights to measure the solution's success (Doorley et al., 2018). Considering this, even though qualitative feedback provides a project with direction, testing is the surest way to gauge whether the project improved the learners' experience or offered new understandings of their world upon reflection of the data.

With that, these seven principles provide helpful guidelines for future projects, big or small, because they ensure there is focused context, sound exploration, mindful considerations, experimentation, and a subjective evaluation phase. Although my personal experiences ultimately defined the design principles presented, I acknowledge that I stand on the shoulders of giants and that the ideas from this list have been inspired by the work and research of many thought leaders who came before me. Lucky 7 is a valuable, but not complete list of principles that will guide my future design and innovation process. It is an evolving list that I will likely adjust with each design and innovation case and context I encounter, as I address the unique needs of my learners over time.

References

Bates, T. (2015). 8.10 Choosing technologies for teaching and learning: The SECTIONS model - Deciding, In Teaching in a Digital Age. OpentextBC.

https://opentextbc.ca/teachinginadigitalage/chapter/models-for-choosing-media-and-technologi

Branch, R. (2009). Instructional design: The ADDIE approach. Springer. https://www.academia.edu/24109729/ADDIE_Robert_Maribe_Branch_auth_Instructional_Desi_BookZZ_org_?auto=download&email_work_card=download-paper

Branco, M. (2018). The adult learning theory–Andragogy. Psycho-Educational and Social Intervention (PESI).

http://www.psiwell.eu/images/io3/PESI-manual-for-trainers.pdf

Cable, S. (2015, June 18). Design principles - a guide [Blog]. cxpartners. https://www.cxpartners.co.uk/our-thinking/design-principles/

Doorley, S., Holcomb, S., Klebahn, P., Segovia, K., & Utley, J. (2018). Design thinking bootcamp bootleg. Adapted from Hasso-Plattner Institute for Design, Stanford University. dschool.stanford.edu/resources/design-thinking-bootleg

Morris, S. (2018). Critical instructional design. In An Urgency of Teachers. Pressbooks.https://criticaldigitalpedagogy.pressbooks.com/chapter/critical-pedagogy-and-learning-online/

Stefaniak, J. (2020). Documenting instructional design decisions. In J. K. McDonald & R. E. West, Design for Learning: Principles, Processes, and Praxis. EdTech Books. Retrieved from https://edtechbooks.org/id/documenting_decisions

Svihla, V. (2017). Chapter 23. Design thinking and agile design. In R. West (Ed.), Foundations of Learning and Instructional Design Technology (1st ed.). https://edtechbooks.org/lidtfoundations

Thurston, T. (2014, March 5). Don't pick sides, create an ADDIE-Agile mash-up [Blog].

eLearning Industry. https://elearningindustry.com/dont-pick-sides-create-an-addie-agile-mashup