How Design Thinking Can Be Used in L&d

Design thinking has had a lot of "buzz" the last few years, and if you're skeptical of whether it's really worth the hype, I get it: at first glance, design thinking can look… blurry. I felt the same way when I first started reading about it, so I want to provide some clarity around the value I have seen it bring to learning and development.

When you start researching design thinking and its origins, you quickly realize that it's not a process that was invented one day by one person. A quick web search (this is an excellent overview and infographic) shows how the process and underlying mindsets have evolved. Design thinking has slowly taken shape over decades to become a mainstream problem-solving technique. It began as a product design process, picking up speed when software development began to blend "product design" into "interaction design." The problems design thinking was used to solve were no longer alwaysthings, butexperiences. I think that's one reason design thinking aligns so well with L&D – the "answer" to the problem is not just the solution itself, it's also what the learner feels like while using it and what they walk away with afterward.

You'll often see design thinking visualized as a process with five steps: empathize, define, ideate, prototype, and test. If you think these steps seem similar to other instructional design models, you're right. That's another reason design thinking suits L&D: it doesn't require throwing away what you've been doing, it's more about elevating key steps to get the attention they deserve. Let's look at how each step lends value to the instructional design process.

1. Empathize: Not as touchy-feely as it sounds.

The best way to explain the empathize step may be to eliminate what it'snot. It is not just about sharing emotions, nor is it solely a needs analysis. Sharon Boller and I prefer to think of this step asgetting perspective. It entails using a variety of tools to learn about the realities of learners' day-to-day experience and how they will apply this new skill.

Without the learners' insight, training solutions often start to look repetitive – probably because the same people sitting around the same table keep coming up with the same ideas. By incorporating the voice of the learner, we begin to uncover important facets of the design like:

• critical content or conditions the stakeholders don't know about
• the rightlevel of content
• the delivery format that best aligns with how and when learners will access and use the solution
• more relevant scenarios and examples
• a truly learner-centric "what's in it for me"

2. Define: Why are we here?

Without clearly stating the problem, you can't clearly solve the problem. If there's no driving business need for the project, there's no metric to tell you when your solution has been successful. No software would be developed without specific user stories; no new product is developed without a specific use case; and no training solution should be developed without a measurable performance goal.

3. Ideation: Taking (the right) shape

You'll see the words "divergent thinking" come up in design thinking descriptions. Divergent thinking is all about getting a diversity of ideas from multiple perspectives. In my experience, once you have the learner perspective and a clearly defined problem, possible solutions start to bubble up whether you're trying to brainstorm or not. At that point, ideation is less like throwing darts on a blank slate and more like putting missing pieces into a jigsaw puzzle. The key is to maintain alignment with the defined needs and outcomes, and there are lots of brainstorming tools and activities to add structure to this process.

4. Prototype & Test: Red light/green light.

Remember: we're designing an experience. Prototyping should be a gut check on whether a solution provides a good experience or a bad one, and can provide early answers to questions like:

• Does the format align with the use case?
• Can we present the content clearly and effectively?
• Does the UI have optimal usability?
• Does this style send the right message?

Personally, I have found that the more focus I give to the learner experience, the more I find myself testing foraccess andusability rather than just content or clarity. For example, a solution can be informative and even elegant, but if it's hard to access (learners need a field-based solution!) or doesn't provide value to the target learner (this is too advanced!), the project needs to pivot. A quick, early prototype and user test can validate your direction before it's difficult (and expensive) to pivot.

My Take

As a fellow L&D professional, I'm happy to share the value I've found by adopting a design thinking approach. Before I discovered design thinking, I was frustrated: Learners were chronically absent from the design process, stakeholders struggled to articulate goals and outcomes, and after launching a new solution, I often wasn't sure whether it had moved the needle or not.

Adopting a design thinking approach required me to prioritize steps of the design process that remedied those problems: suddenly, I had meaningful insight from learners that transformed the direction of the project. Stakeholders could better define outcomes and metrics with input from the learners. And new solutions were tested with learners from the earliest stages of the design. Gaining learner perspective and prototyping (steps where we are often tempted to cut corners to "save time") actually took a negligible amount of time to implement, but ended up saving significant time and money in the form of better results and stakeholder engagement.

If design thinking piques your interest or if you're looking for new tools in your instructional design toolkit, check out the book I co-authored with Sharon Boller on Design Thinking for Training and Development. It includes tools and tips about how to implement each of these steps along with lots of examples and lessons learned. Find it on Amazon.

How Design Thinking Can Be Used in L&d

Source: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/what-design-thinking-means-ld-laura-fletcher

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