Human Centered Design的快速入门手册（上）：

最近我在NovoEd上面选了两门IDEO的课，第一门课叫做Design Kit: Human Centered Design。第二门课是后续课程，叫做Design Kit: Prototyping。

日常的产品经理工作中对于HCD Process的核心概念应用机会就挺多的，访谈用户，快速原型，反复迭代。在这两门课中，我想系统地了解一下这个方法。

访谈用户的时候如何让陌生用户自然吐露真实想法？
访谈时有点机械问答，流于表层很难深入，怎么办？
原型为什么要逐步深入进行（某些公司领导一上来就只看原型做的是否逼真漂亮）？
有些系统功能繁杂，即使是简单原型貌似也只能得到用户的泛泛评价怎么办？
如何走出思维定势，获得更有新意的想法（而不只是和竞争对手产品同质化）？
这些问题在这门课上都得到了一定的解答。

一下是英文详细笔记，中文版概括笔记请见我从IDEO的设计思维课程中学到了什么

网上关于design thinking的材料一般以分享体会、简要介绍为主，NovoEd的课一直等了很久才开放，所以希望这三篇笔记能够帮到想系统学习的人。

总体来说，IDEO将HCD方法分为Inspiration, Ideation, Implementation三个阶段, d.School则将HCD分为Empathize, Define, Ideate, Prototype,Test等五个阶段，理念是一致的。不管是产品，服务，还是空间，体系，基本上围绕用户的产品都可以用到HCD方法来快速试错。

课程材料略繁杂，我采用以d.School的五阶段作为时间轴组织笔记，方便自己查阅。（很多学习材料都提到这五个阶段并非逐个进行，而是可能交替反复进行）

这一篇是关于Empathize，how to put yourself in your users' shoes。其中针对自己的学习重点，我拓展阅读了其他材料，因此用户访谈部分在这篇笔记会格外长。

HCD Process.png

How to think like a HCD Designer？

HCD的设计方法首先就强调了Mindset:
1. Creative confidence
Creative confidence is the belief that everyone is creative(with this HCD process), and you will get creative solution as long as you take action.
It will support you to keep making things and test them out.

2. Make it
We believe in the power of tangibility.
We build something so we can test them, revealing complexity, opportunity and feasibility.
And we share them to get candid, actionable feedback.
You can prototype anything.
一个跳舞游戏可以用真人放在手机框中来快速模拟，人对人甚至计算机对人的服务也可以用Acting out来模拟。
课程后面也在采访用户环节提到Show don't tell. 做出来的实际物品比想象的东西有意想不到的表现力。甚至你能看到用户需求被实际物品所改变。

在设计一个儿童舞蹈游戏APP的时候，设计者们对于舞蹈动作设计会不会好玩产生了争议，一个真人原型的制作很快给了团队直观的印象，一致通过了这个功能

3. Learn from Failure
Fail early to succeed sooner. It's just experiments you can learn things from.

4. Empathy
You have to know different people, different scenarios, different places. Empathizing with the users is the best route to truly grasping the context and complexities of their lives, and it keep the users in the center of your work.
在课程后面会提到Extreme user, expert user, community immersion，interview in the context, 还有camera recording都是一系列把自己放入对方真实日常情境的工具。而不是让对方给你简单地描述。

5. Embrace ambiguity
Don't limit yourself to the solution you already know. (Don't give up your intuition though). Let your user guide you. There will always be more creative ideas.
We will get out into the world and talk to people, open up to different ideas, and arrive at unexpected solutions.

6. Be optimistic
Even if we don't know the answer, it's out there and we can find it.

7. Iterate, iterate, iterate
We quickly get out in the world and let the people we're designing for be our guides.

我的体会是，如果一个HCD方法的执行者对于让陌生人对你open up，或者融入陌生人的生活感到不舒服，那么这就是一个需要打破的舒适圈。

Before you start

1. Frame your design challenge

• What's the problem you want to solve?
• Who are you serving for?
• Use "How might we" to reframe it.(make the problem feels more actionable)
• Is the question focused on ultimate impact?
• Does the question allow for a variety of solutions?
• What are the context and constraints? (time, tech, geographic,people...)
  Does the question take into account context and constraints?
• What are some possible solutions?

Frame your design challenge

2. Build a team
To achieve divergent thinking, it is important to have team members with diverse background, the "T-shaped" person.
Think about if your team have the technical capability you need.

3. Create a project plan
Look at the staff, budget, staff, skills your team have, and think about the major activities, do you have enough resource?

4. Secondary research

• the most recent news in the field
• recent innovations
• history reasons for current situation
• other solutions worked or failed
• get the objective facts and figures that you can't look for in the interview.

5. Discuss with your teammates what you already know a lot about.

6. Discuss what aspects of the challenge you want to know more or don't know.

7. Define your audience
Don't just limit your thinking to the people you're designing for, but also consider government, NGOs, other businesses, or competitors.
Write down all directly involved groups on Post-its. Then peripherally relevant ones.
Think about the connections. Who are the fans? Who are the skeptics? Who do you most need on your side? Write down and save it.

8. Interview Preparation

• Consider users you want to interview.
  Think about factors like age, gender, class, social position and so on.
  Consider both the core user and the extended community. Imagine a map of all the people who might have something to do with your design challenge. Think of characteristics that would make them interesting to meet.

Extreme users

• Consider who are the extreme users.
  Considering what aspect of your design challenge you want to explore to an extreme. If you are redesigning the grocery store shopping experience you might consider aspects like: how groceries are gathered, how payment is made,etc.
  Then to consider the aspect of gathering groceries, you might talk to professional shoppers, someone who uses a shopping cart to gather recyclables (and thus overloads the cart), product pullers for online buyers, or people who bring their kids shopping with them.
  Etreme users make people's needs and work-arounds more notable, which brings uncovered needs, inspiration, and wild ideas might resonates with mainstream users.

• Experts to interview
  Ask about relevant history, context, and innovations.
  When recruiting, give them a preview of the kinds of questions you'll be asking and let them know the time needed.
  Choose experts with varying points of view.

• Group Interview
  If you’re looking to learn quickly what is valuable to a community, Group Interviews are a great place to start.
  Be certain to have one person asking the questions and other team members taking notes and capturing what the group is saying.
  Come prepared with a strategy to engage the quieter members of the group.
  Identify who you might want to go deeper with in a Co-Creation Session.

• Brainstorm interview questions
  Identify and order themes of the questions
  Refine questions (make sure you leave room to ask plenty of "why" question, "tell me about the last time___"question, "how you feel___"question.

• Finding someone who is familiar with or comes from the community to introduce you will make it easier for users to open up to you.

9. Choose places you can be immersed in context

10. Seek analogous inspiration
Get your team together to talk about what aspects of the empathy space you’re exploring are particularly interesting.

If, for example, you think customer service is an important aspect of the space you’re looking at, brainstorm places you might go to find particularly strong (or weak) customer service. You may also want to brainstorm specific people you could interview about these analogous spaces, or how you might do a quick observation.

Don't worry about making sense of the experience in the moment. It might influence your project later in unexpected ways.

Saturate a space with photos and quotes from your analogous space; this can help the team share inspiration, or bring in the analogous insight later in the process.

When helping surgical teams deal with complex procedures, designers looked at how car racing pit-crews optimized their work ow for safety and efficiency.

Phase One: Empathize

Although people often can't tell us what thier needs are, their actual behaviors can provide us with invaluable clues about their range of unmet needs.

Observe like a child

1. Observe and immerse

Budget enough time and money to send team members into the field to spend time with the people you’re designing for. Try to organise a homestay if possible.

A great Immersion technique is to shadow a person you’re designing for a day. Ask them all about their lives, how they make decisions,watch them socialize, work, and relax. You can still learn a lot by following someone for a few hours.

Or you can take a guided tour. Having one of them give you a Guided Tour of their home,workplace, or daily activities will reveal not just the physical details of theperson’s life, but the routines and habits that animate it.

• Be in a beginner's mindset
• Pay close attention to the person’s surroundings.
• Don't judge
• Question anything with "why" and a second "why"
• Strive to assume a posture of wonder and curiosity
• Find patterns
• Absorb what users say to you,and how they say it, without thinking about the next thing you’re going to say.
• Observe with"what","why","how"."What are they doing in the context","How are they doing it (as many descriptive phrases as possible","Why are they doing it this way (make informed guesses regarding motivation and emotion)"
• Be sure you’re taking down exactly what you see and hear alongside your impressions, because It’s easy to interpret what’s in front of you before you’ve fully understood it.
  You can also immerse yourself in online communities where you users are.

2. User Camera Study

Provide a camera to user, and ask them to record their experiences that you want to know. And then follow up with an interview to understand the deeper meanings of the visuals.

3. Customer journey

Have participants create a personal timeline of an experience, then have them map how they felt at different points along the way.Use the map as a visual jumping off point for conversation.

Use this when: You want to discuss acomplicated system or series of interactionswith a participant. (The process of buying a car is a good example.)

4. Interview

General Tips

• Whenever possible, interview people in their space ( or in context). You can learn a lot through observing, or asking questions related to the context.

• No more than three researchers should attend any single interview. And each should have a clear role( i.e. interviewer, note-taker, photographer)

Interview process

Let the conversation flow

• Start by broader questions, which make people feel safe and start the conversation. Like "what do you do for a living" to warm up.

• Use tangible conversation starters
  They can encourage creativity and outside-the box thinking from users. You get the conversation to start and you get users to start thinking.

  You can raise questions like "what is the toilet of the future/of the past","a super toilet","the president's toilet", or "What's your favourite supper like".

  Or you can use tangible starters, especially when you are working on an abstract challenge. You can make a sketch, conduct a card sorting, or build a simple cardboard representation, which are things user can react to. You can even make a simple game like IDEO did.

  If the person you’re talking to doesn’t have much of a response to one, move right onto the next. Keep going until you find something that works, then keep the conversation going with open-ended questions.

• Go for stories
  When you find interesting themes, encourage people to tell you the whole story ( whether it's true or not, story reveals more details, attitude and emotion ). Try questions like "Tell me about a experience(your last supper...)","When is the last time you had trouble(using the public toilet...)"...
  TED: The danger of a single story

• Encourage participants to show as well as tell.
  Whether it’s you with the pen or them, drawing is a fantastic way to help the person you’re designing for organise her thoughts visually and spark ideas.
  You can ask them to draw a map of their daily route, the resource flow of how the family money come in and be spent , what percentage of their fields are dedicated to a certain crop.
  Then you can ask questions about the drawing ,or map them by timeline or other way, or go into details like "among all the costs what’s the most expensive thing he buys", "what can’t he live without", "what is there never enough money for".

• Look for inconsistencies between what they say and what they do.

Tips to avoid common errors

• **Don’t be afraid of silence. **If you allow for silence, a person can reflect on what they’ve just said and may reveal something deeper.
• **Never say "usually" when asking a question. **Instead, ask about a specific instance or occurrence, such as“tell me about the last time you ______”
• Don’t suggest answers to your questions.
• **Ask questions neutrally. **“What do you think about buying gifts for your spouse?” is a better question than“Don’t you think shopping is great?”
• **Don’t ask binary questions. **Binary questions can be answered in a word; you want to host a conversation built upon stories.
• Only ten words to a question.
• Only ask **one question at a time, one person at a time. **
• Make sure you’re prepared to capture.
• Record the exact words people say. Not what you think they mean.

How to use a game as conversation starter

Dice rolling game

IDEO laid out a simple dice game where you would “roll” a loan. Once a participant rolled the dice, she was told the terms of the loan and asked if she’d take it.

The original goal was to grasp how members of this community felt about loans and what factors made them willing to take them on. By getting participants to change some of the variables, they were able to see what kind of loans were attractive and which sort would never work.

By putting scenarios in front of people and getting their reactions, you quickly engage them in your research and create an opportunity to deeply understand what they want, fear, and need.

How to use card sort as a conversation starter

By running a Card Sort, an IDEO.org team uncovered how this community in India thinks about solar lights.
Card sort will help you identify what’s most important to the people you’re designing for, or understand their opinion on things you are working on, like solar light, or bank loan.

Use either a word or a picture on each card. Whatever you select, make sure that it’s easy to understand.

Give it to users and ask them to sort according to preference, or simple sort the cards as they see fit. Or ask what they see your product as.
Ask the users how she would sort the cards if she had more money, if she were old, if she lived in a big city.

How to use collage as a conversation starter

The Collages this group made revealed “community health” means more than just hospitals in rural Nigeria.
Getting the people you’re designing for to make things can help you understand how they think, what they value, and may surface unexpected themes and needs.

Give the people you’re designing for a prompt for their Collage. Make sure that your prompt is simple, yet evocative. Perhaps you ask them to make a Collage that represents taking control of their lives, their dream jobs, or how they think about their families.

When they’re finished, ask them to describe the Collage, what the various elements represent, and how it speaks to the prompt.

It’s also best if the magazines they’re working with are full of pictures, have some relevance to the topic you looking to learn more about, and are purchased locally. You can also print some key words or phrases if you want to test a particular message.

Share your fresh learning after the interview"
To cover the most important topics, consider using these prompts:

• Sound bites:
  What were the most memorable quotes that people heard?Why were they memorable?
• Interesting stories
  What was most surprising to you?
• Motivations
  What did this participant care about the most? What motivates him/her?
• Barriers
  What frustrated him/her?
• Interactions
  What was interesting about the way he/she interacted with his/her environment?
• Remaining questions
  What questions would you like to explore in your next conversation?

Also, record and illustrate your new ideas visually.

5. Co-creation

By getting your users to create themselves, you’re not just hearing their voices, you’re empowering them to join the team. You can co-create services, investigate how communities work, or understand how to brand your solution.

• Identify who you want in your Co-Creation Session.
• Maximize a Co-Creation Session with Conversation Starters, a Brainstorm , Role Playing , Rapid Prototyping, or other activities to get your group engaged.
• Make sure that you’re treating your co-creators as designers, not as Interview subjects.

6. Explore your hunch

A hunch could be an idea you had before the project started, or one that cropped up as you’ve been working. If you’ve got a feeling about something, give yourself a chance to explore it.

• There are lots of ways to Explore Your Hunch. You could run a quick Brainstorm. Or build a prototype. Or maybe run your idea past someone in an Expert Interview.
• Start by articulating your hunch to your teammates and get their feedback. It could be that one of them is thinking along the same lines.
• Next, determine the best way to explore the idea. What do you need to uncover and understand to validate or disprove your idea?
• Remember that even if your hunch is wrong, there are still lots of learnings to be had. Remain open to them and capture them as you go.

一点课程外的补充材料：How to interview a stranger
在这部分课程结束后，我想更深入了解一下如何愉快地访谈陌生用户的例子，于是我找到了这两个材料：
On how I approach strangers in the street | Humans of New York creator Brandon Stanton | UCD, Dublin
Getting People to Talk: An Ethnography & Interviewing Primer

"Humans of New York"（这是一个米国很有名的ID）的Brandon的建议是：

1. Energy you are giving off is 100% important
   Nervous is the worst energy. People will feel uncomfortable around you subconsciously. But it's impossible not to be nervous if you haven't approach people for like 1000 times.
   You'd better be calm, unpretending, friendly and unofficial.

2. Never approach from behind

3. Ask broad questions（和课程提到的一样）
   After introducing yourself and your project, you should ask some broad questions.You are not even looking for the answer, but you'll start a conversation from this point.
   You'll get broad and similar answers, then you can go deeper around it to get the story.
   Broad questions are like opinions, philosophy, etc.
   "Give me one piece of advice."People may answer like "be optimistic". Then you ask "tell me about a time when you had trouble in being optimistic".
   "What is your greatest struggle right now?"
   "Who in your life do you have the hardest time forgiving."
   "Tell me about a risk in your life you didn't take it and you really regret it."

4. Ask for emotions
   "sad moment"
   "moment that let you down"
   "pivotal moments"
   Then this would associate with stories.

Ethnography interview课程中的建议是：

1. In the "Cue" environment
   Interview people in an environment full of "cues" related to your topic and they're comfortable with. Then you can look for the cues around, and ask them about it.

2. **Engage people in the connection with you **
   Start with warm-up questions like: "Tell me about your favourite jeans""when/where did you buy it"
   Then you get the storyline going smoothly. Get people in memory and emotions, then they'll forget the camera and the environment.

3. Be charming
   Genuinely interested in what they are saying.** Listen to them in 12 different levels.**
   Too much nodding and "Aha" "Great" is distracting, and make people feel you're bored.
   Diva Center的案例视频中提到Peer Employee如何接近女孩们，就是从赞美他们的鞋子，帽子等等开始。

4. Don't be too surprised or too bored.
   You'll interrupt them and lose the report.

5. Avoid patronizing transition like "that's interesting"
   People can feel that what they're saying is not interesting and you're just trying to get to the next topic.

6. If you get it right
   You often get to deep emotional place with people.
   **They won't feel they'll be judged or they need to please you. **They just trust you enough to allow you to hear their story.