7 Week Human Centered Design Challenge
Ideo and +Acumen rallied designers from around the world to apply human centered design thinking to help people with disabilities overcome barriers to being hired.
For this project I collaborated with two London UX professionals I’d not met before. We established a cadence for meeting remotely twice weekly juggling time zones, our other jobs and family responsibilities. Together we dig into the problem space adhering to a clearly defined human centered design process from Ideo.
My Role: Generative User Research, UX Design
Team: Kerri-Ellen Casey, Kay Tank
Time: 7 weeks
Result: A web-app designed to dispel myths and connect hiring managers to qualified applicants with disabilities.
Week 01
Desiring to scope our problem space, we agree to define “disabilities” as persons who have learning disabilities aka cognitive disabilities.
Through secondary research and interviewing subject matter experts we have ‘Ahah!’ moments:
Week 02
For primary research we focus on acquiring a much more detailed and nuanced understanding of the people directly involved with employment for persons with learning disabilities. And we want to hear from persons living with disabilities, their stories and first hand accounts of their experiences seeking employment.
1:1 interviews
I identify the various participants we must include to inform a well-rounded picture of the problem space
I divide-up the interviewing process between teammates, based on each researchers access to qualified participants.
Week 03
Synthesis: We’ve conducted eight interviews between us and meet to report the data we’ve collected. Each team member ‘calls-out’ the most interesting disclosures and quotes on post-its pinned to our shared virtual workspace and describes how and why the data is meaningful.
Week 04
Synthesis: Together we think through our data, categories emerge and through affinity mapping, we surface recurring themes.
Confident we have crystallized key issues to address, we focus on articulating goals for a designed intervention.
Our discovery process revealed there are many more people with learning disabilities ready to enter the work force than employers willing to hire them. This lays the ground work for our “big idea”!
Week 05
Week 06
Sketching. Thinking. Sketching.
Use Case Storyboard
Week 07
Chasing the final deadline for the worldwide challenge, we rapidly design independently then come together to share our ideas and achieve consensus on wireframe design, top level content, visual design. We break-out to complete specific tasks required to finalize our MVP design and Process Presentation for handing off to Ideo | +Acumen.
Next steps
Gather design requirements for all of the use cases, map correlating task flows
Develop a comprehensive site map
Design comprehensive wireframes and high fidelity prototype
Evaluate design with user testing
Reflection
I’m impressed with the validity of what my teammates and I accomplished given time constraints and the impact of differing time zones.
I undertook this project AFTER applying to the Masters of Human Centered Design degree program at the University of Washington and BEFORE I was admitted. I loved the human centered process and team collaboration so much that my desire to own Experience Design role sky-rocketed, making it unbearable while waiting to find out whether I was admitted to UW. I was.
I received my Masters of Human Centered Design and Engineering degree January 2020.