A process cycle based in a 5 stages:

• Empathize
• Define
• Ideate
• Prototype
• Test

Empathize

Objective:

• Understand customers’ needs
• Deep insight into what they need and expect from the solution/product

Activities

• Engage with stakeholders
• Use innovative methods to collect information
• Understand the problem/need
• Record observation to answer what, how, and why

Guidelines to follow:

• Adopt appropriate method to gather relevant information
• Engage stakeholders positively
• Experience the problem to understand the impact

Define

Objective:

• To create a well-defined and meaningful problem statement to focus on

Activities

• Information analysis
• Collaborating observations that help define the core problem
• Provide clarity and scope to the problem

Guidelines to follow:

• Focus on the positive aspects of the customers’ needs
• Eliminate negative aspects identified in their needs
• Identify connectivity between problems by identifying similar context
• Break down the problems into sub-problems
• Define each problem to create meaningful problem statement

Ideate

Objective:

• To generate and define multiple ideas

Activities:

• Collect as many ideas as possible
• Think, think, think…
• Brainstorming
• Use tools like charting, mind maps, boards
• Gather all solutions suggested by the team of thinkers

Guidelines to follow:

• Don’t get into details, feasibility, and viability during this phase
• Don’t evaluate ideas
• Focus on generating ideas
• Always create visualization of ideas

Prototype

Objective:

• To testify an idea
  • Verifies whether an implemented solution is successful
  • Identify further problems with the implemented idea to refine
• Gathering feedback from the users about their experiences with the product

Activities:

• Identify the type of prototype needed to illustrate the ideas
• Capture all the key aspects of the idea and solution with the prototypes

Guidelines to follow:

• Don’t spend too much time on the prototype always build prototypes with the intended users in mind
• Checking feasibility and collecting feedback is the primary objective of prototypes.
• Don’t focus on internal problems

Types of prototypes:

• Basic prototype model: provide limited tested features, it’s inexpensive, may not be useful for some cases, you will get limited feedback.
• Operational prototype model: operates like finished products, they are expensive, users can visualize how they will operate, you will get deep feedback.

Test

Objective:

• Return to your users and test the prototype for obtaining feedback

Activities:

• Engage with stakeholders
• Understand if the needs are covered
• Collect as much feedback as possible

Guidelines to follow:

• Focus on assertive and defined feedback
• structure the test activities with the user stories.
• explain what was implemented and not implemented in the prototype (set expectations)
• Don’t focus on internal problems