This article is originally drafted by amazing Gulsah Koc, a bright UX designer from Berlin.
Recently, I had the opportunity to participate in one of the workshops of Behrad Mirafshar at Bonanza Design. I’ve been to other design thinking workshops but this was a hell of a journey.
It started with the definition of design thinking and Bonanza Design’s perspective on this topic. Offering the missing information and explaining every detail with examples allow us to be on the same page and help us to get our definitions right.
It was my first full day remote design thinking workshop and my first experience with Mural. Being able to collaborate through a digital platform, share ideas, put notes actually made everything easier than I anticipated.
Design thinking process in its core contains a lot of collaborative work. That’s why I love participating in these workshops because sometimes when I’m focusing on a subject, I tend to get stuck with one of the ideas.
But with collaborative work like a workshop or as Behrad calls it work-day, it allows me to stretch the muscles on my brain and be more creative in so many ways. Especially talking about the major forces of market validation such as cultural trends, technology, or competitive prices.
Having a cool idea is a thing but making sure that it is successful is a whole other topic. Adding the market validation to the design thinking process and closing it up with the design sprint widen my perception of the UX process.
The project of the workshop was how we might increase the adoption rate of sustainable fashion amongst normal consumers.
It started with us writing down the problems we can come up with and then sorting them according to our point of view (p.o.v.).
The point of view is an interesting concept and the missing link in most of the design thinking processes available on the internet.
The workshop is designed in a way that you cannot lose sight of the customers. It’s a design thinking workshop after all. At every given step, we have to first think through the lens of the customers.
Collecting problems and voting on them led us to the persona phase. In this phase, we all worked individually to create a lot of personas. Maybe we created too many personas but it’s fine.
In the end, with voting again and high/low pain mapping, we end up with two out of twelve. Working with those personas, we zoom in on each of these personas — e.g. an indie vegan mom — and the problems they face.
Going really deep on the persona and how she’s actually experiencing the problem helped us get into her shoes and strengthen our empathy muscles.
The most fun for me was further questions. I don’t know why but I love questions. When I got deep in coming up with questions, I realized all the other amazing questions from other participants.
In my daily life, I’m a sustainable fashion researcher so all these questions were really helpful for my personal sustainable journey, too.
This process followed up by separating the questions and going wild and feasible with our solutions. Having this contrast in the process was amazing because I get to understand the feasible solutions better.
In summary, this workshop had so many unique opportunities for a junior UX designer like me. Thinking things in reverse or getting one on one feedback on my ideas and detailed answers to my questions actually helped me to feel more secure about my knowledge.
Asking questions is not always easy but when it’s appreciated is a really fast and internalized way to absorb the information. Thank you Behrad for the workshop!
Want to join Bonanza Design’s workshops, check and register here:
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