Intro to Design Thinking Course (How To)

Learn the user-centered methods and mindsets that entire businesses are using to improve their product experiences. Throughout this course, we’ll go over how to find the voice of our user, the importance of that voice, and how to create a better experience for our user.

What you'll learn

• Define design thinking
• Understand who is your User 

• Role of Empathy in design
• Understand Empathy Maps
• Understand Journey Maps
• The importance of collecting data for users
• Conceive of solutions to common design problems

Becoming a Design Thinker

Before you can learn design thinking methods, you’ll need to understand the mindsets behind those methods. We’ll introduce basic terminology and more importantly, we’ll introduce what design thinking is and why you would want to use it.

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• Design Thinking Origins

  2:07

• Design Thinking Terms and Practices

  2:32

• Mindsets vs. Methods

  2:04

• Becoming a Design Thinker Review

  7 questions

Becoming Acquainted with Your User

Let’s start getting into the heads of our users. To do this, we’ll need to work with a couple of key bits of info and then we’ll begin applying that content to some of our design thinking methods.

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• Empathy Maps

  2:11

• Data Collection

  3:06

• instruction

  Activity: Data Collection

• "Who Is My User?"

  2:13

• instruction

  Activity: Who Is My User?

• Leveraging Empathy Maps Review

  5 questions

Understanding Your User’s “As-Is” Scenario

If an empathy map is a quick snapshot of your user, consider the as-is journey as the movie version. The as-is journey will bring to light areas of opportunity for you to improve the design. Sometimes, the areas of opportunity are small portions of the design. Other times, the opportunity could be the entire concept behind a design. Just remember: the key to a successful “as-is” will always be honesty.

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• Journey Maps

  1:46

• Phases

  1:25

• instruction

  Activity: Phases in a Journey Map

• Identifying the Opportunity

  1:25

• Journey Maps Review

  7 questions

Designing for Your User’s "To-Be"

You now know where your user’s needs exist, so it’s the perfect time to act on it. We’ll start by generating new ideas and then threading these ideas into the user’s journey to create a new story.

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• Solving for Pain

  2:16

• Big Ideas

  3:04

• instruction

  Activity: Big Idea Vignettes

• Storyboarding the New Journey

  2:43

• Storyboarding and the New Journey Review

  5 questions

Telling the Story

You now have a solution to your user’s pain. But you’re not done yet. You’ll first need to figure out how to communicate all this information to the rest of your team and to project stakeholders in a way that speaks their language (we are reinforcing empathy here so why not approach communicating with your team from the same place?).

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• Roadmapping

  2:19

• Presenting Your Findings

  2:19

• Conclusion

  0:56

• The Story Ends Review

  4 questions