Design Thinking Handbook

Compassion in tandem with a beginner’s mind helps us translate empathy into action.

beginner’s mind is the mind of compassion. When our mind is compassionate, it is boundless.
Shunryu Suzuki — ZEN MIND, BEGINNER’S MIND

Once you’ve had a chance to synthesize the data and group patterns, take a look at how they support or contradict your original POVs.

resource for debriefing and synthesizing is from Brendan Mulligan at Cluster. Mulligan outlines some great tips and techniques for holding a viewing party and capturing insights from your team, and identifying and bucketing patterns as a group

Erika Hall outlines how to structure the session (summarize goals, pull quotes and observations), the space and supplies you’ll need (sticky notes and sharpies!), and the types of data to look for (user goals and priorities).

can be helpful to bring multiple prototypes to a testing session. This will give users more fodder to react to and compare against

If you’re constrained to remote testing, services like ethn.io and UserTesting can provide you with users in fairly targeted demographics.

Set objectives
What specifically are you testing, and what do you want to know? This drives everything that comes next: the questions you ask, the people you recruit, and how you determine success.

Having a beginner’s mindset and testing assumptions early in the design process will help you design better products

The older you get as a designer, the more you realize that you just don’t know anything … if you can embrace that you don’t know, but you know how to go find