Milestone 3: Define + Ideate
The goal of this project milestone is to define the focus for your semester project (based
on the outcome of Milestone 2, your initial needfinding) and to come up with some
design alternatives to explore solutions within your problem area.
In this assignment you will revisit the findings from your needfinding, expand your
needfinding on a deeper focus, and formulate points of view (POVs) for your potential
users. From there, you will craft several “How Might We” (HMW) statements to frame
the problem area and intended design goal. Based on the best HMW statements that
frame the problem space, you will brainstorm several solutions. Using the best of these
solutions, you will sketch out three design alternatives. These design alternatives (and
accompanying storyboards) will explore the design space and user experience for your
problem area.
Milestone Requirements
1. Additional Interviews, Observations, & Synthesis:
Based on the needfinding and analysis conducted in the last milestone, identify
and conduct any additional needfinding activities your team requires. Interview
at least 2 new people (remember to interview in pairs). If you’ve narrowed down
what you want to do (e.g., from health down to cancer recovery), interview a
range of users that would be affected in that problem area.
Combine the new data with your prior data to see if some interesting themes
appear in more than one interview. Feel free to use empathy maps, or journey
maps to help you synthesize i.e., find needs and insights from all of your
interview data.
Optional: Go out and conduct one or two observations of some people in action
in the context of your problem domain. Record what, how, and why they are
doing what they are doing.
2. POV Generation:
Generate 6+ POVs. You should create at least one POV inspired by each of the
interviews your team conducted (these POVs can be generalizations or
extrapolations based on the individuals interviewed, they don’t need to be literal
representations of your interview participants). Refer to the POV
reading/resource and the bootcamp bootleg methods to sanity-check your POVs.
Each POV should be formalized as four sentences. Please use the following
template to guide your POV generation (italicized sentences are there to guide
your POV, and should not be included in your formal POV write ups)1:
We met:
(What specific person did you meet that inspires your work?)
We were surprised to notice:
(Tell us something we didn’t know or wouldn’t have thought about before we
started this project. What unique new perspective do you have now? What
tension, contradiction, or surprise did you find?)
We wonder if this means:
(What was your leap? What did you infer? This is the need you have uncovered!)
It would be game-changing to:
(This is your call to action. Build on your insight and take an aspirational stance
on what you can do as a team. This isn’t your solution -- it is the problem to be
solved. A problem with a more informed perspective.”
3. Best POVs:
Select 1-3 POVs that you find most compelling. Final POV statements should be
written in the following format,
“We met … We were surprised to notice … We wonder if this means … It would
be game changing if …”
4. HMW Generation:
Generate 10-15 “How Might We” (HMW) statements for each of your best POVs.
Refer to this d.school bootcamp bootleg guide on how to generate powerful
HMW statements (p. 26).
5. Best HMWs:
From the pool of all your HMWs generated in the previous step, select the 3 best
HMWs. They need not come from different POVs, but we’d like to see a diversity
of HMWs. Refer to this brainstorm selection method card (bootleg p. 30) or the
ideate lecture slides (Slide 7 - Design thinking) for selecting ideas.
6. Brainstorm Solutions:
1
This format and the sentences describing how to answer each question are copied directly from the 2022 Stanford
PPT about Define, found in the assignment description.
Brainstorm with scraps of paper or post-it notes on how to solve your HMW
questions. Remember to do some individual brainstorming first and then do
additional brainstorming as a group. Make sure to quickly put up as many
ideas as possible. There are no bad ideas at this stage. Try to think of at least
10-15 solutions per each of the 3 best HMWs.
7. Best Solutions:
Select the top 3 solutions. Going for a diverse range of ideas is best at this stage.
8. Brainstorm Tasks:
Describe in moderate detail three to five tasks that users will perform using your
top three solution ideas. There should be at least one each of simple, moderate,
and complex tasks. Note: tasks do not say how to carry out the activity, but
instead say what the user is trying to achieve. Focus on user behavior, not
features. Label each task as simple, moderate, or complex.
9. Sketch Solutions:
In this step your team will develop sketches and storyboards of designs and user
experiences. Create sketches and storyboards for the top 3 solutions your
team has identified (your design alternatives); they should be drawn (likely by
hand) and low fidelity.
Along with each sketch, you will provide a brief narrative storyboard of
how the system will work (see examples at end of document). Your design
sketches should be sufficiently detailed for a potential user to provide meaningful
feedback about the design. In each of the storyboards, walk through how a user
would use each of your 3 different solutions.
Do not think about specific technologies at this time. You do not need to build a working
prototype at this stage. You will get to that in the next phase. Don’t worry about how
awesome the sketches look, the goal is to get the information and experience into an
external form factor so that you can successfully communicate your ideas to others.
Brainstorming
The brainstorming process you follow for this project milestone is important.
Please consider adapting the 10 for 10 method for the brainstorming steps in this
assignment. Please use the weekly meeting times you have agreed upon. You all
should be working together, especially when you are picking your team’s top POVs,
HMWs, and Solutions. Often times, the best ideas will be a combination, extension, or
iteration; and this goes best when you all get together and discuss/critique/build-on what
you’ve done together.
Fundamentally, you should aim to develop a variety of different design ideas and
concepts across the entire possible design space for your problem area. The key is to
push the boundaries of the design possibilities.
Note: brainstorming is a significant part of this assignment, so we highly recommend
using a visual collaboration tool, like a whiteboard or pen and paper or FigJame or Miro
(both of which have free education accounts).
Report
Your deliverable for this milestone is a report.
This report will contain the artifacts your team created for this milestone. Below is
an outline of the format you should use for your report, with the section headers and the
specific content to include in each section. For each section of the report, please
include an explanation of why your team made the choices you made (for example, a
justification of why you found these three POV statements to be the most compelling).
Make sure that your report adequately reflects the brainstorming process that your
group used.
Suggested outline and headers:
Cover Page
a. Include team name, the names of all team members, and the assignment
number (Milestone 3)
1. Introduction
a. Describe what your problem area is.
2. Additional Needfinding
a. Who you interviewed & what you found out.
b. Summary of how the new interviews improved upon what you learned from
the original needfinding.
optional: If your team conducted observations, where/what you observed and a
summary of the who
3. Point of Views
a. Present the three top POVs (“We met … We were surprised to notice … We
wonder if this means … It would be game changing if …”)
4. How Might We
a. Present the three top HMW statements with the POVs they stem from.
5. Solutions
a. Present the three top solutions. Each solution should have a sub-section
header (e.g., Solution 1).
In each subsection you should include 1) a description of the solution 2)
images of the sketches and storyboards for each solution.
6. Summary and Reflection
a. Describe your brainstorming and collaborative process. Reflect on the
strengths and weakness of your approach
b. Compare and contrast the three solutions. What are the strengths and
weaknesses of each solution?
c. What did you learn from this phase? Was it what you expected?
Appendix: Other POVs and HMW statements
a. In the appendix, please provide:
- The other 3 POV statements
- All 10 HMW statements generated for each of the top 3 POVs (30 HMW
statements in total). Make sure it is clear which POV these HMW
statements correspond to.
Note: remember, each section (excluding the Intro and the Appendix) MUST HAVE
explanations of your team’s choices.
Submission
Submit your report as a PDF in eLC by March 1st, 2024 . Only one person from your
team needs to submit the report. Make sure that your group name appears somewhere
on your report.
Evaluation
Evaluation for this assignment will be based on the content and quality of the work
completed. Evaluation Criteria includes:
● Description of additional needfinding interviews (diversity & appropriateness
of participant, insights).
● Description of POVs, HMWs, and brainstorming of selected solutions.
● Reflection and Explanation of the teams brainstorming, process, and choices.
● Image Legibility: images included are not pixelated and can be assessed. Any
eligible content is explained clearly in a caption so that the reader can
understand what they are viewing.
● Report Quality.
● Completion and Clarity.
Examples
Example of output from brainstorming:
Example of a storyboard of a user experience:
Additionally, don't forget to capture interesting moments throughout your term
project journey. This will help you create an interesting video at the end of the
🙂
semester, which will be the final step of your term project. And don’t forget to
have fun!
References
This assignment incorporates elements of previous assignments from Georgia Tech
(Ceara Byrne and others) and Stanford (James Landay).
