MethodBee: A Zeta Design initiative transforming the way we design
Learning design methods the fun way
Plenty of new products are introduced onto the market every day, but a vast majority of them fail. The failure is not always a monumental shortcoming; it can be as subtle as a minor inconvenience in using it. One of the most important aspects of a successful product is to ensure a great customer experience. And a good design team can work effectively to achieve this. They can make the product easier to understand and use. If the design team can contribute to making the product successful, they can also deserve a place among the leaders. You must be familiar with the popular debate on — if Design should have a seat at the leadership table. Well, who doesn’t want to contribute to the responsibilities of creating something useful and great? We believe that the design team should be carrying equal weight on strategy and decision making along with the product, engineering, and business executives.
Design thinking is necessary at every stage of development.
But getting a seat at the table is just not enough; it comes with daunting challenges. And one of the significant challenges of the design team is to facilitate design thinking at all levels. Since all the teams work in their respective environments with their specialized skill set, sometimes it might be difficult to take a step back and look at the bigger picture. The design team helps to make them cognizant of how a product fits together end-to-end using design thinking.
Big changes come out of a bottom-up approach. In such approaches, discrete ideas and energy are organized and channelized into a collaborative effort from the whole team. Considering this benefit, we wanted to weave design thinking into our problem-solving process. This will not only help our teams to ensure a flawless understanding of our products but also help identify issues at every level and tackle them. This will enable us to see past the boundaries of our domain-specific knowledge and come up with innovative solutions.
Design Thinking is an iterative process where we attempt to understand the user, challenge assumptions, and redefine problems in an attempt to identify alternative strategies and solutions that might not be apparent with our initial level of understanding. In order to attempt this, we have numerous methods and practices in store that can guide us to conquer the different stages of problem-solving. These design methods pave the way for structured thinking that allows us to dissect, understand, ideate, and innovate better.
Introducing MethodBee
MethodBee is an educational initiative from the Zeta Design team that aims at introducing various design methods and practices to our designers and product teams. Workshops are conducted every month to highlight the design methods individually. This will help them to be aware of and use these methods while building the products and solving design challenges. With more such tools inside the design kit, we can pick the right one that can help give us the best outcome.
This initiative is inspired by Towards an Activity-Oriented Design method for HCI research and practice(2002) by Daisy Mwanza, a recognized framework for enhancing design practices. It is an analytical and practical approach for applying the key concepts of human-computer interaction research and problem-solving practices.
But, how exactly will it help designers?
MethodBee will help us in sharing better perspectives on everyday design problems. Moreover, as the design methods have a specific framework, it makes collaboration on fuzzy problems easier.
Now, let’s dig deep into the benefits of MethodBee.
- Provides an opportunity to look at a problem or solution from multiple lenses.
Every problem-solver comes with a unique blend of skills, ideas, and creativity. Their approaches can be significantly different than yours, yet they would still contribute to a potential solution. And hence, it is important to consider all the ideas before finalizing one. MethodBee helps bring all the contributors in one place and provides them a platform to ideate and bring the best of all ideas. - Aligns all the stakeholders on the challenges.
Design is a collaborative process. It requires inputs from stakeholders of different teams and units to reach a common goal. Design methods influence us intensely in contributing ideas and opinions. It enables them to gather the best feedback, and address pushback sooner rather than later. It helps to instill a sense of democracy within the creative process and assures them that their voices matter. This ultimately prevents them from becoming disillusioned with a project. And when everyone is aligned, it becomes easy to achieve unanimous stakeholder buy-in. - Provides a systematic approach to handle complex problems.
One of the most efficient ways to solving a complex problem is divide-and-conquer i.e. breaking it down into smaller clusters. It is then easy to focus and address the decomposed bits and thus contribute to the whole. Design methods provide step-by-step techniques to identify, understand, and solve smaller, manageable problems. - Helps focus deeper into the problem.
The primary role of the design methods is to develop a profound and practical understanding of the design process. It further presses upon how this process can be modified, made more effective and transparent, and be managed to achieve sustainable design outcomes. - Helps minimize the errors and design iterations, and provides clarity.
Design methods help keep design iterations to a minimum. Of course, it is natural to commit mistakes while designing a solution for a problem, but relevant design methods can assist us to recognize errors in our designs and provide us with the tools to rectify them. The sooner we recognize the errors, the easier it is to rectify them. Along with this, the design methods prove to be extremely useful in tackling fuzzy problems by reframing them in human-centric ways. - Brings change and helps the organization evolve.
Adopting design methods in building products can bring a massive change to the organization. It provides a platform to the stakeholders for better communication of ideas and solutions. The more we question assumptions and challenge predefined solutions, the better we understand and build our products.
How do we do it?
While collaborating on building a product, designers are expected to follow and deliver the product requirements. But we believe that the function of designers is not just restricted to shipping products. They help bring visibility and structure to the product. They produce a host of ideas, use different techniques and methods, and refine them to achieve the best possible solution.
By introducing MethodBee, we envision bringing both the design and product team together and introducing various design methods that are engaging in nature. This will not only aid in setting the right context and obtaining alignment across the whole team but will also help achieve a consensus on the approach to various product solutions. We have taken inspiration from various instructional design models to facilitate a cohesive learning experience for the MethodBee workshops. In every workshop, we start with a fun ice breaker, followed by the information on a particular design method, and finally end it with an engaging and informative activity to enhance the learning.
Here’s a general framework of the MethodBee presentations:
Starting May 2021, we initiated sessions under MethodBee with the hope of amplifying our learnings and benefit from the design methods. We conduct these sessions every month wherein we pick and discuss a particular design method or technique. Since we believe that sharing is caring, we will be sharing our learnings with you in the upcoming articles. So, till then..stay tuned. We hope that through reading these articles, you can add more design methods to your toolkit as well. 😊
A huge shout out to Preethi Shreeya, Nupur vats, and Roopal Kumar for being the important pillars of this initiative; Ramakrishna V, Kshitij Pandey, and Lavanya Gopalaswamy for constant support and feedback for this blog; and Aakansha Menon for the superb illustrations.
