Stanford d. School
Stanford d. School
In September 2018, I had the unique opportunity to attend the Stanford Executive Design Thinking Bootcamp with a few of my colleagues. My primary goal in attending was to not only deepen my fluency in design thinking methods, but also to gain a level of mastery that would assist me in providing design thinking leadership for KeyBank’s nascent and growing product design organization.
Below, I’ve compiled highlights as well as some key takeaways from my experience.
WELCOME TO D. SCHOOL
We kicked off the first day with a happy hour and welcome from our instructors, Perry, Jeremy and Katherine before breaking into teams. Each bootcamp is centered around a challenge - our challenge was to reimagine the Bay Area public transportation system.
experience mapping
For the first exercise, my team learned some tips on how to improve our interview and observation skills in order to better understand our customer’s motivations. Each team member had an opportunity to interview each other and receive direct feedback from our coaches. We used the above worksheet as a tool to map our experiences using public transportation.
point of view statements
On day two, it was time for the team to put our interviewing skills to practice. We boarded the bus and headed to AT&T Park to interview people about their most recent experience using public transportation. After a couple of interviews, we went back to the studio and started synthesizing all the interview data as a team. We created point-of-view (POV) statements for each of our interviewees. This exercise really helped us build deeper empathy while focusing in on one key insight for each interviewee.
RAPID PROTOTYPING & TESTING
Day three was our chance to really get creative! After reviewing our POV statements, we selected one user to focus on and went to work solving their problem. We used materials we had on hand to create a physical prototype. When it was time to test our prototype, we went to a local shopping center and recruited willing participants like this gentleman on the right.
DISCUSSING OUR LEARNINGS
Additional synthesis and more discussion on what we learned from our prototype testing led us to better refine our POV statement and hone in a more focused problem to solve for.
TELLING OUR STORY
On the last day of d. School, the entire bootcamp class was broken into two large groups with each representing a studio. As a studio, we voted on all the prototypes and POV statements, rating each on depth of insight and disruptiveness of concept (my team had one of the best insights of the studio!). The highest rated concepts were selected to be part of the studio’s overall portfolio.
Key Takeaways
Design Thinking Bootcamp was a completely exhilarating experience that further cemented my love for design. Throughout the week, I documented everything we did, noting behaviors and activities that I wanted to take back to my team at KeyBank:
Do more experience mapping in the field to help facilitate interviews and delve deeper into specific points of users’ stories;
Use the “I like..” and “I wish” methodology when asking users to evaluate your prototype;
Create POV statements to help the team build empathy for our users;
Transition to more “no-fi” prototype testing and stop wasting time on getting designs perfect in order to get feedback, and;
Coach the team on adopting a “Just Try It” mentality through rapid prototyping, testing and iteration.
putting it to practice
I was eager to share my learnings with my design team when I returned to work after d. School. In this photo, I’m explaining to the team how to synthesize qualitative data from empathy interviews to create POV statements.