I worked in a team of 6 other students to design a solution to improve the usability of IBM's SkillsBuild platform. With my team members all being from different degrees, we had a great range of creative ideas to build upon. Our final idea involved implementing 'job profiles' - a way for users to say their current skills and the job they're aiming for, so the SkillsBuild AI can make more personalised course suggestions.
Before we got started, we had a great talk from John McNamara about how to build a good idea with design thinking:
1️⃣💡 Empathy Mapping - we need to thoroughly understand the problem, otherwise we could invest in solutions that don't actually solve the problem! We can build empathy maps which have 4 fields: what users feel, say, think and do. This gets us into the mindset of the user so we can realise what the underlying problems actually are.
2️⃣💡 Ideation - once we properly understand the problem, we can start thinking of ideas. We can critique and 'chip away' at our initial ideas to make them stronger and more narrow, and more directly solve the problem.
3️⃣💡 Simplicity and Cost - we can select which idea to develop further by plotting the ideas on a graph of simplicity vs cost, with increasing simplicity along one axis, and decreasing cost along the other. We'll find the cheapest and simplest solution in the top right-hand corner.