wingwmn

spreading my wings and sharing random lessons learned along the way

Design

Observations on making beautiful and relevant things

The Life Changing Magic of Chasing the F*#ks

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“You are so inspiring. I want to be like you.”

“Yegads, please. Set your sights higher,” I advised.

“No really. I thought I was being stupid and irresponsible for doing this course at 29, but you showed me you can do anything at any age.”

“Grrrr.”

“I mean, look,” he said as he pointed to the massive hall teeming with our fellow design graduates and their guests. “You took this course and goofed around with these kids. I think it’s so cool that you don’t give a fck.”

Very sweet. But also very mistaken.

Truth is, I do give a fck. Many of them. Including about this course. I wouldn’t be my mother’s daughter if I pranced around life like a carefree gazelle. Instead, I plod around mulling over risks, assessing the chances of colossal embarrassment or failure. But the somewhat ‘unusual’ behavior I suspect my classmate was trying to point out is — like a moth to a flame, I am DRAWN to these challenges. If there is a chance for me to be in over my head, I am on it like white on rice. Call it a penchant for finding unpleasantness and diving in head first.

The more unpleasant, the greater the motivation for me to jump in. Many lifetimes ago, I was invited to be a substitute English teacher for 4 months in an all boys catholic high school. (Note: All Boys. Catholic. High School.) I had been out of university for just about a year, so the students would barely be younger than I was. When I came in to interview for the position, I was given friendly tips on how to survive the term:

  • Don’t smile for the first week. You must not show softness or they boys will walk all over you;
  • Dress code – ensure that chest, knees and elbows are covered at all times;
  • Keep the boys in front of you always. You’ll never know what they’re up to (or peering down into) when they’re standing behind you;
  • Be aware of random mirrors lying face up on the floor, particularly if you’re in a skirt. . . the list went on.

As if to confirm the warnings, while I was being given the campus tour, a few boys flung themselves against the metal grills separating us while heaving monkey noises.

I shook all the way home that day. I was acutely terrified of the opportunity, and my brain begged me to beg off. But because I was petrified, I called and accepted the job. And I threw up everyday that week.

Much has been said about the economic value of facing challenges. Like building muscle, conquering challenges helps one grow and adapt. It prepares one to learn HOW to learn new skills in an ever-changing economic environment where, by 2025, an estimated 75% of the workforce will consist of freelancers and entrepreneurs.  Bla bla.

Sure, that’s all well and good.

But the reason I nosedive into discomfort is far less strategic. I do it simply for that incredible sensation of liberation — that childhood feeling that accompanies fiiiinally jumping off the high diving board. For me, there is an almost palpable feeling of expansion when you break through the confines that fear traps you in.

When you become a discomfort-chaser, the small fcks (like solo dining) become easy hurdles and the bigger fcks (like taking a design class with ZERO design experience alongside insanely talented kids half your age) become familiar territory to navigate. Then life becomes a string of exhilarating experiments and adventures. Sure, you may find yourself embarrassed once in a while. Or you just may find yourself randomly taking a design class in London, or teaching a group of the sweetest boys, having the absolutelyfckingtastic time of your life.

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Neither here nor there, but if you’re interested in checking out what I’ve been up to in the said design class, check out anipayumo.com

As usual, I would absolutely love to hear your thoughts in the comments section below.

The Design Chronicles #5: Deep Thoughts

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This course has taken over my life, so this is all I can muster up for now.

Packaging Deep Thoughts

(Backstory:  we recently had a brief where I was to design boutique packaging for 2 wooden clothes pegs.  My market was metrosexual outdoor enthusiasts.  (Yes, random.)  We were allowed to go wild on the story.  These were the thoughts that ran through my head the whole time.)

(Disclaimer: Not too proud of my product.  But proud of my thoughts.)

The Design Chronicles #4: The Voice

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This design course is my current battle field. Each day, I am forced to bleed out yet another new idea from a fully-drained idea bank. I shatter nerves and pull muscle frantically diving towards end-of-day deadlines. I wrestle with new and strange software. I grapple with a pencil to produce barely coherent sketches; choke my brain with designer trivia; wring out reports; swipe material for my visual diary; investigate personas; draft plans on brand ideas: duck from ugly subway posters, and combat the urge to analyze the layout of every book I read.

All that is the easy bit. The biggest battle I wage is with the endless chatter of my ego. From the moment I set foot in the classroom to the walk back home, this ego is my crazy-man-on-the-subway whom I have been trying to ignore and struggling to subdue.

Humility, or the absence of ego, is like a muscle that needs to be trained.  Subjecting the muscle to effortful activity strengthens it.  To remove ego, Ryan Holiday suggests “put(ting) yourself in rooms where you’re the least knowledgeable person. That uncomfortable feeling, that defensiveness that you feel when your most deeply held assumptions are challenged—what about subjecting yourself to it deliberately?”  I confirm.  With this course, my efforts to remove ego is in Iron Man mode.

You see, ego is our own personal marketing strategist. Its aim is to construct a formidable story of ourselves to sell to others, to establish our “market position”. To do this, our ego picks what it believes are our unique selling points and exploits it. And it panics when this neat little marketing story is threatened. It babbles, it chatters, it blubbers.

You can imagine the hysterics mine was in since I started the course. “Double-u. Tee. Eff,” it whined. “Mediocrity is NOT a good story to sell.” And everyday, it slithers in and tries to lure me away. “Why work so hard?  You could be back in NY.  Or on vacation.  How about you call in sick and hie off to Paris for the rest of the term?” While I get design advice from a classmate, its unproductive voice interjects, “She was born while you were on your way to prom. What does she know?” It attempts to convince me that getting feedback is unnecessary. And it flashes neon signs above friends who are rising the corporate ladder, “See what you’re missing?”

Ego is the old-fashioned supervisor that stifles us.  It keeps us from exploring and pushing ourselves. From learning new skills. From showing our amateur work.  It denies us self-improvement and keeps us wedged in the flimsy, pretty packaging it has made for us. And so if we have the earnest desire to learn something new, we should be prepared to put in the hard work, buckle down and wage the daily war against this crazy chatter.

 

The Design Chronicles #3: It’s You, Not Me

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The other week, our class was split into groups. Each group was tasked to create a brand concept around a product that would target a specific demographic. The demographic we were given was Circus Performers.  The product was Bottled Water.

The group’s initial instinct was to create a brand of water that was stereotypically circus-y. That is, over-the-top colorful, with big and bold circus typeface, and maybe some hoops and lions for good measure. Something really creative like that (ha!). But of course, that wasn’t the point of the assignment. The objective was to understand user-centered design. What would happen if we really thought about our consumer. Thought about who he is; what he likes to do; what he likes to eat; what his hobbies are; how he grew up; what he carries in his bag . . . basically, get to know him more than we knew ourselves. In real life, designers would conduct user research to get this information. But since this was classroom make-believe, we coughed up a profile of our typical circus performers:

Marcel, a circus clown.  45 years old, English with a French mother, lives alone in a sparsely furnished flat, and is really depressed inside. He frequents the same bars and cafes where people know him, but are wary of his acerbic side comments. He reads French philosophers, and dreams of writing a book someday.
Kataryna, an acrobat.  26-years old, Eastern European, and married to her co-performer. She has quirky hobbies like trainspotting and collecting snow globes. She wants to retire from circus life, have 3 kids and put up a coffee shop, but her husband wants to keep traveling with the circus.

By drawing out these profiles and gleaning insights, it created the momentum for approaching brand conceptualization in a different way. We realized that circus performers want nothing to do with the pretense of a circus when they are off-duty. Instead, they want honesty and simplicity from everything and everyone. No fake, no overselling, no over the top.  They are also quirky but intelligent individuals.

Honesty, simplicity, wit. We used these as our hooks. Every other bottled water company sells water as fresher, clearer, smarter, more magical than the next. In reality, however, it’s just water. But still a necessity.  And we were going to sell it as that.  Given this, our brand idea would be: Being honest about water. Our brand’s tone of voice:  matter-of-fact, straight to the point, clever and a little arrogant (“Whatever.  You need me.”). And our brand: BUT STILL.

The clean simply-designed label would say “Nothing special. But still.”

The labels would vary in accordance to where they were being sold.  For example,

In a bakery: “Nothing sweet. But still.”
In a bar: “Nothing sexy. But still.”
In a coffee shop: “Nothing caffeinated. But still.”
In a card shop on Valentine’s Day: “Nothing romantic. But still.”

Tag line: “Still water. Still nothing special”.

We patted ourselves on the back for the cleverness of our idea (while some of our classmates scratched their heads in confusion). But more importantly, we marveled at how far we had come from our initial concept.

Oh, the things that happen when you put yourself in others’ shoes.

What do you think of the concept? Cool? Too clever for our own good? Don’t get it? Let me know!

The Design Chronicles #2: Mood Board Awakenings

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This week, we were introduced to the mood board. Many mood boards. After receiving a client brief and before doing anything — putting pencil to paper, conjuring up color palettes, or even panicking — we were required to create mood boards. This, we learned, should kickoff every design process.

The low down on a mood board: it is a collection of images that evoke the mood or personality of a brand. It is used to get the designer and the client on the same page.  Words can only do so much (one man’s “classic” might be another man’s “boring”), and being able to visualize the design in the same way is key. For a designer, it is also an aid in the development of a design. From the images, a designer takes inspiration for color, typography, layout, etc. For this amateur designer, they were my saviors in getting the creative juices flowing. Photos of a volcano, shattered glass, and an indian scarf inspired my brochure for a coding school. Wool scarves, a camp fire, and a woman in lingerie curled up in a field of hay inspired the color palette for an ice cream ad. Naturally.

This mood boarding process brought some liberating realizations:

That beautiful design is always the child of a banal process. I used to think that a clever logo or gorgeous film poster popped up in the designer’s mind fully formed; that design was the realm only for the “recognized creatives”.  Not the case. Designers are ultimately designing for their clients, and so the finished product has to be born out of the visual guidelines established with them. Designers, then, are necessarily inspired by the mood boarding process (or their equivalent per designer). Not by the elusive creative genius.

That nothing is truly original. Every beautiful design (and I will hazard to say, every work of art) has been inspired by something.  Consciously or subconsciously, a creator is influenced by all that she has experienced — art, nature, films, interiors, food, music, books, travels, history, a bad day. Even the Mona Lisa was inspired by someone.

“There is nothing new under the sun.  Not even Manet.” – Jules Breton

“Originality is way overrated. To make, you need to take. All artists do.” – Darby Barnnard

BUT, That filtering inspiration through the prism of the unique individual produces truly unique work. Every person has a singular story; each of us is the confluence of our days. And as objective and clinical as she may try to be, a designer’s history and influences always stand between the mood board and the final product.  It is remarkable that in class of 47, there are 47 unique creations for the exact same brief — each a little nod to the kaleidoscope of a person behind the design.

Aaaaall this to say, creativity is not reserved for the select few.  It is accessible to anybody with the willingness to put in the work, an eye open to inspiration, and the courage to reveal a little of themselves.

The Design Chronicles #1: Into the Wild

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I’ve hurled myself headfirst into one of the most ridiculous situations I’ve ever been in. I am now attending a 3-month, intensive, full-time Visual Design course. I knew it was going to be a big shift for me, but I wasn’t expecting it to approach the levels of preposterous.

On Day 1, it became very apparent that I was THE throbbing sore thumb of the class. Out of a class of 47, I am one of the few who’s had almost 2 decades of work experience. Most of my classmates have barely had 2 decades of LIFE! More saliently, I am the solitary left brain among a sea of rights. My classmates are all vibrant creatives — furniture makers, fine arts graduates, UX designers, DJs, art directors, architects. I’m the sensible financier. They think in shapes and colors; I spout out numbers (and some words). They Photoshop; I Excel.

A Quick Share of Week 1 

Designers are tasked to solve vague client problems. Such as “I want a classic logo”. Ummm… what does that mean? How does one define ‘classic’? Is it Apple classic? Or Kellogg’s cereal classic? The client is likely going to be uncertain on how to answer that himself.  It is the job of the designer to determine that.

Solving such obscure problems is much like finding our way out of a dark forest. We take small incremental steps forward and feel our way through. We discover.  In design, this is called Prototyping and Testing.

Prototyping. In this phase, the designer roughly sketches out various options (key word being rough). In class, we are normally given 20 minutes to produce 20 sketches. “Don’t be too precious,” they remind us when we focus too much on one particular design.  The key is to quickly come up with a variety of solutions to test.

Testing. The designer then chooses 3 best designs and solicits feedback on them. The client points out the elements that are or aren’t working for him. The designer goes back and refines her idea, then seeks more feedback.

This process of sketching and feedback is incremental and iterative until an optimal solution is found.

Designing our Lives

This design process can be applied to any problem that has no clear answer, or that has a multitude of possible answers. The guys at Stanford’s Life Design Lab teach how to apply the principles when we hit upon the quintessential question, “What do I do with my life now?”  This question is the proverbial dark forest.  As prescribed, we take small steps and feel; prototype and test.  So, for example, if I think I might want to open up a restaurant, I shouldn’t go full-throttle into establishing one immediately. That would be “too precious” – too much investment of time and money on something I am not sure is right for me. I might end up hating it, but will be in too deep to have the flexibility to backtrack.  So I dip my toe in by perhaps first working in a restaurant, or talking to restaurant owners, or doing weekend catering.  And I reflect and consider before I dive.

This design course is my weekend catering. It’s a prototype of my long-standing unexplored interest in visual design. It is short and rough. I don’t yet know where this will take me. So far, I’ve had my ego crushed and my mind expanded.  It is a lot of hard work and yet I’m having the time of my life. So the jury is still out on what happens from here. I may realize that I may not have the skill nor the interest to ever decipher Helvetica Neue from Gotham fonts. Or, I may realize that I do, in fact, have a hibernating baby bear of a right brain.  I will discover soon enough.  After all, that is the point of this spectacular absurdity.

Creating Good Content

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Statistics are all over the place about how much content is being produced on a regular basis. WordPress says that about 45 million new posts are being published each month on its platform alone. Not to mention the gazillions of posts being published each day on Facebook, Instagram, etc. Then, you have the various platforms like Medium and Quora with their own universe of bloggers. Then you’ve got the news sites, and youtube, and the growing galaxy of podcasts, and . . . well, you get the point. There is a LOT. OF. STUFF. out there. There is so much content being produced on a daily basis, that apparently (and unfortunately), the average person engages with just 2% of the posts he/she reads.

If you are a producer of content, how do you cut through all that noise to get your voice heard? How do you get your message across?

I sat in on a lecture given by Hassan Ali, Creative Director of the Onion. He discussed how one can build “Hella Good Content”. I thought I’d share some of my notes:

First, what is good content?

Good content is content that:

  • stands out in the noise
  • resonates with your audience
  • results in audience engagement (like commenting or sharing)
  • gets new followers

Type of content

There are multiple types of content you can create to get the same message across — from a blog post, an Instagram or Facebook post, a podcast, an infographic, an interview, and so on. Certain platforms and certain content forms lend themselves better to the specific message you want to get across. For example, if you are launching a campaign to quit smoking and want to relay smmoking statistics to your audience, creating bite-sized infographics with visual charts that is easily digestible and can be easily shared might be more effective than writing a blog post featuring lots of data and numbers.

How does one stand out?

To stand out, one must first be seen. With the massive amounts of content available, your content has to have what Ali calls, “thumb-stopping power” — one that will stop your targeted audience mid-scroll. That thumb-stopping power can come in the form of a great visual, strong concept or an engaging headline.

Certain formulaic headlines or formats have shown to be effective in pique-ing interest. These include:

  • “How to. . .”
  • “Tips for . . .”
  • “10 Things I learned. . .”
  • “Explaining . . . “

Traits of Good Content

The three golden traits of good content to strive for are:

  1. Usefulness — what is in it for the reader? will this make the reader’s life easier? better? more inspired?
  2. Relatability – is what you are saying relevant to people’s lives? Will your message click with people, i.e., will this make your readers say, “this is so true?”
  3. Entertainment — Will people find this amusing? funny? emotional? Will this move them in some way?

Now, on to creating good content!

I would love to hear your thoughts on what you think great content is.

How To Get The Ideas In Your Head Built Into Products

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In this post, we talked about how we develop new insights to create solutions that could effectively address people’s pain points.

So you’ve come up with unique observations about your users’ behaviors. What do you do next? These are the steps to make those insights into viable products or services that could improve people’s lives.

First, Brainstorm With Others (or what designers call “Ideate”)

Don’t accept that the one idea you may have is the optimal solution. Gather a group of 2 to 5 family members and friends to brainstorm product ideas that stem from your insight. The importance of brainstorming with others is that when you do so, you bring different points of view, different knowledge bases, and different experiences to the session which creates a great environment for creative thinking. This also allows you to feed off each other’s ideas to create even more ideas.

With your group, the brainstorming challenge is to go for quantity. At this point, don’t worry about the feasibility or reasonability of the ideas. Encourage people to go wild. Hold any judgements on the ideas being contributed. Try to address your challenge from different angles and different perspectives – what are possible digital solutions? What about non-digital solutions? Can you borrow models from other industries and apply them to your challenge? Push yourselves to come up with 30. . . 40 ideas. It is when you reach the “dried out” moments, when you think you can’t squeeze another idea out of you, that some of the more original ideas come about.

As you come up with ideas, write each one on a post-it note. This makes it easier after the session to cluster similar ideas together to possibly meld into one bigger product concept.

You might also be wondering how to get people excited about a brainstorming session. A few tips: first, promise it’s going to be a fun, creative activity; second, promise it’s going to be just an hour of their time; and third, promise food.

Next, Choose a Concept and Build (or “Prototype”)

Choose one from your ideas — maybe you choose based on what you’re most excited about or based on what potential users are excited about. Either way, choose one idea and go build a prototype. At this point, you want to build a very rough model of your product. Emphasis here on very rough. Use whatever materials you have on hand — toys, pen and paper, scissors and construction paper, etc. One of the main objectives of building this initial prototype is to just help you think through how the idea is actually going to work. For example, if you are building an app, making a prototype will force you to think through details such as what each page will look like, what features it will have to encourage sharing with others, etc.

Another objective of building a prototype is so that you have something concrete to present your users to obtain detailed feedback from them. By seeing your prototype, there is no ambiguity about what your concept description and what the users may imagine it to be. Your customers can then assess whether your idea has any legs; if there are certain aspects of your product that is confusing; if there are things that can be optimized, etc.

This is why building low-fidelity prototypes is encouraged. When you are working on a rough prototype, there is no attachment to any aspect of the product as there might be when you spend a lot of time and money building a high-fidelity prototype. When your users provide their feedback, you can modify aggressively. Or worst case, you can ditch the concept and move on to the next one. No harm, no foul. And you have a whole basket of other ideas from your brainstorming session you can turn to.

Then, tear down and build again (“Iterate”):

At this point, know that you’ve basically just begun the process of building your product. After you get feedback from your users, you go back to brainstorming to come up with more specific ideas. If your app users say that you should add the concept of a game to your app, you go back to the drawing board and see how you might include that in your product. Then you rebuild your prototype with enhanced features. Then you seek more feedback, ideate and prototype again. And so it goes.

Maintaining the feedback loop with your customers is essential. This is what creates desirable, user-centric products that are currently disrupting industries.

Listen with humility and be patient with the process.

A Venture’s Dream Team

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For your product to have a good chance of success, it has to stand on the following three legs — desirability, feasibility and viability.

Desirability: Your product has to be liked! There’s no point in creating something that no one is going to want. You have to ask, would consumers want this product? Is there a need for it? Will consumers use it? If the answer is no to any of these questions, your product will, unfortunately, likely sit on store shelves.

Feasibility: Your product has to be build-able! Why try to create something that can’t actually be made? The questions you have to ask are, can the product actually be built? Is it technically sound? Does it do what it’s supposed to do? If the answer is no, then your fabulous idea cannot really exist.

Viability: Your product has to sustain itself. That is, you have to be able to sell it at a price that people are willing to buy it for. The questions you have to ask are, can this venture make money? Can the business sustain itself? If the answer is no, then this business is really a hobby.

Based on the three legs above, it should follow that the core team necessary to launch a venture should consist of team members that can ensure that each of the legs are on solid footing.

The Hipster. The champion of desirability. The Hipster not only focuses on the visual aesthetic of the product, she more importantly has the responsibility of making sure the product presents effective solutions to consumers’ wants and needs. She’s the design thinker. She has the customers in mind always, and and aims to create the best experience for them.

The Hacker. The champion of feasibility. The Hacker’s area of responsibility is making sure the solution can be built. And that it works. She is the technician — the programmer, the engineer, the doctor, the architect, or whomever has the know-how to build the product.

The Hustler. The champion of viability. The Hustler’s main role is to hustle. She makes sure the lights stay on and the team is fed. She is in charge of ensuring that there is money in the account, that costs are managed, that people know about your product, and generally making sure that the engine is running.

Do you have your dream team lined up?

Five Ways to Develop Unique Insights

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More and more awesome companies are creating remarkably innovative products.  We discussed a lot of that in this post.  A good majority of these products are not only beautiful but also solve real problems.  How do these innovators and entrepreneurs develop such ground-breaking ideas?  By developing unique insights!  Innovative ideas are born out of original insight.  But what is an insight?  An insight is a deep intuitive understanding of people’s motivations and subsequent actions.  This elaborate awareness of people is the spark for constant innovation.  These understandings can’t be developed purely from data analysis and number crunching.  Forming insights requires us to tap into our human-ness and explore people’s underlying emotions.

When we have richer insights about people, we have the tools to address their problems more effectively.  One success story I love is about Embrace Innovations. Embrace started out of a Stanford class.  Its co-founders started off with the challenge of giving millions of premature babies access to incubators that regulate a baby’s temperature and give them a better chance at life.  They initially sought to build cheaper incubators for hospitals.  However, after deliberate efforts to better understand their market in India, they realized that majority of premature births happen in rural areas far away from hospitals.  Mothers didn’t have the resources to bring their premature babies to hospitals for care.  So, even if Embrace had designed a cheaper and better incubator for hospitals, their efforts would be for naught if babies didn’t make it to the hospitals!  To address this, Embrace created a product that looks like a baby-sized sleeping bag able to regulate a baby’s temperature.  Their product is easily transportable to rural areas, a fraction of the cost of an incubator and functional without electricity.  The product was a wild success and has reached 200,000 babies in various countries!

Where do we look for insight?  The simple answer is: it all boils down to being curious about people and seeking to understand what drives them.  Steve Jobs put it succinctly when he said, “The broader one’s understanding of the human experience, the better designs we will have”.  Below are various methods to help develop insights:

Observe Your Own Pain Points

Tune in regularly into your emotions and observe when you are irked, stressed out, or inconvenienced.  What situations trigger these emotions?  What do you find frustrating or inconvenient?  Is there a product or service that you find yourself wishing you had to help achieve an objective?  Your pain points could very well be others’ pain points, too, and these provide an opportunity for innovation. The entrepreneur, Derek Sivers, for example, developed cdbaby out of a need.  As a musician, he wanted to sell his CDs online.  Big online record stores, however, did not sell independent music online unless they went through major distributors.  Derek did not want to go through distributors who were notorious for bad business practices, so he decided to build an online store to sell his CDs.  When he told his other musician friend about it, his friend asked if Derek could sell his CDs, too.  Derek agreed as a favor to his friend.  When other musicians heard about Derek’s online store, they asked if he could sell their CDs, too.  Next thing he knew, he had 50 musicians selling through his site.  Ten years later, he sold cdbaby for $22 million.

Observe Others  

Go out into the world and pay close attention to how people behave.  Observe how they interact with their world.  For example, if the particular problem you want to solve is how to help parents feed their children healthier meals, go to where you might be able to observe parents make food decisions — in supermarkets, restaurants, maybe online.  What do they purchase? How do they behave?  Do they look at labels?  Do they consult their children when purchasing? In restaurants, what do they order?  Who does the ordering? Do parents try to influence behavior of children?

As you observe people, try to take note of anything that triggers certain behaviors?  Are there any objects they are curious about?  Are there any hacks or work-arounds that people apply?  What creative ways do people resort to when no solution is in sight?  Observing people can lead to discoveries of certain behavior that people don’t even realize they do!

Talk to People

Talk to people and probe their motivations.  Be curious about what is driving their actions.  If you interviewed parents about their family’s eating habits, you might want to ask them what they typically eat on a school night.  How might this be different on the weekends.  Why do they cook what they cook?  What do they think is “healthy”?  Why do they think certain foods are healthy versus others?

Don’t take answers at face value, and keep asking “why?”  People may not know what drives certain behavior, and may need to be coaxed out by your digging.  Ask them to demonstrate what they do.  Shadow them.  Ask them about any discrepancies you might find between what they say and what they do.

Talk to the Fringes of Your Market

Talk to people who are not your average consumer with respect to the problem you are trying to solve.  For example, if you are trying to promote carpooling in large cities, try talking to people who are not your average commuters.  Describe your target market by certain demographics, and go to the extreme of each demographic group.  For example, you can group your target market by commuting mode.  Your average commuter would either take public transportation or drive their cars to work.  Now, think about people outside this “average”.  You might want to talk to people with chauffeurs, or people who only ride their bikes, or people who only walk.  These are the “extremes”.

Another demographic grouping might be by age group.  Your average commuter might be between 18 and 50.  So, you might want to reach out to people older or younger than this segment.  You’ll be surprised by what insights they may bring to the table.  Older commuters for example, may force you to think of a solution that accommodates physical limitations.  Younger commuters may help shed light on the ease of different modes of transportation.  By limiting your research to average consumers, you may very well be limiting yourself to average brain storming ideas.  Talking to people in the fringes will help expand your idea-generation process to arrive at solutions that will be all the more innovative and inclusive.

Walk in Their Shoes

While it is important to observe and talk to people, there is nothing like developing real empathy for your user.  To deeply understand a situation, it is critical to put yourself in your customers’ shoes and see for yourself what your consumers are experiencing.  To understand commuters’ pain points, for example, go through the entire commuting process that they go through.  Purchase a train ticket (do you buy online?  at the booth?), look for the station (are signs and maps easy to understand?), try a carpooling method in your area (was one easy to find? was it easy to use?).  Note your experiences.

As you go about these various methods in seeking insights, you will find patterns of behavior among the different people you talk to and observe.  These could very well be corroborated by your own empathy exercise.  These patterns or themes are the seeds of insights that fuel innovative ideas!

“Everything around you that you call life was made up by people that were no smarter than you and you can change it, you can influence it, you can build your own things that other people can use.” – Steve Jobs