Here is another free design resource we have made at the Lab: a short book on Ethical Design Engagement with your Community. It walks through essential mindsets and planning steps to make sure the user research, co-design, and other work with community members is done responsibly and ethically. It is a short introduction, that aims to be practical, helping a … Read More
The Boring-Exciting Map to understand users’ needs
This prompt asks the user to lay out possible ideas for a challenge area along a vector. In this instance, it’s what would be most boring (uninspiring) to what would be most exciting. After they lay things out, then you can follow up with why’s to uncover what the key factors are to get them excited about an idea in … Read More
Know Your User persona template
This is a template I use with my design process to capture small Personas of my target users. Forcing myself to write down who will be using my design helps me to focus on adding features & functions that will engage them, and give them value. I recommend having a hierarchy of users — with some taking precedence over others, … Read More
Mapping Users’ Lives & Workflows
Ideo.org’s site Design Kit has an article from Shauna Carey, describing how she uses user-mapping in her interviews and ethnographic work with young women in developing countries. We asked women and girls—community health workers, taxi drivers and secondary school girls—to draw a map of their community, and used their maps to guide a conversation around the factors that allow for … Read More