From the course: Design Thinking: Testing and Refining

Introduction to test and refine

From the course: Design Thinking: Testing and Refining

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Introduction to test and refine

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- The testing and refinement phases of design thinking are important turning points where you challenge your ideas and create the opportunities to make them better. This can create cycles of testing something, learning what works and does not, and then refining it in order to again test learn and refine. That cycle looks like this as you build up a foundation of customer and business needs. Followed by a hypothesis, something you feel strongly may provide a solution. Then, you cycle through trying it out, learning how it performs using the observations, to refine, and then repeating the cycle. For testing, you have a variety of methods at your disposal. Some are really great at learning how your customers feel, while others are fantastic at uncovering how they behave. We call methods used to learn how customers feel, attitudinal. This could be learning how they feel overall about our brand or company, all the way down to how they feel about a particular feature in our product. When we need to learn how our customers use, want to use, complete a task, or reach a goal, we call those testing methods, behavioral. Within this matrix, you also have two other groups. Some of these methods are really good at discovering a whole new way to help your customers. While the other side is fantastic at optimizing existing experiences to dial in the performance of your product to the needs of the people who are your customers. We call these innovation and optimization. The testing phase within design thinking involves generating user feedback as related to the prototypes you have developed, as well as gaining a deeper understanding of your users. The refinement phase is a powerful tool to revisit and reassess your ideas. These two phases work together in succession to test and refine your solutions.

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