Assumptions in UX/UI Design

I've talked about the need to find the root cause  of a problem and not just to solve the symptoms. It's important, by the way, to solve the symptom – you  don't want that to stay around. But we also need to get rid of the *underlying cause*. Or else it'll come back again; the symptoms will repeat. So, how do you do that? Well, the Japanese developed a technique on, actually, the Toyota assembly lines.

They call it the *5 whys*. Now, the 5 whys sounds good, and you can do that yourself – you can always say "Why?"; when somebody tells you something, you say, "Well, why is that?" And they'll tell you why that is, and you know you've sort of reached the root cause when they say, "I don't know." because actually you can *never* really get at the *very, very bottom*. So, what we need to do is get at the *lowest  level* that we can actually *do* something about. In the United States – and probably in every  country –

when there's a major airplane crash, when they issue their report, which is  often a year or two after the event, they don't say, "This was caused by pilot error." or, "This was caused by a faulty altimeter." or, "This was caused by a bump." What they usually do is they  say, "There were *many* things happening, and here's a list of things. And if any one of these had not happened, there would not have been an accident."

So, if there are – say – eight things that  led to the accident, any one of which could have prevented the accident,  how do you know which is the *root cause*? *All eight* are the root cause. So, you have to therefore look at the *whole system* and find out what the *entire underlying set of possible root causes* is and work on them.

You've probably all heard that phrase  'thinking out of the box'. Everyone tells you, 'Think out of the box.' And it sounds so easy, and yet it's so difficult. If we're talking about theory and creativity, then we've got to think about *de Bono and lateral thinking*. So, if you're thinking out of the box, then lateral thinking is almost, not quite but almost, the same thing in different words.

And this idea of doing things that are breaking the mold, that are not following a line obviously covers a lot of creativity  techniques, but particularly lateral thinking, de Bono's lateral thinking. The idea there is you've got, wherever you are, you've got your problem; you've got your start point. *Linear thinking*, in de Bono's terms, is very much about trying to follow the standard path, going along. So, if you're doing mathematics, you might pull the standard techniques off the shelf.

If you're writing a poem, you might be thinking line by line and thinking how each line fits and rhymes with the one before – if you're doing rhyming poetry, that is. So, it's all about following the same path of reasoning going on and on. *Lateral thinking is about trying to expand.* So, instead of following the same path of  reasoning, are there *different places to start*? You know – are there different ways of thinking  from the way where you are?

So, it's about trying to expand your idea of where you are outwards. So, that might be thinking of different solution strategies, so it might be thinking of different ways to start. Crucially, though, if you want to see out of the box  or get out of the box, you actually often need to *see the box*. If you're literally in a cardboard box, you know you're in it. But mental boxes – you don't actually know you're in them. It's not that there's a cardboard wall and you don't go beyond it.

It's more like a hall of mirrors, so you  never realize there's anything outside at all. Sometimes, *unusual examples* can help you see that. And that's, again, part of the reason for the bad ideas method, like *random metaphors* – things that, as soon as you've got something that *isn't in the box*, even if it's not a very good thing, it  helps you to realize because you say, 'Well, *why* isn't this a good solution? Why doesn't it *work* as a solution?'

And as you answer that question about why, what you're doing is you're *naming that cardboard wall*. And once you've named the cardboard wall and you know it's there, you can start to think of what might be outside of that box but perhaps is a better solution. If you think about some of the analytic method— combining those, those are about building a map of the territory, which is very much about naming the box, naming the walls, naming the boundaries, and by naming them, by seeing from a  distance what is there,

being able to then think of alternative solutions that are completely different. So, both alternative solutions help you to see the territory, help you to see the box. Of course, by seeing the box, that gives you the potential to have alternative solutions and actually you can iterate back and forth between those and hopefully build a better understanding  of what is there and what is constraining you. If you understand what's constraining you, then you can start to break those constraints.

When you have a question or you're making a design decision, a question about your users: Will our users do this? Will our users need this feature? Will our users like this? Is this something that our users want? When you have those kind of questions,  the first thing you should do is GOOB or what we call GOOB: Get Out Of the Building.

And you can get out of the building in your mind to begin with by impersonating – you know – doing a little improv, doing a little role-playing with your device – you know – one hand, one eyeball, kind of simulating the interaction, maybe holding the baby and holding the device and trying to  do the thing with one hand; turning the lights off in your office, getting it dark or going outside in the bright sunlight – you know; kind of simulate like that, just to get yourself out a little bit. But GOOB is really about having a culture of decision making that's outside-in facing.

So, you want outside in as opposed to internal assumptions projected outward onto the users. So, make sure that your first point of call is to GOOB and if your stakeholders who are not watching this, who are not here don't understand that, try and encourage  that need to align with *user behavior*

– actual user behavior and actual user context since that's critical to UX; it's not just about the visuals – it's about the behavior, and  the behavior lives out there, not in here.

Personas are one of these things that gets used  in very, very many ways during design. A persona is a rich description or description of a user. It's similar in some sense, to an example user, somebody that you're going to talk about. But it usually is not a particular person. And that's for sometimes reasons of confidentiality.

Sometimes it's you want to capture about something slightly more generic than the actual user you talked to, that in some ways represents the group, but is still particular enough  that you can think about it. Typically, not one persona, you usually have  several personas. We'll come back to that.   You use this persona description, it's  a description of the example user,   in many ways during design. You can ask  questions like "What would Betty think?"

You've got a persona called / about Betty, "what would  Betty think" or "how would Betty feel about using this aspect of the system? Would Betty understand this? Would Betty be able to do this?"   So we can ask questions by letting those personas  seed our understanding, seed our imagination.   Crucially, the details matter here. You want to make the persona real. So what we want to do is take this  persona, an image of this example user,   and to be able to ask those questions: will  this user..., what will this user feel about  

this feature? How will this user use this system  in order to be able to answer those questions?  It needs to seed your imagination well enough.  It has to feel realistic enough to be able to   do that. Just like when you read that book  and you think, no, that person would never   do that. You've understood them well enough that  certain things they do feel out of character. You need to understand the character of your  persona.

For different purposes actually, different levels of detail are useful. So I'm going to sort of start off with   the least and go to the ones which I think are  actually seeding that rich understanding.  So at one level, you can just look at your  demographics. You're going to design for warehouse   managers, maybe. For a new system that goes into  warehouses. So you look at the demographics, you might have looked at their age. It might be that on the whole that they're   older. Because they're managers, the older end. So  there's only a small number under 35. The majority  

are over 35, about 50:50 between those who are in  the sort of slightly more in the older group.  So that's about 40 percent of them in  the 35 to 50 age group, and about half   of them are older than 50. So on the whole  list, sort of towards the older end group.   About two thirds are male, a third are female.  Education wise, the vast majority have not got   any sort of further education beyond school. About 57 percent we've got here are school.  

We've got a certain number that have done basic  college level education and a small percentage   of warehouse managers have had a university  education. That's some sense of things.   These are invented, by the way, I should say, not  real demographics. Did have children at home. The people, you might have got this from some big  survey or from existing knowledge of the world,   or by asking the employer that you're  dealing with to give you the statistics.   So perhaps about a third of them have got children  at home, but two thirds of them haven't. 

And what about disability? About three  quarters of them have no disability whatsoever.   About one quarter do. Actually, in society  it's surprising. You might... if you think   of disability in terms of major disability,  perhaps having a missing limb or being   completely blind or completely deaf. Then you start relatively small numbers.   But if you include a wider range of disabilities,  typically it gets bigger. And in fact can become  

very, very large. If you include, for  instance, using corrective vision with   glasses, then actually these numbers  will start to look quite small.  Within this, in whatever definition they've  used, they've got up to about 17 percent with   the minor disability and about eight percent  with a major disability. So far, so good. So now, can you design for a  warehouse manager given this? Well,  

you might start to fill in examples for  yourself. So you might sort of almost like   start to create the next stage. But it's hard. So let's look at a particular user profile. Again,   this could be a real user, but let's imagine  this as a typical user in a way. So here's Betty Wilcox. So she's here as a typical user.  And in fact, actually, if you look at her, she's   on the younger end. She's not necessarily the  only one, you usually have several of these.  And she's female as well. Notice only up to  a third of our warehouse ones are female. So  

she's not necessarily the center one. We'll come  back to this in a moment, but she is an example user. One example user. This might have been  based on somebody you've talked to, and then you're sort of abstracting in a way. So, Betty Wilcox. Thirty-seven, female, college education. She's got children at home, one's  seven, one's 15. And she does have a minor disability, which is in her left hand. And  it's there's slight problem in her left hand.  

Can you design, can you ask, what would Betty  think? You're probably doing a bit better at   this now. You start to picture her a bit. And you've probably got almost like an image   in your head as we talk about  Betty. So it's getting better.   So now let's go to a different one. You know, this  is now Betty. Betty is 37 years old. She's been a   warehouse manager for five years and worked for  Simpkins Brothers Engineering for 12 years. She didn't go to university, but has studied  in her evenings for a business diploma.

That was her college education. She has two children  aged 15 and seven and does not like to work late.   Presumably because we put it  here, because of the children.   But she did part of an introductory  in-house computer course some years ago.   But it was interrupted when she was promoted,  and she can no longer afford to take the time.   Her vision is perfect, but a left hand movement,  remember from the description a moment ago,   is slightly restricted because of an  industrial accident three years ago. 

She's enthusiastic about her work and  is happy to delegate responsibility   and to take suggestions from the staff. Actually,  we're seeing somebody who is confident in her   overall abilities, otherwise she wouldn't  be somebody happy to take suggestions.   If you're not competent, you don't. We sort of see that, we start to see a   picture of her. However, she does feel threatened  – simply, she is confident in general – but she   does feel threatened by the introduction of  yet another computer system. The third since she's been working at Simpkins Brothers. So now, when we think about that, do you have a better vision of Betty?

Do you feel you might be in a position to start talking about..."Yeah, if I design this sort of feature, is this something that's going to work with Betty? Or not"? By having a rich  description, she becomes a person. Not just a set of demographics. But then you  can start to think about the person, design for the person and use that rich human understanding you have in order to create a better design.

So it's an example of a user, as I said not  necessarily a real one. You're going to use this as a surrogate and these details really, really matter. You want Betty to be real to   you as a designer, real to your clients as you  talk to them. Real to your fellow designers  as you talk to them. To the developers around  you, to different people. Crucially, though, I've already said this, there's not just one. You usually want several different personas because the users you deal with are all different.

You know, we're all different. And the user group – it's warehouse managers – it's quite a relatively narrow and constrained set of users, will all be different. Now, you can't have one persona for every user,   but you can try and spread. You can look at the range of users.   So now that demographics picture I gave,  we actually said, what's their level of education? That's one way to look at that range. You can think of it as a broad range of users.

The obvious thing to do is to have the absolute  average user. So you almost look for them:   "What's the typical thing? Yes, okay." In my  original demographics the majority have no college   education, they were school educated only. We said that was your education one,   two thirds of them male – I'd have gone for  somebody else who was male. Go down the list, bang   in the centre. Now it's useful to have that center  one, but if that's the only person you deal with,   you're not thinking about the range. But certainly you want people who in some sense  

cover the range, that give you a sense  of the different kinds of people.   And hopefully also by having several, reminds  you constantly that they are a range and have   a different set of characteristics, that there  are different people, not just a generic user.

I think it's really important to bring both user research with sort of industry research together, so you're looking at things that are likely to shift with technology with business models, with all of that and you're bringing it together with what does the person think they need today and how might that shift given the circumstances around them shifting.

There's a lot of interplay between these things. So, to summarize it's qualitative and user research to understand core human behaviors and the things that maybe aren't going to change. What are their rituals? What are their habits? How are they currently? What are the jobs that they need done? Then, it's industry and market research that is really looking for technology shifts, business model shifts, flag – little signals out in the world

of what is likely to change in 5 / 10 / X number of years. And you're going to bring those two things together: that's where innovation happens. And I think then that's also on the business partnership level, like who else is part of this ecosystem? And what do they know that we don't know? And how can we exchange information? What can we do? And then it's also "Have you instrumented your systems that your customers and your partners are using?" so that just the act of using it can tell you things

about what people need.

User research is a crucial part of the design process. It helps to bridge the gap between what we think users need and what users actually need. User research is a systematic process of gathering and analyzing information about the target audience or users of a product, service or system. Researchers use a variety of methods to understand users, including surveys, interviews, observational studies, usability testing, contextual inquiry, card sorting and tree testing, eye tracking

studies, A-B testing, ethnographic research and diary studies. By doing user research from the start, we get a much better product, a product that is useful and sells better. In the product development cycle, at each stage, you’ll different answers from user research. Let's go through the main points. What should we build? Before you even begin to design you need to validate your product idea. Will my users need this? Will they want to use it? If not this, what else should we build?

To answer these basic questions, you need to understand your users everyday lives, their motivations, habits, and environment. That way your design a product relevant to them. The best methods for this stage are qualitative interviews and observations. Your visit users at their homes at work, wherever you plan for them to use your product. Sometimes this stage reveals opportunities no one in the design team would ever have imagined. How should we build this further in the design process?

You will test the usability of your design. Is it easy to use and what can you do to improve it? Is it intuitive or do people struggle to achieve basic tasks? At this stage you'll get to observe people using your product, even if it is still a crude prototype. Start doing this early so your users don't get distracted by the esthetics. Focus on functionality and usability. Did we succeed? Finally, after the product is released, you can evaluate the impact of the design.

How much does it improve the efficiency of your users work? How well does the product sell? Do people like to use it? As you can see, user research is something that design teams must do all the time to create useful, usable and delightful products.

One of the things that can be quite hard to remember during design is to keep in mind that you're in a bigger context. It's easy to get focused on the device you're  designing for or a particular screen. This isn't helped by the tools you use. Typically, when somebody presents a design, what you see nowadays for a digital design,

whether it's for a phone-based application or web-based application, is a wireframe. And there are so many tools that help you generate these. But of course, what that does is it focuses you on the screen, on the page, not on the wider context in which it's based. So, how can you try and focus on this? There's a lot more things in this context than the screen. There's the things that happened before. So, if you recall the scenario of Betty in the warehouse,

the consignment arrived late; she'd had a bad night. These all contribute to the context the person's in; so, all the things that have happened in the past. And there's other people around. There's Betty's children, particularly the child who woke in the night. There's Tony, who works in the warehouse as well, who noticed there was a problem. Emma, who's on the night shift, who prepared the crib sheets. So, a lot of other people around

– some of those are about interactions that are  happening at the moment; some of those connected past events. Some of those might influence it. For instance, the boss or the client, perhaps Betty has to engage with other people; if there's a problem with a consignment, perhaps the delivery folks who provided it. So, there's lots and lots of people involved as well. The body – we are physically-embodied people;  we're not sort of eyes and fingers to use a computer system; we're a whole person.

So, again, recall that Betty is supporting this gear thing on a balance between her hip and a slightly weak hand. That does suggest, even without going... you can probably picture this, somehow or other there's a computer screen, but without anywhere to put things out. So, perhaps there are other... understanding a body might suggest ways you redesign the space. But clearly, there's issues about the body of the person involved, which influences things.

Does somebody have to stretch a long way? That can make you think about things. There's the physical environment as well. So, it was interesting. Betty had to take the gear thing and bring it to the computer. There were distances involved, and a warehouse is a big place. If you're designing an office system, then you might not have to think about great distances. But in a warehouse or an outside task there might be big distances involved. Does somebody have to carry things like the way that Betty did? Would it be better then, once you start  thinking about that,

to have some sort of system where she might have something handheld to take to the part? Not necessarily all of the system, but they might be doing just  something enabling them to scan what the part was and then go back and have a look  at things, rather than have to carry it over. Is it noisy or quiet? Is it hot or cold? I mean, I'm guessing a warehouse might be on the chilly side, but then there's lots of people and lots of activities, so maybe not. Maybe – thinking of the body, maybe it gets hot. And certainly it could be quite a noisy environment with forklift trucks around.

So, again, you might think "Oh, we'll have a hands-free system and make it voice-operated." But that's not going to work if there's a forklift truck driving behind the back of you in the middle of trying to do the interaction. So, you have to keep this in mind, the whole  context. Otherwise, the system you design that might look great in a wireframe doesn't actually contribute and fit into the bigger picture.

As you're designing, it's so easy just to design for the people that you know and for the culture that you know.  However, cultures differ. Now, that's true of many aspects of the interface; no[t] least, though, the visual layout of an interface and the the visual elements. Some aspects are quite easy just to realize like language, others much, much more subtle.

You might have come across, there's two... well, actually there's three terms because some of these are almost the same thing, but two terms are particularly distinguished. One is localization and globalization. And you hear them used almost interchangeably and probably also with slight differences because different authors and people will use them slightly differently. So one thing is localization or internationalization. Although the latter probably only used in that sense. So localization is about taking an interface and making it appropriate

for a particular place. So you might change the interface style slightly. You certainly might change the language for it; whereas global – being globalized – is about saying, "Can I make something that works for everybody everywhere?" The latter sounds almost bound to fail and often does. But obviously, if you're trying to create something that's used across the whole global market, you have to try and do that. And typically you're doing a bit of each in each space.

You're both trying to design as many elements as possible so that they are globally relevant. They mean the same everywhere, or at least are understood everywhere. And some elements where you do localization, you will try and change them to make them more specific for the place. There's usually elements of both. But remembering that distinction, you need to think about both of those. The most obvious thing to think about here is just changing language. I mean, that's a fairly obvious thing and there's lots of tools to make that easy.

So if you have... whether it's menu names or labels, you might find this at the design stage or in the implementation technique, there's ways of creating effectively look-up tables that says this menu item instead of being just a name in the implementation, effectively has an idea or a way of representing it. And that can be looked up so that your menus change, your text changes and everything. Now that sounds like, "Yay, that's it!"

So what it is, is that it's not the end of the story, even for text. That's not the end of the story. Visit Finland sometime. If you've never visited Finland, it's a wonderful place to go. The signs are typically in Finnish and in Swedish. Both languages are used. I think almost equal amounts of people using both languages, their first language, and most will know both. But because of this, if you look at those lines, they're in two languages.

The Finnish line is usually about twice as large as the Swedish piece of text. Because Finnish uses a lot of double letters to represent quite subtle differences in sound. Vowels get lengthened by doubling them. Consonants get separated. So I'll probably pronounce this wrong. But R-I-T-T-A, is not "Rita" which would be R-I-T-A . But "Reet-ta". Actually, I overemphasized that, but "Reetta". There's a bit of a stop.

And I said I won't be doing it right. Talk to a Finnish person, they will help put you right on this. But because of this, the text is twice as long. But of course, suddenly the text isn't going to fit in. So it's going to overlap with icons. It's going to scroll when it shouldn't scroll. So even something like the size of the field becomes something that can change. And then, of course, there's things like left-to-right order. Finnish and Swedish both are left-to-right languages. But if you were going to have, switch something say to an Arabic script from a European script,

then you would end up with things going the other way round. So it's more than just changing the names. You have to think much more deeply than that. But again, it's more than the language. There are all sorts of cultural assumptions that we build into things. The majority of interfaces are built... actually the majority are built not even in just one part of the world, but in one country, you know the dominance... I'm not sure what percentage,

but a vast proportion will be built, not just in the USA, but in the West Coast of the USA. Certainly there is a European/US/American centeredness to the way in which things are designed. It's so easy to design things caught in those cultures without realizing that there are other ways of seeing the world. That changes the assumptions, the sort of values that are built into an interaction.

The meanings of symbols, so ticks and crosses, mostly will get understood and I do continue to use them. However, certainly in the UK, but even not universally across Europe. But in the UK, a tick is a positive symbol, means "this is good". A cross is a "blah, that's bad". However, there are lots of parts of the world where both mean the same. They're both a check. And in fact, weirdly, if I vote in the UK,

I put a cross, not against the candidate I don't want but against the candidate I do want. So even in the UK a cross can mean the same as a tick. You know – and colors, I said I do redundantly code often my crosses with red and my ticks with green because red in my culture is negative; I mean, it's not negative; I like red (inaudible) – but it has that sense of being a red mark is a bad mark.

There are many cultures where red is the positive color. And actually it is a positive color in other ways in Western culture. But particularly that idea of the red cross that you get on your schoolwork; this is not the same everywhere. So, you really have to have quite a subtle understanding of these things. Now, the thing is, you probably won't. And so, this is where if you are taking something into a different culture, you almost certainly will need somebody who quite richly understands that culture.

So you design things so that they are possible for somebody to come in and do those adjustments because you probably may well not be in the position to be able to do that yourself.

Accessibility ensures that digital products, websites, applications, services and other interactive interfaces are designed and developed to be easy to use and understand by people with disabilities. 1.85 billion folks around the world who live with a disability or might live with more than one and are navigating the world through assistive technology or other augmentations to kind of assist with that with your interactions with the world around you. Meaning folks who live with disability, but also their caretakers,

their loved ones, their friends. All of this relates to the purchasing power of this community. Disability isn't a stagnant thing. We all have our life cycle. As you age, things change, your eyesight adjusts. All of these relate to disability. Designing accessibility is also designing for your future self. People with disabilities want beautiful designs as well. They want a slick interface. They want it to be smooth and an enjoyable experience. And so if you feel like

your design has gotten worse after you've included accessibility, it's time to start actually iterating and think, How do I actually make this an enjoyable interface to interact with while also making sure it's sets expectations and it actually gives people the amount of information they need. And in a way that they can digest it just as everyone else wants to digest that information for screen reader users a lot of it boils down to making sure you're always labeling

your interactive elements, whether it be buttons, links, slider components. Just making sure that you're giving enough information that people know how to interact with your website, with your design, with whatever that interaction looks like. Also, dark mode is something that came out of this community. So if you're someone who leverages that quite frequently. Font is a huge kind of aspect to think about in your design. A thin font that meets color contrast

can still be a really poor readability experience because of that pixelation aspect or because of how your eye actually perceives the text. What are some tangible things you can start doing to help this user group? Create inclusive and user-friendly experiences for all individuals.

Do you know this feeling? You have a plane to catch. You arrive at the airport. Well in advance. But you still get stressed. Why is that? Designed with empathy. Bad design versus good design. Let's look into an example of bad design. We can learn from one small screen.

Yes, it's easy to get an overview of one screen, but look close. The screen only shows one out of three schools. That means that the passengers have to wait for up to 4 minutes to find out where to check in. The airport has many small screenings, but they all show the same small bits of information. This is all because of a lack of empathy. Now, let's empathize with all users airport passengers,

their overall need to reach their destination. Their goal? Catch their plane in time. Do they have lots of time when they have a plane to catch? Can they get a quick overview of their flights? Do they feel calm and relaxed while waiting for the information which is relevant to them? And by the way, do they all speak Italian? You guessed it, No. Okay. This may sound hilarious to you, but some designers

actually designed it. Galileo Galilei, because it is the main airport in Tuscany, Italy. They designed an airport where it's difficult to achieve the goal to catch your planes. And it's a stressful experience, isn't it? By default. Stressful to board a plane? No. As a designer, you can empathize with your users needs and the context they're in.

Empathize to understand which goals they want to achieve. Help them achieve them in the best way by using the insights you've gained through empathy. That means that you can help your users airport passengers fulfill their need to travel to their desired destination, obtain their goal to catch their plane on time. They have a lot of steps to go through in order to catch that plane. Design the experience so each step is as quick and smooth as possible

so the passengers stay all become calm and relaxed. The well, the designers did their job in Dubai International Airport, despite being the world's busiest airport. The passenger experience here is miles better than in Galileo Galilei. One big screen gives the passengers instant access to the information they need. Passengers can continue to check in right away. This process is fast and creates a calm experience,

well-organized queues help passengers stay calm and once. Let's see how poorly they designed queues. It's. Dubai airport is efficient and stress free. But can you, as a designer, make it fun and relaxing as well? Yes.

In cheerful airport in Amsterdam, the designers turned parts of the airport into a relaxing living room with sofas and big piano chairs. The designers help passengers attain a calm and happy feeling by adding elements from nature. They give kids the opportunity to play. Adults can get some revitalizing massage. You can go outside to enjoy a bit of real nature.

You can help create green energy while you walk out the door. Charge your mobile, buy your own human power while getting some exercise. Use empathy in your design process to see the world through other people's eyes. To see what they see, feel what they feel and experience things as they do. This is not only about airport design. You can use these insights when you design

apps, websites, services, household machines, or whatever you're designing. Interaction Design Foundation.

Cross-functional teams, unlike silos, have all the people necessary to build a specific thing together. Let's look at an example. Imagine you're on a team that is supposed to build the onboarding flow for a new app that helps connect job applicants with jobs. You can't build the whole thing with just designers. Or with just engineers, for that matter. I mean, you probably could do it with just engineers, but it's a terrible idea.

A cross-functional team for this onboarding work might include a few engineers, perhaps some for the front end and some for the back end. Might include a designer, a researcher, a product owner or manager, maybe a content writer or a marketing person. In an ideal world, all of these folks would only work on this particular team. In the real world, where we actually live, sometimes folks are on a couple of different teams and some specialists may be brought in to consult. For example, if the team needed help from the legal department to explain some of the ramifications of a specific decision,

a cross-functional team would have a dedicated legal expert they could go to. But that legal expert might also work with lots of other teams. In agile environments, the cross-functional team generally sits together or if remote, has some sort of shared workspace. They all go to the required team meetings. They understand the goal of the team and the users. They're experts, or they soon become experts, on that onboarding flow. Contrast this to how it might be done in a siloed environment. In that case, you might have different people assigned to the team depending on need, which can seem really flexible.

Until you realize that you end up with five different designers working on the project all at different times and they all have to be brought up to speed and they don't really understand why the other designers made the decisions that they did. Same with the engineers. And do not get me started on legal. Silo teams tend to rely more on documentation that gets handed between groups. And this can lead to a waterfall project where project managers or product managers work on something for a while to create requirements, which they then hand off to designers who work on designs for a while

and then they pass the deliverables on to engineering, who immediately insists that none of this will work and demands to know why they weren't brought in earlier for consultation. You get it. By working in cross-functional teams instead, the people embedded on the project get comfortable with each other. They know how the team works and can make improvements to it. They come to deeply understand their particular users and their metrics. They actually bring engineering and even design and research into the decision making process early to avoid the scenario I described above.

Universal design is a design practice that is generally considered to be a design that has gone through all the design processes while hoping to take everyone into consideration. You just would have to design it in a way that everyone can use it. The *problem* with the approach of universal design is, though, that *you cannot really design for everyone*.

To design with 8 billion people in mind is strictly impossible: a design that is utopian or more academic or more a discourse subject rather than something that we can really and truly design. But you can do *inclusive design* as a part of design practices that strive for inclusion. The difference is that inclusive design is the umbrella above,

for example, accessible design because accessibility is an accommodation. It is checking boxes whether your design is truly accessible. And if it serves the purpose for your audiences. Inclusive design is the same umbrella. Universal design is more of a juxtaposition, but it's more battling against inclusive design because if you think of everyone, you think of no one.

And in this inclusive way, we can look towards architecture, we can look towards city planning and also how buildings are built in the past decades because they have taken aboard the inclusive approach. They do all the accommodations they can think of – for example, no stairs, ride towards those who have to take a wheelchair. Or it could be beneficial to people with a trolley or with something heavy that they have to carry.

So, thinking of this benefits everyone. And now imagine the internet being a public space, and how we can learn from city planning and architecture and interior design, that we are *accommodating those who need accommodation*. And that's what the inclusive approach is about. So, to sum this up, your research cannot be universal, because you cannot serve that, but it can be personalized and it can be also tailored to the needs of the audience you are serving.

Design thinking improves the world around us every day because of its ability to generate groundbreaking solutions. You can contribute  to the future developments in a similar way if you adopt the design thinking mindset into  your own work procedures. But first, you need to know what the five phases of design thinking are. And that's what this video will teach you. Design thinking is a *non-linear, iterative  process* that can have anywhere from three to seven phases, depending on who you talk to.

The model we chose to focus on here at IxDF has five. As we mentioned, the design thinking process  is *non-linear* and *iterative*. This means you don't have to follow the five phases in any particular order. You can carry out the stages in parallel or repeat them and circle back to a previous stage  at any point in the process. Basically, don't ever think these pieces are set in stone. The whole point of design thinking is that it allows you to work in a *dynamic way* to *develop and launch innovative ideas*.

There's no need to use design thinking as a step-by-step process, unless the situation calls for it. Now, you may wonder why we chose to focus on *this* particular variation of the design thinking process. We picked the *5-phase model* because it's the one proposed by the Hasso Plattner Institute of Design at Stanford. Actually, you may have heard it called its more  common name: the d-school. They are world-renowned for the way they teach and apply design thinking. So, who better to take inspiration and learn from? And there's no need to worry; you won't miss out!

Regardless of which design thinking model you personally choose to focus on, all variants embody the same principles which were first described in 1969 by Nobel Prize laureate Herbert Simon  when he wrote *The Sciences of the Artificial*. We hope this short video has given you a good  introduction to the five phases of design thinking. We can't wait for you to learn more  about this revolutionary process!