My adaptation of designing thinking based on the original framework, combining my experience, learnings and practice to help problem solving with clients.
I am responsible for coming up with project & design/research approach for client's ask as well as teaming, estimation and project plan. After years of practice, I have consolidated different approaches to problem solve.
Through my professional years, I notice clients often felt the business voice is missing in the equation. As a practitioner, I feel strongly that business users' needs are critical to both user-centered design and design as a business activity. More importantly, we need to align our solution to the bigger picture like company strategy or vision, therefore adding "Strategy" at the beginning of the design thinking framework, as well as "Alignment" is the core of the framework.
Inspired by Scrum methodology, the framework is designed to run in sprints to cater to the need for flexibility and agility, as well as the ease for project planning & re-alignment.
In practice, when we receive an ask from the client, it is critical to assess and clarify the ask. Then evaluate what are the information and research available. Often in times, there are sufficient research already been done. Based on the assessment, we can plan if we want to ahead with discovery or if we have enough information to fast track to ideation. (We can come back to discovery in the later stage as well!)
Between sprint(s), we should always keep our stakeholders in the loop withstands up and mini-playbacks. During alignment sessions at the end of each sprint, it is the time to come together and decide what's next (1) Ideation (2) Discovery (3) Implementation.
Draft Project Approach (Timeline)
Draft Project Approach (Timeline)
Draft Project Plan
A page of Project Plan
Throughout my career as an experience design lead in the agency/consulting world, I see the variation of design maturity across Asia markets. Despite the markets' differences, there is a common need for a simple enough to understand the design framework but at the same time flexible enough to suit the client's contextual needs.
There was a time I tried to push forward the textbook design thinking process, but it never fits the client's way of work and their internal processes. Understanding the paradox of "no such thing as one size fits all" while needing a consistent framework and flexible framework. The "Customised Design Thinking" is what I came up with so far. As my experience grows, I will iterate this in the future.
Y.S ~ June 2020