Design Thinking : the fundamentals

This lecture explains how Design Thinking differs from the traditional waterfall approach by placing the end user, and empathy for that user, at the center of product development instead of deciding on viability and feasibility alone. It introduces the three lenses of business, technical feasibility and desirability, and uses the Airbnb founders' story, professional photography instead of a purely scalable fix, to show how a human-centered decision can turn a struggling startup around.

This lecture describes the mindset needed to succeed with Design Thinking: staying curious, questioning assumptions instead of relying on presuppositions, and treating every idea as a hypothesis to test rather than a fixed truth. It introduces the five-step Design Thinking model, empathize, define, ideate, prototype and test, that structures the rest of the course, with a preview of concrete examples for each stage.

This lecture defines empathy in Design Thinking as understanding a user's challenges, frustrations and needs without judgment, with respect and curiosity. Using the example of a product manager interviewing a camera user about real usage scenarios, it shows how to gather insight without leading the conversation, and introduces techniques such as user interviews, surveys and working from a starting hypothesis when direct access to the target customer is limited.

This lecture walks through building an empathy map for a fictional persona, Jean Sportif, a gym member reluctant to buy supplements through a mobile app. It explains the four quadrants, says, does, thinks and feels, and how interviews, surveys or informed hypotheses feed each quadrant, giving product teams and UX designers a structured way to capture what an observable behavior reveals about deeper motivations and fears.

This practical exercise guides the learner through building a personal empathy map for their own ideal customer or user, filling in the four quadrants, says, does, thinks and feels, to structure raw research notes into a clear picture of that user's needs, frustrations and unspoken beliefs before moving into the definition phase of the Design Thinking process.

This lecture covers the definition phase of Design Thinking, where scattered empathy-map insights are grouped into clear themes and needs. It explains why needs should be framed as verbs rather than nouns, using Henry Ford's famous line about faster horses, so that the real opportunity stays open instead of being locked into one solution, and demonstrates how to cluster similar sticky notes into named categories such as complexity, price or security.

This lecture introduces user journey mapping, tracing every phase a customer goes through when interacting with a product, from product search to cart, payment and confirmation, and layering in what the user does, thinks and feels at each step. This technique helps product teams and UX designers pinpoint exactly where friction, confusion or anxiety appears during the experience.

This exercise asks the learner to build their own user journey map for their product or service, detailing what the user does, thinks and feels at every step of the interaction, in order to be as specific as possible when spotting friction points worth solving.

This lecture shows how to turn the pain points surfaced in the user journey into prioritized opportunities by grouping them into categories, such as security, clarity or lack of progress indicators, and rating each one on feasibility and importance. This simple scoring method helps product managers and teams decide where to focus limited time and resources first.

This lecture introduces the 'How might we...' framing technique, a phrase that reorients the team's brain toward solutions while keeping the challenge open rather than pre-deciding the answer. It shows how to turn each prioritized pain point into a How-might-we statement that will later fuel brainstorming and ideation sessions.

This exercise has the learner rate the challenges identified earlier by feasibility and importance, then write a 'How might we...' statement for each one, preparing focused, actionable prompts for the ideation phase that follows.

This lecture sets the ground rules for effective ideation: staying open-minded, suspending judgment, favoring quantity over quality at first, encouraging wild ideas, and making sure introverted voices are heard as much as extroverted ones. It previews the main idea-generation techniques covered next, mind mapping, brainstorming, storyboarding, the 'worst idea' technique, and asking end users directly for their suggestions.

This lecture details the rules of an effective brainstorming session: a small group of four to six people, a strict time limit, a clearly stated 'How might we' objective, and a sticky-note method where everyone writes ideas simultaneously instead of speaking one at a time. It also covers psychological safety, judgment-free idea sharing, and the role of a facilitator who keeps the group focused and gives space to quieter participants.

This lecture teaches the 6-3-5 brainwriting method, six participants each write three ideas in five rounds, building on each other's notes as sheets rotate around the table, generating up to 108 ideas in under an hour. It is presented as a fast, structured alternative to open brainstorming when a team needs a large volume of ideas quickly.

This lecture explains why teams build a low-cost prototype instead of developing a full product right away, saving time and money while gathering honest feedback before major investment. It covers simple prototyping options, from hand-drawn sketches to tools like Zeplin, and how to walk a test user through each screen or step to collect impressions early.

This resource lists online tools for building mobile app or website prototypes and mockups, including Mockflow, Balsamiq, Moqups, Figma, Wireframe.cc and Zeplin, useful for product managers, designers and developers who want to test a solution visually before development starts.

This lecture presents storyboarding, a technique borrowed from filmmaking, as a low-cost way to prototype a user's journey through a product using a sequence of simple drawings. It explains how to keep each frame focused on what truly matters, and how storyboards can be used to present a solution to a client, an executive committee or a technical team.

This exercise invites the learner to draw their own storyboard, by hand or using an online tool such as Storyboard That, to visualize their user's journey through the proposed product or service.

This lecture explains the Minimum Viable Product concept popularized by Eric Ries in The Lean Startup, launching a version with the smallest possible feature set to gather real market feedback, measure results and iterate rather than spending months building a full product with no validation. It also covers pivoting, illustrated with Instagram's shift from a location check-in app to a photo-filter app, and how Lean Startup thinking parallels the Design Thinking cycle.

This lecture teaches the MoSCoW prioritization method, Must have, Should have, Could have, Won't have, to help product owners and teams rank features and backlog items when resources are limited. It explains how to run a prioritization workshop with stakeholders and how this technique connects to Agile and Scrum backlog management.

This lecture introduces the testing phase of Design Thinking, where prototypes are put in front of real users under realistic conditions to confirm or reject earlier hypotheses about pain points such as security, clarity or ease of use. It reinforces that Design Thinking is iterative: each test cycle produces information that feeds the next round of empathy, definition and ideation.

This lecture gives a structured method for running usability tests: planning scenarios in advance, defining objective and subjective success criteria, and using a four-quadrant observation sheet, what worked, what to improve, questions raised, and new ideas, to capture results. It emphasizes the think-aloud approach, asking users to describe what they see, think and feel as they interact with the prototype, without becoming attached to your own solution.

This exercise walks the learner through preparing and running their own usability test sessions, using one observation sheet per participant and scenario, taking notes and optionally filming the session for later review.

This lecture explains A/B testing as a way to compare two variations of a product feature, such as button color or image size, on a random sample of users and measure which version drives better conversion. It shows how A/B testing can run alongside prototype testing to validate design decisions with real data rather than opinion.

This lecture presents the Sailboat Retrospective, an Agile team ritual adapted to Design Thinking, where the team maps its progress as a boat sailing toward an island, the goal, pushed by favorable winds, the things that are working, slowed by anchors, the blockers, and threatened by rocks, the risks. It explains how to run this visual retrospective as a structured, inclusive way for every team member to surface what to keep, fix or watch out for.