MEITE/Design Thinking

This is copied from the now-defunct blog[.]emilytrabert[.]com

Part 1: Empathize

To empathize, you:

Observe.

View users and their behavior in the context of their lives.

Engage.

Interact with and interview users through both scheduled and short ‘intercept’ encounters.

Immerse.

Wear your users’ shoes. Experience what they experience for a mile or two.

Hasso Plattner, Design Thinking Bootleg

DevCred

DevCred‘s potential consumer base includes a variety of customers, users, and stakeholders. Three primary consumers are an aspiring software developer without a BS in Computer Science, a technical recruiter, and a hiring manager. In order to help serve all three of them, I put myself in their shoes (or at least tried to) and created the three specific personas below.

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Part 2: Define

The define mode is when you unpack your empathy findings into needs and insights and scope a meaningful challenge. Based on your understanding of users and their environments, come up with an actionable problem statement: your Point Of View.

More than simply defining the problem, your Point of View is a unique design vision that is framed by your specific users.

Understanding the meaningful challenge at hand, and the user insights you can leverage, is fundamental to creating a successful solution.

Hasso Plattner, Design Thinking Bootleg

Needs Analysis for Code the Dream

My interview and observation data show that the senior software developers at Code the Dream currently face difficulty assessing the abilities of current interns, determining whether a student should be brought on as an intern, and determining whether an intern should be promoted to a staff developer.

My results show that the problem is happening because they do not have an agreed-upon rubric for assessing software developers from beginner intern to beginner staff developer.

Based on the interviews with these senior developers, I think that creating a rubric of hard and soft skills with five levels can solve the problem and help them standardize the assessment process and hire competent interns and staff.

Part 3: Ideate

Ideate is the mode in which you generate radical design alternatives. Ideation is a process of “going wide” in terms of concepts and outcomes—a mode of "flaring” instead of “focus”. The goal of ideation is to explore a wide solution space—both a large quantity and broad diversity of ideas. From this vast repository of ideas, you can build prototypes to test with users.

Hasso Plattner, Design Thinking Bootleg

Bedroom Re-Design

As someone who loves visuals, I find Pinterest to be one of the best tools for ideating. When I wanted to re-do my bedroom, I spent hours scrolling on Pinterest to figure out what I wanted to do. I like dark, cosy rooms and I really wanted a canopy bed, but didn’t have any other ideas otherwise. Nothing really jumped out at me until I saw this image.

I love this office so much! I knew I wanted something similar in vibe, so I started collecting bedroom photos using keywords like “forest” and “fantasy”. My final inspiration board is here.

Part 4: Prototype

Prototyping gets ideas out of your head and into the world. A prototype can be anything that takes a physical form—a wall of post-its, a role-playing activity, an object. In early stages, keep prototypes inexpensive and low resolution to learn quickly and explore possibilities.

Hasso Plattner, Design Thinking Bootleg

DevCred

In order to best mock out my proposed process for DevCred, I created a storyboard that explained the problem, the steps necessary to complete the process and the desired outcome.

You can find a polished version of this storyboard at dev-cred.com.

Part 5: Test

Testing is your chance to gather feedback, refine solutions, and continue to learn about your users. The test mode is an iterative mode in which you place low-resolution prototypes in the appropriate context of your user’s life. Prototype as if you know you’re right, but test as if you know you’re wrong.

Hasso Plattner, Design Thinking Bootleg

Practicing Technical Interviews

Our interview and observation data show that non-traditional adult computer science learners (not in 4-year college but either taking programming courses in community college or online) currently face a lack of confidence during the live coding portion of technical interviews interview.

Our results show that the problem is happening because they are not used to being watched while they code.

Based on the interviews with these adult learners, we think that providing opportunities for recorded mock interviews with feedback from another person can solve the problem and help target learners achieve confidence in their ability to code while being interviewed and in their ability explain their thought process.

Testing

Results here.