Design Thinking Concepts Quiz

Design Thinking

• Design thinking is a methodology for building projects from start to finish.
• It is a human-centered, non-linear, and iterative process.
• Designers and others use it to understand users, challenge assumptions, redefine problems, and create innovative solutions.

Design Thinking - Key Concepts

• Human-centered: Focuses on understanding and meeting human needs.
• Non-linear: Steps don't always follow a strict sequence; designers can revisit steps.
• Iterative: The process repeats and refines solutions based on testing and feedback.
• Integrative approach: Balances human needs, technical feasibility, and economic viability for broader challenges.
• Context of Design: Drawing on historical figures (examples Brunel) to understand and solve complex design problems.
• Human-Centered Design: Prioritizes human needs, cultural understanding, and context; applying it to global challenges.
• Prototyping for Innovation: Uses rapid prototyping to quickly refine ideas and test solutions.

Tim Brown Ted Talk

• The speech emphasizes human-centered design and systemic problem-solving over superficial product improvements.
• Design thinking is a method to create more impactful innovations by focusing on improving the usability and accessibility of user-friendly products.

Design Thinking in a Nutshell

• It combines desirability, feasibility and viability
• Allows people not trained in design to use creative tools to solve challenges.
• A detailed methodology for solving complex problems.

Main Stages of Design Thinking

• Inspiration: Generating initial ideas and brainstorming possible solutions.
• Ideation: Selecting the most feasible ideas and refining the solutions.
• Implementation: Putting the chosen solutions into practice.

Design Thinking Process

• Empathize: Understanding the user's perspectives, needs, and motivations.
• Define: Clearly defining the problem that needs to be solved.
• Ideate: Brainstorming multiple possible solutions.
• Prototype: Creating a tangible representation of a solution to test its feasibility.
• Test: Testing the prototype and gathering feedback from users to refine the design.

Web Design

• Web design: A process of conceptualising, planning and creating the visual layout and functionality of websites.

• Disciplines: Includes graphic design, UI/UX design and coding.

• Key Elements:

  • Visual elements: Layout, color, fonts, logos, images, videos, icons, shapes and user psychology.
  • Functional elements: Navigation, information architecture, user interaction, speed, responsiveness, usability and accessibility.

Web Design Evolution

• Responsive Design: Adapting website layouts to different screen sizes (phones, tablets, desktops) for a seamless user experience.
• System-Centered vs User-Centered: A system-centric approach focuses on the technical aspect of the system while a user-centered design centers around user needs.

User-Centered Design

• UCD: An iterative process focusing on user needs and testing during design iterations.
• Characteristics: Empathy, usability testing, iterative process, accessibility, and personalization.
• Steps: Understand the problem, specify user needs, design solutions, evaluate the solutions.

User Psychology

• User behaviors and insights: Understand how users navigate and process information in web design.
• Emotional impact: Use color and design elements to create the right emotions or sensations in the user.
• Decision making: Applying principles like reciprocity and fear of missing out to increase user engagement and encourage interaction.
• Eyetracking studies: Monitor where and how long users look at different parts of a webpage, revealing their pattern of visual navigation.

Color Psychology

• Colors evoke emotions, influence user behavior, and are crucial for user experience.
• Each color has an associated emotional impact (e.g., red = passion, blue = trust).
• Cultural significance of colors varies across cultures.

Color Pairing Types

• Monochromatic: Using different shades of the same color.
• Complementary: Using colors opposite each other on the color wheel.
• Analogous: Using colors adjacent to each other on the color wheel.
• Split-complementary: Using a color and the two colors adjacent to its opposite.
• Triadic: Using colors equally spaced around the color wheel.
• Tetradic (or Double Complementary): Using two pairs of colors that are opposite each other on the color wheel.

Visual Hierarchy

• Visual hierarchy is a principle for guiding user attention by using size, color, and positioning to communicate the importance of website elements.

Typography

• Typography is essential for readability and creating visual hierarchy.
• A proper combination of fonts enhances the appearance and readability of web content.

60/30/10 Rule

• A guideline in design for creating visual clarity and emphasis by dividing the color palette into proportions for different elements. (60% for dominant color, 30% for secondary color and 10% for accents).

Data Storytelling

• Fundamentals: Transforming complex data into accessible narratives.
• Application: Simplifying data, enhancing memorability, and influencing audiences effectively.
• Elements: Narrative, visualization, and data (supporting the story).

Web Design Steps

• Research: Understanding users, competitors, goals.
• Wireframing: Creating a simplified structure.
• Design: Developing the look and feel.
• Development: Building the website.
• Testing: Ensuring functionality and usability.
• Launch: Making the website live.
• Maintenance: Keeping the website updated.

Key concepts in WordPress

• Theme: Pre-designed templates for a website’s appearance.
• Plugins: Extensions for adding features and functionalities.
• Pages: Static content like 'About Us' or 'Contact'.
• Posts: Dynamic content (e.g., blog posts) usually displayed chronologically.
• Dashboard: The WordPress control panel.
• Page Builder: Tools that allow customization of website layouts without coding.

Machine Learning

• Supervised Learning: Models are trained on labeled data, predicting outcomes for new, unseen data based on learned patterns.
• Unsupervised Learning: Models identify patterns and structures in unlabeled data without explicit guidance.
• Reinforcement Learning: Models learn to make decisions in an environment by interacting with it and receiving rewards or penalties for their actions.

Additional Concepts

• Deployment: Deploying a model to make predictions on new, unseen data.
• Data Preprocessing: Cleaning and transforming data before use in machine learning.
• Feature Selection: Choosing the most relevant features for a supervised model to maximize performance.
• Model Evaluation: Assessing the performance of a machine learning model using metrics like precision, recall, F1 score.
• Overfitting: A model that performs well on training data but poorly on unseen data.
• Underfitting: A model that fails to capture the underlying patterns in the training data.

Network Science

• A network is a collection of nodes and links (connections); nodes represent entities (e.g., people, cities, organizations).
• Links (edges) represent relations (e.g., friendships, transactions, relationships).
• Density: A measure of the interconnectedness of a network.
• Centrality: Measures the importance of nodes in a network (e.g., closeness centrality, betweenness centrality).
• Motifs: (meso-scale) Recurrent interaction patterns in networks.
• Communities: Tightly connected clusters or groups of nodes (often found in social or biological networks).
• Directed Networks: Networks with one-way connections (vs. undirected networks).
• Weighted Networks: Networks where links have associated values (e.g., relationship strength).

Recommendation Systems

• Collaborative Filtering: Recommending items based on the preferences of similar users.
• Content-Based Filtering: Recommending items similar to those a user has liked previously.

Blockchain

• Blockchain Technology: A distributed, immutable ledger recording transactions across many computers.
• Cryptocurrencies: Digital money like Bitcoin and Ethereum.
• Decentralization: Removes the need for a central authority, for instance, the banks or credit card companies.
• Immutability: Ensures data integrity and prevents tampering.
• Transparency: Allows all participants to see the transactional history.

Test your knowledge on the core concepts of design thinking! This quiz covers various phases, pillars, and key benefits associated with the design thinking process. Dive in to understand the nuances that make design thinking effective in problem-solving.