Design of Everyday Things Excerpt - Chapter 6 Design Thinking

(With reference to: https://gist.github.com/wataruoguchi/277f704e426113fa2c3a13a177a87a39)

Design Thinking - solve the correct problem

Superficial problem is usually a symptom. How do you know you solve the correct problem? The problem has to be discovered! It is not easy to dig deeper to address the real issues.

Solve the correct problem

Design thinking process -
Start by trying to understand what the real issues are - using Five Whys method. The process is iterative and expansive. The researchers don't try to search for a solution until they have determined the real (sometimes underlying and latent) problem. They begin to consider a wide range of potential solutions and only then will they finally converge upon their proposal.

Tools of Design Thinking - Human-Centered Design and the double-diamond diverge-converge model of design

Human-Centered Design (HCD) - solve the right problem so as to meet human needs/capabilities
HCD process of ensuring that people's needs are net, that the resulting product is understandable and usable, that it accomplishes the desired tasks, and that the experience of use is positive and enjoyable (or that the intended experience of use is attained)

HCD design need to satisfy the constraints and concerns including:
shape, form, cost and efficiency, reliability and effectiveness, understandability and usability, the pleasure of appearance, the pride of ownership, and the joy of actual use.
The iterative cycle of HCD design process - iterate through 4 stages of observation, idea generation (ideation), prototyping, and testing - repeat until satisfied. These 4 activities are iterated. They are repeated over and over with each cycle yielding more insights and getting closer to the desired solution.

The Iterative Cycle of Human-Centered Design

1. Observation: Discipline of Design Research 
Applied Ethnography: The design researcher will go to the potential customers, observing their activities, attempting to understand their interests, motives, and true needs. To observe the would-be customers in their natural environment, in their normal lives, wherever the product or service being designed will actually be used. To understand the real situations they encounter (not pure isolated experience) The problem definition for  the product design will come from this deep understanding of the goals the people are trying to accomplish and the impediments they experience. Focus on people's activities to be performed while being sensitive to how local environment and culture might modify those activities. Go there and find out! (GOOB, go out of building) Don't take a shortcut and stay home. To find the right problem requires a deep understanding of the true need of the intended population.

2. Idea generation (ideation): Creativity is the key. brainstorming

• Generate numerous ideas It's dangerous to become fixated upon one or two ideas too early in the process
• Be creative without regard for constraints Avoid criticizing ideas. Avoid premature dismissal of ideas.
• Question everything Ask stupid questions, questioning the obvious.

3. Prototyping

• Build a quick prototype or mock-up of each potential solution
• The mock-ups can be sketches, foam and cardboard models, spreadsheet, PowerPoint slides
• During the problem specification phase, it's done mainly to ensure that the problem is well understood
• Wizard of Oz method to mimic a huge powerful system well before it is built.

4. Testing

• Gather a small group of people who correspond as closely as possible to the target population
• If the device is normally used by one person, test one person at a time; Five people studied individually, is a good number
• The research team should be observing, behind those being tested (Video recording)
• Get more detailed information about their thoughts
• During the problem specification phase, it's useful to ensure that the problem is well understood
• During the problem solution phase, ensure that the new design meets the needs and abilities of those who will use it
• Give multiple iterations of improvement, rather than just one!

5. Iteration 

• The role of iteration in human-centered design is to enable continual refinement and enhancement. 
• The goal is rapid prototyping and testing.
• Fail frequently, fail fast (and fail early!) Deliberate tests and modifications make things better. 
• Failures are to be encouraged. Failures shouldn't be called failures: they should be thought of as learning experiences
• Requirements - the hardest part of design is to get the requirements right, meaning getting the right problem to be solved as well as the appropriate solution

• Requirements made in the abstract are invariably wrong
• Requirements produced by asking people what they need are invariably wrong
• Requirements are developed by watching people in their natural environment
• getting the requirements right involves repeated study and testing: iteration
• observe and study: decide what the problem might be, and use the results of tests to determine which parts of the design work, which don't work.
• with each cycle the tests and observation can be more targeted and more efficient. and the ideas become clearer, the specifications better defined, and the prototypes closer approximations to the target, the actual product. 
• The time iteration process end: This is up to the product manager, who needs to deliver the highest-possible quality while meeting the schedule

Double-Diamond diverge-converge model of design
- the first diamond (phase): finding the right problem
- the second diamond (phase): finding the right solution
- Discover, Define, Develop and Deliver (4 stages defined by British Design Council, 2005)

• Gather a small group of people who correspond as closely as possible to the target population
• If the device is normally used by one person, test one person at a time
• The research team should be observing, behind those being tested (Video recording)
• Get more detailed information about their thoughts
• Five people studied individually, is a good number
• During the problem specification phase, it's useful to ensure that the problem is well understood
• During the problem solution phase, ensure that the new design meets the needs and abilities of those who will use it

Design research versus market research

• Design
  • wants to know what people really need and how they actually will use the product or service under consideration
  • Designers tend to use qualitative observational methods by which they can study people in depth, understanding how they do their activities and the environmental factors that come into play
  • These methods are very time consuming, so designers typically only examine small numbers of people, often numbering in the tens
• Marketing
  • wants to know what people will buy, which includes learning how they make their purchasing decisions
  • Concerned with customers - who might possibly buy? What factors might entice them to consider and purchase a product?
  • Marketing traditionally uses large-scale studies with surveys, and questionnaires
  • converse with hundreds of people in focus groups, and to question tens of thousands of people - "Big Data", "Market Analytics", "A/B testing"
• Deep insights on real needs from a tiny set of people v.s. broad, reliable purchasing data from a wide range and large number of people
• Designers understand what people really need, but the small number of people observed is a concern
• Marketing understands what people actually buy, but  it may only provide the shallow insight into a large number of people.

ACTIVITY-CENTERED VERSUS HUMAN-CENTERED DESIGN

Activity-centered design = enhanced HCD: How can we accommodate all of these very different, very disparate people for products, such as an automobiles? Focus on activities, not the individual person - activity-centered design, letting the activities define the product and its structure. Let the conceptual model of the product be built around the conceptual model of the activity - people are willing to learn the essential things to the activity.

On the differences between tasks and activities

• Activities - a collected set of tasks
  • High-level activities (e.g. going to work) will have under it numerous lower-level ones.
  • In turn, lower-level activities spawn tasks.
  • Goals have 3 level that control activities: Be-goal (Abstract, governing a person' being), Do-goal (plans and actions), and Motor-goal (how actions are performed, tasks and operations)
  • designing for tasks is usually too restrictive! Apple's success with its music player was because it supported the entire activity in listening to music - discovering, buying, loading music to the music player, creating playlists (that cane be shared), and listening to music. Apple designs and supports the entire activities (ecosystem) of music enjoyment.
• Tasks - 
• a task is an organized cohesive set of operations directed toward a single, low-level goal
• Low-level structure
• e.g., "Find a shopping basket", "use a shopping list to guide the purchases"

Well-design products will package together the various tasks that re required to support an activity.

ITERATIVE DESIGN VERSUS LINEAR STAGES

the traditional design process is linear, sometimes called the waterfall  or gated method. This is in contrast to the iterative method of human-centered design, where the process is circular, with continual refinement, continual change, and encouragement of backtracking, rethinking early decisions. it is also called Scrum and Agile. Iterative methods are designed to defer the formation of rigid specifications. The iterative method, however, is best suited for the early design phases of a product, not for the later stages.  It also has difficulty scaling its procedures to handle large projects.

Decision gates give management much better control over the process than they have in the iterative methods. The best methods combine the benefits of both iteration and stage reviews. Iteration occurs inside the stages, between the gates. The goal is to have the best of both worlds: iterative experimentation to refine the problem and the solution, coupled with management reviews at 

the gates.

What I Just Told You? It doesn't Really Work That Way

A company professes to believe in user experience and to follow human-centered design, in practice there are only two drivers of new products:

1. Adding features to match the competition
2. Adding some feature driven by a new technology

Do we look for human needs? - No.

Don Norman's Law of Product Development

- The day a product development process starts, it is behind schedule and above budget

How to prevent?

The way to handle the time crunch that eliminates the ability to do good up-front design research is to separate that process from the product team: have design researchers always out in the field, always studying potential products and customers. Then, when the product team is launched, the designers can say, "We already examined this case, so here area our recommendations." The same argument applies to market researchers. Multidisciplinary teams work as harmonious groups allowing enhanced communication and collaboration. 

The Design Challenge

Products have multiple, conflicting requirements

Designers must please their clients, who are not always the end users. 

In some situation, cost dominates. But how about training costs? Maintain costs?Productivity?

Designers must consider needs of all stakeholders, not only those of product users, involved in the product process.

THE STIGMA PROBLEM

People do not wish to admit having infirmities, even to themselves. Example: Even though the OXO peeler was designed for someone with arthritis, it was advertised as a better peeler for everyone. Design for special people graciously, not to mention or highlight their infirmities! Why can’t devices for those who need them be as sophisticated and fashionable today?

Designing for people with special needs is often called inclusive or universal design. The best solution to the problem of designing for everyone is flexibility: flexibility in the size of the images on computer screens, in the sizes, heights, and angles of tables and chairs.

Complexity Is Good; It Is Confusion That Is Bad

The most important principle for taming complexity is: Provide a good concept model in  complexity, giving structure and understanding to the users.

Standardization and Technology 

some technology improvements come naturally through the technology itself, others come through standardization. Standardization is one type of cultural constraint. The resulting standard is usually a compromise among the various competing positions, oftentimes an inferior compromise. 

WHY STANDARDS ARE NECESSARY:

A SIMPLE ILLUSTRATION 

are standards really necessary? Yes, they are. Without such standardization, clock reading would be more difficult: you'd always have to figure out the mapping.

A STANDARD THAT TOOK SO LONG,

TECHNOLOGY OVERRAN IT

Standards can take so long to be established that by the time they do come into wide practice, they can be irrelevant. Nonetheless, standards are necessary. They simplify our lives and make it possible for different brands of equipment to work together in harmony.

A STANDARD THAT NEVER

CAUGHT ON: DIGITAL TIME

Standardize and you simplify lives: everyone learns the system only once. But don’t standardize too soon; you may be locked into a primitive technology, or you may have introduced rules that turn out to be grossly inefficient, even error-inducing.

Deliberately Making Things Difficult

good design (design that is usable and understandable) sometimes must be balanced with the need for “secrecy” or privacy, or protection. 

• Any door designed to keep people in or out.

• Security systems, designed so that only authorized people will be able to use them.

• Dangerous equipment, which should be restricted.

• Dangerous operations that might lead to death or injury if done accidentally or in error.

• Secret doors, cabinets, and safes: you don’t want the average person

even to know that they are there, let alone to be able to work them.

• Cases deliberately intended to disrupt the normal routine action (as discussed in Chapter 5). Examples include the acknowledgment required before permanently deleting a file from a computer, safeties on pistols and rifles, and pins in fire extinguishers.

• Controls that require two simultaneous actions before the system will operate, with the controls separated so that it takes two people to work them, preventing a single person from doing an unauthorized action (used in security systems or safety-critical operations).

• Cabinets and bottles for medications and dangerous substances deliberately made difficult to open to keep them secure from children.

• Games, a category in which designers deliberately flout the laws of understandability and usability. Games are meant to be difficult; in some games, part of the challenge is to figure out what is to be done, and how.

Even where a lack of usability or understandability is deliberate, it is still important to know the rules of understandable and usable design, for two reasons. 

First, even deliberately difficult designs aren’t entirely difficult. Usually there is one difficult part, designed to keep unauthorized people from using the device; the rest of it should follow the normal principles of good design. 

Second, even if your job is to make something difficult to do, you need to know how to go about doing it. 

You could systematically violate the rules like this:

•  Hide critical components: make things invisible.

•  Use unnatural mappings for the execution side of the action cycle, so that the relationship of  the controls to the things being controlled is inappropriate or haphazard.

•  Make the actions physically difficult to do.

•  Require precise timing and physical manipulation.

•  Do not give any feedback.

• Use unnatural mappings for the evaluation side of the action cycle, so that system state is difficult to interpret.