On Friday last it was my turn to organise the activity for our Meld Friday Sessions.
I’ve been doing some prep. for a new service design project and at the same time I’ve been reviewing my year of being a Meldster. After this review I decided I’d like to learn new design research methods as a way to keep my skills fresh. Getting the Meldsters’ help in this seemed a good thing (9 heads are better than 1).
For the activity we first divided into three groups. Each group was given a pile of 20 design research method cards (on stickies). In our groups we had to place each of the design methods into a job category. These categories cover some of the types of projects Meld is working on at the moment: Long-term strategy; Understanding users; Designing a new product or service; or Generating requirements.
We’ve now got a wall of 60 design methods aligned to different types of work. I hope that we can build on this. My intention is that the methodology wall will provide us all with the inspiration to use different processes during our research. I would hate to think that we’d ever get stale.
Here’s Niina and the methodology wall:
I’d like to thank the following sites, posts, people and books for help in collecting the 60 methods:
- Chauncy Wilson of Autodesk and Johnny Holland for the publication of Autodesk’s 100 UX Design & Evaluation Methods
- Jon Kolko’s book Exposing the Magic of Design: A practitioner’s guide to the methods and theory of synthesis
- Usability Methods from Foraker Labs
- Service Design Tools from Roberta Tassi’s thesis work
- IDEO’s Method Cards