Deep-Dive™ is the name of a technique used to rapidly immerse a group or team into a situation for problem solving or idea creation. This approach is often used for brainstorming product or process development.
Originally developed by the IDEO group (a learning design company) for rapid product development, the Deep-Dive technique is now widely and increasingly used for innovation not only in product development, but process improvement and customer service strategies. The method used by IDEO was documented by Andy Boynton and Bill Fischer (of International Institute of Management Development (IMD) business school), who latterly further enhanced the process and sold the rights to Deloitte Consulting in 2006.
What is the Deep-Dive Brainstorming technique?
Here are top paying jobs for Information Architecture, Usability, and UX practitioners plus reasons to explore each for your user experience design career - and bank your account. (Salary figures based on Indeed.com and GlassDoor.com data)
- User experience strategist: $67,000 to $135,000
- Usability analyst: $81,000 on an average
- User interface designer: $84,000 to $155,000
- Interaction designer: $91,000 on an average
- Interaction designer: $91,000 on an average
- Information architect: $104,000 on an average
High paying jobs in User Experience design
Design thinking, as a concept, has been slowly evolving and coalescing over the past decade. One popular definition is that design thinking means thinking as a designer would, which is about as circular as a definition can be. More concretely, Tim Brown of IDEO has written that design thinking is “a discipline that uses the designer’s sensibility and methods to match people’s needs with what is technologically feasible and what a viable business strategy can convert into customer value and market opportunity.”
A person or organization instilled with that discipline is constantly seeking a fruitful balance between reliability and validity, between art and science, between intuition and analytics, and between exploration and exploitation. The design-thinking organization applies the designer’s most crucial tool to the problems of business. That tool is abductive reasoning.
What is Design Thinking Anyway?
The intranet manager is one of the most important people in an intranet design project. Many times the effort that goes into such a project is on the same level as that of a major organizational change initiative. It is therefore important that the manager is thoroughly prepared for the journey. If you are managing your first redesign project or are new to intranets or just love intranets then we have the resource to get you started: Manager’s guidebook to intranet design projects.
This 64-page guidebook takes you through eight stages of a typical intranet design project. Each stage has many activities that go under it. The activities described and insights included are those gathered over the years by PebbleRoad.
Manager’s guidebook on intranet redesign projects
Disclosure: I work for the company that released the ebook. Of course, it’s included here because it I think it deserves to be here.
Insightico is a collaborative user research tool that lets you add images, documents, audio and video files. You can then add insights to specific parts of the image, document, audio or video file and tag them.
Fellow researchers can star, like and comment on each others’ insights. Analyze the tags to see relationships and patterns emerge. That’s not all, you can also create highlight playlists where you select specific insights that help communicate a concept or idea.
Insightico– the simple and easy way to use and reuse your research.
Disclaimer: I work with PebbleRoad, the awesome company that has built Insightico.
The pilot thought he had keyed in 7600 to warn air traffic control his radios had packed up. But he actually punched in 7500, the code for “I’ve been hijacked”.
The pilot’s problem is comic, but not unique. Why, asks Michaela Bushell, are so many products still designed to suit the way companies would ideally like us to behave?
User Centred Design- because we don’t work how we like to think we do
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A UX process diagram that maps software development life cycle (SDLC) and user centered design (UCD) activities together.
A UX Process diagram
Their Human Centered Design Toolkit is a free innovation guide for NGOs and social enterprises.
Human-Centered Design is a process used for decades to create new solutions for companies and organizations. Human-Centered Design can help you enhance the lives of people. This process has been specially-adapted for organizations like yours that work with people in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. Human-Centered Design (HCD) will help you hear people’s needs in new ways, create innovative solutions to meet these needs, and deliver solutions with financial sustainability in mind.
The Toolkit is divided into four sections that can be downloaded individually or together:
- The Introduction will give an overview of HCD and help you understand how it might be used alongside other methods.
- The Hear guide will help your design team prepare for fieldwork and understand how to collect stories that will serve as insight and inspiration. Designing meaningful and innovative solutions that serve your customers begins with gaining deep empathy for their needs, hopes and aspirations for the future. The Hear booklet will equip the team with methodologies and tips for engaging people in their own contexts to delve beneath the surface.
- The Field Guide and Aspirations cards are a complement to the Hear guide; these are the tools your team will take with them in order to conduct research.
- The Create guide will help your team work together in a workshop format to translate what you heard from people into frameworks, opportunities, solutions, and prototypes. During this phase, you will move from concrete to more abstract thinking in identifying themes and opportunities and back to the concrete with solutions and prototypes.
- The Deliver guide will help catapult the top ideas you have created toward implementation. The realization of solution includes rapid revenue and cost modeling, capability assessment, and implementation panning. The activities offered in this phase are meant to complement your organization’s existing implementation processes and may prompt adaptations to the way solutions are typically rolled out.
IDEO’s Human Centered Design Toolkit
Download individual sections
Download the complete HCD toolkit (PDF, 30.5 mb)
Download the field guide (PDF, 820 kb)
Abstract
When the authors company chose to adopt an Agile development process for new products, her User Experience Team took the opportunity to adjust, and consequently improve their user-centered design (UCD) practices. Their interface design work required data from contextual investigations to guide rapid iterations of prototypes, validated by formative usability testing. This meant that they needed to find a way to conduct usability tests, interviews, and contextual inquiry— both in the lab and the field— within an Agile framework. To achieve this, they adjusted the timing and granularity of these investigations, and the way that they reported their usability findings.
This paper describes their main adaptations. They found that the new Agile UCD methods produced better-designed products than the ‘waterfall’ versions of the same techniques. Agile communication modes allowed them to narrow the gap between uncovering usability issues and act on those issues by incorporating changes into the product.
Adapting Usability Investigations for Agile User-Centered Design
A key aspect of successful User-Centered Design (UCD) is evaluating early and throughout the UCD process. The Background: Accessibility & User-Centered Design (UCD) chapter introduces the User-Centered Design process.
This section provides information on incorporating accessibility into the following evaluation methods:
- Importance of Comprehensive Accessibility Evaluation
- Standards Review
- Heuristic Evaluation
- Design Walkthroughs
- Screening Techniques
- Usability Testing
Evaluating for Accessibility