Design thinking for makers

There is no rulebook for makers, and that can be both empowering and terrifying at the same time. But a methodology called "design thinking" can make it easier to come up with ideas, test them quickly and iterate until you find the best solutions for your users.

I’m a UX designer and a maker, and in this post, I will walk you through an example of how I’ve used design thinking to release v2.0 for my platform ctrlalt.cc in a relatively short amount of time (a couple weeks) doing everything from redesigning it to coding new functionality for it. I'll also give you a few creative exercises to help you along the way.

What is Design Thinking?

A generic definition for “Design thinking” is “A human-centered approach to innovation that draws from the designer’s toolkit to integrate the needs of people, the possibilities of technology, and the requirements for business success” - (Tim Brown from IDEO)

I like to think of it as a zoomed out map that can help you reach and navigate a creative mind space on demand. It’s a very flexible and non linear process that you can use at any stage in your project, regardless of its size or nature. Covering anything from new products to new features, new landing pages, design updates, creating courses, getting unstuck when you've run out of ideas on how to fix a problem and any other creative project that you can think of and addresses an audience.

Let's dig into how it works.

1. Empathise

As you’ve guessed, this step is all about understanding who you are building for and what their problems are. In a standard model, this is where you would create user personas, conduct user interviews and collect as much knowledge about your users as possible. And don’t get me wrong you can still do all those things if you want, but from a maker perspective, your resources are more limited, so you need to focus on what’s gonna get you closer to your results in the most effective way.

In my case, from my chats with them, I know that my users are founders, makers, designers, and developers and that they want to discover tools that help them with their tasks, without wasting too much time. Some of them also want others to discover their projects. And they also want to get backlinks for their projects, and have people come to their website on a regular basis.

Your situation will look different but defining your project based on the problems you are trying to solve works in the same way. Don’t have any users yet? This still works. Think about who you are building for, go on a social media where the people that you are building for hang out, start talking to them and a percentage will want to help you out and answer a few questions, which is all you need right now! Start asking them about the problem you are trying to solve. See what solutions they currently use and find out what they don’t like about them. And there you have it, your initial bit of insights into what your users want.

Now that you have this information, it can start to look daunting again. You will have a lot of people telling you a lot of different things, so how do you know what to take forward? Enter step number 2: Define.

2. Define

For this step, we basically use the info that we’ve gathered and dive a bit deeper into understanding what problems this group of people share, to find what areas we should focus on.

💡 Tip: An exercise that I find handy at this point is writing these problems down on post-its (physical or digital ones - you can use something like Figjam if you want to go digital). Make sure you use 1 post-it per problem. Then start to group together the post-it’s referring to similar issues. If you need a bit more structure you can organise them by the stage in the user journey the issue occurs at:

• Awareness
• Consideration
• Purchase
• Retention
• Advocacy

You’ll start to see some clusters forming, and that will help you identify the areas that you should be focusing on.

In my case the main focus area ended up being daily activities. It was something people enjoyed and I was offering too little of it. This was also highly linked to increasing daily visitors for the products on the website, so it sounded like a great direction to go in.

Now that I know what area I needed to focus on, the next step is creating a solution as a response to this. Which brings us to step 3: Ideate.

3. Ideate

Design thinking is very flexible, which means there are a lot of different exercises that you can do at this step, depending on what you’d like to achieve. Most exercises usually focus on team brainstorming, so I like borrowing some from the “design sprint” framework as I find they are great at pushing you into a creative mindspace and they are better suited to makers.

A. "How might we" exercise

I like to start with an exercise called “how might we” (you can read more about it here) where you look at the problems from your focus cluster (from step 2) and reframe them into solution seeking questions, following this structure “how might we” + action + for user + so that + outcome.

For example, in my case a “how might we” question would be “how might we focus more on daily activities for makers so that their products get the spotlight more often?” or “how might we focus on daily activities for site visitors so that they come back to the site more often?”

B. Find inspo

Next, with these questions in mind, you should go and find inspiration for potential solutions. This can come from anywhere, but looking at how other products answer your questions is a great place to start! That being said, I would recommend looking at solutions in a different industry than your own as it helps you think outside the box and come up with more original ideas.

C. "The Crazy 8s" exercise

Now that your creative juices are flowing, it’s time to sketch out some potential solutions. And this exercise called “The crazy 8s” (part of a technique called “The 4 step sketch”) is perfect for squeezing ideas out.

For this you’ll ideally need some paper (but a digital whiteboard works too) and a timer. Get 8 boxes ready, either digitally or by folding the bit of paper into 8.

Now start the timer and every minute you will make a new solution sketch. You don’t have to finish it, just sketch an idea for 1 minute and then move into the next rectangle when the minute is up. Try to sketch something each time, even if some of them might feel hard to do. Keep going until the 8 minutes are up. You’ll be amazed at how many ideas you came up with when this is done!

And now that you have all these ideas, you can start putting them together and sketching the solution you’ll be going forward with. Don’t put too much pressure on this though, it doesn’t have to be right. This process is all about testing ideas and iterating, so follow your gut, and sketch the solution out, we’ll find out if it’s right later on.

In my case, my core solution was creating a timeline of daily launches that would include new products as well as relaunching products from the directory. This would encourage makers to launch and relaunch their products as often as they wanted, which would also mean fresh daily content for the website, encouraging visitors to come back daily and discover all the new & relaunched products.

So with this sketched out, the next step is to make the solution a bit more tangible so that people can interact with it.

4. Prototype

The prototype can be as minimal as you want it to be, but the important thing here is that your core solution is functional, while spending a minimal amount of time on it. In a traditional setup you’d do this in a day and then test it. But again, these rules are not set in stone, so you should adapt them to your specific case.

For me because it was quite a big build, I gave it a couple weeks. But regardless of the size, or the stage of your project, you have to be very diligent in cutting off all the “nice to haves” and keeping the focus on the core functionality, so you can get it in front of users as soon as possible.

In my case, I already had so much functionality and features, that I had to go in the opposite direction and ended up binning a lot of the old site, keeping pretty much the database and some basic functionality. The first release for v2.0 needed to focus on the daily launches, so I had to put a lot of the other tangent functionalities in ‘coming soon’ (there are still some of these throughout the site if you go and visit, but I’m slowly launching them one by one, taking them through this same process)

Which brings us to the last step of this non-linear process: Testing

5. Test

Now that you have a functional version of your idea, you have to get it in front of people and see what they think! So you can gather feedback and iterate where needed.

You might have to go back to step 2 and redefine the problems after you’ve presented users with a solution that maybe is not quite right for them. Or maybe your solution is not as smooth as it could be, which would mean going back to step 3. This is all part of the process and you should do this as many times as needed! It will only make your product better.

In a standard setup you’d want to conduct live user testing, and gather insights by watching your users actually try the product. But makers have to be more creative with their resources, so launching your project (ctrlalt.cc is a great spot for this), getting it in front of real people and gathering feedback through email and/or social media is all you need! And will be invaluable in identifying all sorts of things that you’ve missed, things you didn’t think were needed, future focus areas, potential feature ideas and so on.

It’s not a linear process and you will go through this cycle over and over again. So don’t overthink it and launch as soon and as often as you can! It will help you create better products that better serve the needs of your customers.

Being a maker is not easy, especially when there are so many things to consider at every step. But if you don’t know where to start, what to focus on next or need a reliable structure that you can adjust with time and will help you create better things on demand, you should give design thinking a go! You will not regret it.