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DT Tools

Understand

01_Problem Statement

What you can do with the tool:

  • Develop a common understanding of a problem with the client and in the team.

  • Formulate collected findings from the problem analysis into a Design Challenge.

  • Define the direction and framework for generating ideas.

  • Form the basis for the formulation of a target-oriented How-might-we question (so-called HMW questions).

  • Develop a reference for later performance measurement.

02_Design Principles

What you can do with the tool:
 

  • At the beginning of the project, we focus clearly on a specific mindset or requirements for the product or service.

  • Obtain a common understanding in the team concerning the assignment.

  • Provide guidance so that decisions can be made more quickly within the design team.

  • Define overarching characteristics which should be treated with higher priority.

  • Develop a guideline that ensures that future design challenges are created on the same overarching principles.

03_Interview for Empathy  

What you can do with the tool:

  • Gain a good understanding of a user's needs, emotions, motivations and ways of thinking.

  • Gain insights that are not visible in a superficial view, such as frustration and deeper motivations of a user.

  • In the context of use, find out which task sequence the user has to perform and which mental model he bases this on.

  • Validate information already gained and gain new insights. 

  • Establish a good basis for discussions with the Design Thinking Team.

04_Explorative Interview

What you can do with the tool:

  • Explore the everyday life of people.

  • Gain a deep understanding of the user and his unspoken needs.

  • Get a view of the basic values, beliefs, motivations and aspirations that influence behavior.

  • Create a mindset that does not focus on the product, but on people and their needs.

  • Explore cultural and social aspects that may influence the satisfaction of needs.

  • Minimize risks at an early stage, identify opportunities and examine initial concept ideas.

  • Explore the everyday life of people

05_Question 5x Why

What you can do with this great guy:

  • Discover the root cause of a problem.

  • Develop a sustainable solution.

  • Go deep and experience more than just superficially exploring the symptoms that are obvious.

  • Dig deeper and deeper to gain new surprising insights

06_5Wh questions  

What you can do with the tool:

  • Obtain new knowledge and information and grasp the problem or situation in a structured way.

  • Draw conclusions from concrete observations of a specific situation to more abstract, potential emotions and motives.

  • During the observation phase, use "W-Questions" to observe more closely and dig deeper for new insights.

07_JTBD

What you can do with the tool:

  • Structured recording of customer tasks (jobs to be done) and gaining new insights.

  • To find hidden tasks of the customer that have not yet been pronounced, in order to derive or sharpen customer needs later.

  • Also optimize the entire customer experience, for example to give a service a clear purpose.

08_Extreme & Lead User

What you can do with the tool:

  • Explore the needs of users who are average users unable to articulate.

  • Finding new innovative ideas.

  • Identify early trends in user behavior or needs.

  • Find ideas for a more integrative design.

09_Stakeholder Map  

What you can do with the tool:

  • Receive valuable information for strategic and communicative planning and future activities.

  • Make assumptions about the influence of certain actors on the project.

  • Identify indications of missing information on actors, e.g. which actors have not yet been sufficiently considered (white spots).

  • Identify initial conclusions about alliances or power relations as well as potential conflicts between different stakeholders.

10_Emotional Response Cards

What you can do with the tool:

  • Before redesigning existing products, test their attractiveness and compare them with new ideas.

  • Learn more about competing products, brands and experiences.

  • Collect statements on strategy, information architecture, interaction, aesthetics, and speed.

  • Vision: Already at the kickoff, the client learns how he wants his product to be characterized by the user.

  • For new products, e.g. after a usability test, learn what the user experienced, thought and felt.

  • Compare prototypes across different iterations.

Observe

11_Empathy Map

What you can do with the tool:

  • Document findings from observations or tests with users and capture the user from different perspectives in order to build empathy.

  • Better understand where the user has problems (Pains) or possible advantages (Gains), and derive his tasks (so-called Jobs to be done).

  • Gather insights to create a persona.

  • Summarize observations more easily and capture unexpected insights.

12_Persona & User Profile

What you can do with the tool:

  • Create a fictitious character that is a potential user/customer of a solution.

  • Create a common image of the user/customer in the team

  • Visualize the goals, wishes and needs of a typical user/customer and share them with the design team.

  • Gain a consistent understanding of a target group.

  • Document stories and images that a typical user/customer experiences.

13_Customer Journey Map   

What you can do with the tool:

  • Establish a common understanding in the team about the experiences of customers with a company, product or service.

  • "Moments of misery that affect the customer experience.

  • Get a good understanding of all the customer's touchpoints.

  • Close issues and gaps in customer interaction and realize a unique experience.

  • Create a new and improved customer experience.

  • Develop new products and services in a customer-oriented manner.

14_AEIOU

What you can do with the tool:

  • Bring structure into observation and ask the right W questions, which are decisive for gaining knowledge.

  • Facilitate the evaluation of many findings by larger design teams performing parallel observations.

  • To relate the user to the activity, to the space and to an object.

  • Gather knowledge that is not public.

  • Insights can also be collected by inexperienced design teams, because the AEIOU tool provides structure and guidance.

15_Analyse-Fragen-Builder

What you can do with the tool:

  • Identify relevant influencing factors which form the basis for a new or improved product or service and then analyse them in a targeted manner.

  • Prevent not being creative enough in the analysis process because the focus is on technical "details".

  • Increase efficiency in the analysis process by avoiding idle times.

  • Use a standardized procedure to re-examine the problem and solution space with the help of data.

16_Peers Observing Peers   

What you can do with the tool:

  • To explore the behaviour and needs of a user in a "natural" and inconspicuous way.

  • Gain a better understanding of the problem or design challenge that has been defined.

  • New insights are gained into how the problem is solved today, which workarounds are applied and how the process is lived in the real world.

17_Trendanalyse

What you can do with the tool:

  • Explore megatrends, trends and their points of contact.

  • Visualise the larger context of trends and discuss with the Design Thinking Team or clients whether and how the trends interact.

  • Avoid a too simple, subjective and possibly monocausal view of a development and find holistic approaches.

  • To identify and present overlaps and causal relationships between trends and to draw conclusions about the possible significance of a trend.

  • Gain valuable contextual information about the problem or idea.

Define /Point of View

18_HMW-question 

What you can do with the tool:

  • Transforming a latent need into a design challenge.

  • Write down the goal of the later idea generation and the intention with the Design Thinking Team in a concrete sentence.

  • Define the scope and framework of the idea-finding process. ​

19_Storytelling

What you can do with the tool:

  • Research, talk to people and create empathy to formulate profound stories.

  • Summarize results from the Understanding and Observing phase and discuss them with the team.

  • Highlight the unexpected and create new perspectives.

  • Generally share knowledge, ideas, but also results (solutions) with others.

20_Context Mapping  

What you can do with the tool:

  • Learning from an "expert": the user who gives unexpected insights into what he is going through in his life.

  • Make a bigger picture of a particular situation. How do others experience these experiences? When will they experience this? With whom and in what context?

  • Follow the principle: "Knowledge is information with additional context." To create true knowledge, the context must be known and this tool helps to create this awareness.

21_Define Success

What you can do with the tool:

  • A coordination and unity in the team to achieve which success should be achieved.

  • Ensure that requirements of the organization/management/users and other stakeholders are understood so that it is easier later to get a buy-in from the decision makers.

  • Simplify the selection and prioritization of options throughout the project.

  • To create a basis for measuring via KPIs, if any are desired for the project.

22_Vision Cone

What you can do with the tool:

  • Get a feel for changes over time.

  • Think in periods and sections, for example, from the past to the future by mapping different results over time.

  • Sketch a projected, plausible, possible, preferred or absurd future.

  • Linking visions with concrete next steps.

  • To show the potential of all possibilities, for example with regard to technological and sociological developments.

23_Critical Items Diagram 

What you can do with the tool:

  • To process the results from the phases of understanding and observing and to filter out the decisive elements.

  • Prepare the phases "Finding ideas" and "Developing prototypes" and thus create a good starting point.

  • Help the team to understand and agree on the things that are essential for the project.

  • Derive various How-might-we questions.

Find ideas

24_Brainstorming

What you can do with the tool:

  • Generate many ideas that spontaneously come to the team's mind.

  • Utilize the full creative potential of the Design Thinking Team.

  • Immediately have a large number of variants available.

  • To obtain an interdisciplinary view of a problem that represents different competences.

  • Collect ideas and perspectives from a heterogeneous group.

  • Awaken enthusiasm and create momentum.

25_2x2 Matrix

What you can do with the tool:

  • Quickly determine which ideas to pursue and which ideas to discard.

  • Get a first overview of which ideas already have a certain maturity.

  • Perform strategic innovations, market opportunities and many other categorizations and prioritization of ideas.

  • Use it wherever decisions need to be made.

26_Dot Voting  

What you can do with the tool:

  • Make joint decisions within the team.

  • Restrict the selection and thus simplify and prioritize.

  • Make faster decisions and avoid lengthy "analysis paralyses".

  • Resolve disagreements in teams and avoid power games.

  • Include the views of all stakeholders in the decision-making process.

  • Finally, focus on the best ideas and market opportunities.

27_6-3-5-Methode

What you can do with the tool:

  • Either generate new ideas or further develop existing ideas and simply document them.

  • To introduce inexperienced workshop participants to brainwriting and the rules of brainstorming in a structured way with an easy to learn approach.

  • In quiet individual work, grasp the creative potential also of people who are rather reserved in open group situations.

  • Promote the generation of fancy ideas through the explicit separation of idea generation and idea evaluation.

28_Special Brainstorming

What you can do with the tool:

  • Generate a large number of ideas in a limited time,

  • Encourage mutual exchange and active listening between group members to build on collected ideas.

  • Take different perspectives through different approaches and look at a problem from different angles.

  • Increase creativity in different ways, e.g. through negative brainstorming, figuring storming or body storming.

29_Analogien & Benchmarking 

What you can do with the tool:

  • Generate ideas that lead to a WOW effect.

  • Explain ideas and complex facts through analogies in an understandable way.

  • Find inspiration by comparing problems and their solutions from another area with our problem.

  • Integrate supportive cognitive thought processes that are necessary for open and poorly structured problems (so-called ill-defined and wicked problems).

  • Unleash your full creativity in combination with Sketch Notes.

30_NABC

What you can do with the tool:

  • Quickly grasp the core of an idea, concept or prototype.

  • Ensuring that the user/customer is in the focus by starting with the question about the customer problem and then intensively addressing the customer's needs.

  • Consider an idea under the four different aspects Need (problem/need), Approach (solution/performance promise), Benefit (benefit) and Competition (alternative/competition).

  • Present an idea at an early stage and obtain important feedback.

  • Compare different ideas/concepts with each other.

31_Blue Ocean & Buyer Utility 

What you can do with the tool:

  • Explore new untapped market opportunities.

  • Provide differentiated and new services based on user needs.

  • Adapt a strategy to new market needs by understanding the competitive advantage.

  • Establish the appropriate vision for the Design Challenge or a roadmap for the step-by-step implementation and control mechanisms.

Prototype

32_Exploration Map

What you can do with the tool:

  • Make visible what kind of experiments were carried out and what prototypes were realized.

  • Get a quick overview of which experiments or prototypes can still be performed.

  • Record the delta between an expected and actual result of an experiment.

  • Gain a common understanding of the experiments carried out so far in the team

33_Prototype to Test

What you can do with the tool:

  • Let the user experience the idea and observe how he interacts with the prototype.

  • Deepen the understanding of the potential user.

  • Validate needs and verify assumptions.

  • Get feedback on different dimensions of desirability, feasibility and feasibility.

34_Service Blueprint  

What you can do with the tool:

  • Extend the Customer Journey Map by including supporting technologies, data and customer interactions for each phase of the journey.

  • Address key issues in the development of new products or services, such as whether a service covers all customer needs and all pains have been removed.

  • Visualize the interactions with a customer on different levels (e.g. frontstage, backstage, supporting processes).

  • Define key performance indicators (KPIs) in terms of quality and time of interactions

35_MVP

What you can do with the tool
 

  • Find out at an early stage whether the basic need is satisfied and the product is of interest to the market.

  • Iterative testing to determine whether the user's needs can be satisfied with a minimally functional product and how this can best be expanded.

  • Find out through user feedback how much the product is in demand before further details and features are developed.

  • Minimize the risk of investing in a solution for which there is too little market demand, saving time, money and energy.

Test

36_Testing Sheet

What you can do with the tool:

  • Systematically plan a test and define the roles.

  • Document the test and results so that they can be easily used for the next activities.

  • Consider in advance which are the test criteria and in which cases the hypotheses are considered verified in order to validate the needs and test assumptions.

37_Feedback-Capture-Grid

What you can do with the tool:

  • Test the first prototypes quickly and easily using four defined questions.

  • Record, collect and cluster test results in writing.

  • Sharpen theses on problems as well as solutions, personas and ideas and further develop prototypes on the basis of the findings.

  • In general, write down feedback on ideas, presentations, etc. quickly and easily in a structured way.

38_Experience Testing  

What you can do with the tool:

  • Leave the fantasy world and conquer the real world by exploring the prototype with real customers.

  • Find out if it really works as intended for the users/customers.

  • Learn whether the idea will lead to success or not.

  • Get feedback: "love it", "change it" or "leave it".

  • With the right questions, collect qualitative and quantitative data to identify whether problems arise during experience or use.

39_Solution Interview

What you can do with the tool:

  • Understand whether an intended solution is valued by users, i.e. whether it is convincing in terms of functionality, user-friendliness and user experience.

  • To question the task on which the project is based, i.e. to check whether the project concentrates on the decisive questions.

  • Understand the needs, behaviours and motivations of users/customers more deeply.

  • To measure the value of the solution for the user.

40_Structured Usability Testing

What you can do with the tool:

  • Using defined test scenarios (tasks), observe the interaction between user and system (prototype).

  • Check and compare the correctness of the assumptions, solutions and concepts made with the user.

  • Get new inputs for improvement or completely new ideas.

  • Gain deeper insight into the problem by testing existing products.

  • Improve usability iteratively through testing and subsequent optimization

41_A/B Testing  

What you can do with the tool:

  • Perform a real A/B test or several variants of a prototype in the form of multi-variant test / split testing.

  • Make a quantitative evaluation.

  • Conduct a qualitative survey and evaluate the number and content of feedback.

  • Compare individual variants of a function or a prototype (e.g. button, visuals, arrangement) with each other.

Reflect

42_I like, I wish, I wonder

What you can do with the too:
 

  • Anchor it firmly in the team as a feedback ritual in which only "I like, I wish" or supplemented with "I wonder" is permitted as feedback (IL/IW/IW for short).

  • Small successes, which were achieved by an iteration, a prototype or in a test, celebrate with it.

  • Make a part of the reflection and the brainstorming, e.g. extended by "What if..." and an idea parking.

  • Giving and receiving feedback in written and spoken form.

43_Retrospective

What you can do with the tool:

  • Improve team interaction and collaboration - in a fast, focused, respectful and structured way.

  • Take a "RETRO-SPECTIVE", i.e. look back at what went well and what could be improved.

  • Reflect which factors are changeable and which are to be accepted.

  • Foster a positive atmosphere, as all team members are heard and can get involved, which in turn promotes the mindset of self-organized teams.

44_Create a pitch  

What you can do with the tool:

  • Show the team and stakeholders the current status of the prototype, a project or the final solution.

  • Structuring ideas and highlighting the essential statements.

  • Get feedback on the solution and key features, customer needs or value proposition.

  • Convince the audience or decision-makers of the project in order to obtain approval and resources for further action or implementation.

45_Lean Canvas

What you can do with the tool:

  • Summarize the results of the Design Thinking iterations and give everyone a clear picture of the innovation project.

  • Visualize and structure the hypotheses in order to then test them and record the findings in an overview.

  • Consider implementation or the business model to identify the risks associated with implementation.

  • Compare different variants and business models.

46_Lessons Learned

What you can do with the tool:

  • Gather experience in the project in a structured way and process it.

  • Learning from experience and using it for the next project.

  • Enable a positive handling of mistakes and appreciate good progress.

  • Identifying, documenting, applying and finally making use of the findings.

47_Roadmap
Implementation

What you can do with the tool:
 

  • Use the Roadmap for Implementation as a guide to determine the current position (A) and the destination "Where to go" (B).

  • Maintain an overview and determine whether the right destination area and target group will be considered during the trip.

  • Sharing the path to the goal with others.

  • Develop the basis for a checklist with the most important success factors.

  • Make clear an undefined path from A to B through iterations in the course of the journey.

48_Growth & Scale Funnel

What you can do with the tool:

  • Document a portfolio of existing customer requirements (today's markets) and future customer requirements (tomorrow's markets). 

  • Focus on the contribution margin and sales of existing customers and technologies through extrapolation.

  • Track opportunities in new ecosystems, technologies and market roles through retropolation.

  • Demonstrate the market validation of prototypes, proof of concepts and finished solutions over time.

  • Replace existing innovation funnels with modern terminologies and approaches

49_Digital Transformation

What you can do with the tool:

  • Transform a business model based on new technological requirements.

  • Better meet customer needs, increase efficiency and reduce costs.

  • Redefine physical and digital channels and provide customers with a unique experience.

  • Initialize a realignment of the business to remain sustainable.

50_Agenda Planer 

What you can do with the tool:

  • The preparation of a 1-5 day workshop.

  • Plan and keep an eye on the most important steps of the preparation.

  • Record an overview of the workshop participants.

  • Plan different tools and methods over the duration of the event.

  • Plan the follow-up and documentation.

  • Reflect retrospectively on what went well and what went less well. .

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