Course 2 week 1 makes huge strides in the Design thinking framework. Each part seems too important to not include in the notes. It deals majorly with the Empathize step, so it involves a lot of user research (which I need to work on the most). On top of this, the upcoming week 2 also deals with Empathize part, so we can make an inference (solely from the fraction of content that it takes in the course) that this is the most important step out of the 5 steps of the design thinking framework. This is going to be a long one, so put your designer's hat on.

Week 1: Empathizing with users and defining pain points

Difference between Pity, Sympathy, and Empathy

1. When you have pity for someone, you feel sorry for them. Usually has condescending overtones.
2. When you have sympathy for someone, you acknowledge their feelings, but you keep yourself from experiencing those feelings.
3. When you empathize with someone, you share their mental and emotional experiences.

Approaching UX research with empathy makes it easier for you to solve the right problem. Watch this cool video on empathy.

Three steps towards planning user research and interviews:

1. Determine research goals
2. Define your target audience
3. Write interview questions

Step 1: Research Goals

Research goals help us to select the ideal candidate with desired characteristics for our research. Create interview goals using the following points:

1. What do you want to learn from the interviews?
2. Are there certain user problems or pain points that you need to empathize with?
3. Are there any characteristics of users you want to interview? Why?
4. How much information should we have to ensure we get a comprehensive and balanced set of data?

Common templates of research goals

1. I want to understand the processes and emotions that people experience around the problem my product is trying to solve.
2. I want to identify common user behaviors and experiences with tasks that my product is trying to address.
3. I want to understand user needs and frustrations as they relate to the product I’m designing.

Step 2: Define your target audience

Before you practice empathy you need people to practice it with. But not everyone can be a good candidate for each user study. Depending on your product, you need to recruit people from diverse yet relevant backgrounds.
A screener survey is a detailed list of questions that helps researchers determine if potential participants meet the requirements of the research study. Demographics that you might ask about in a screener survey include:

1. Age
2. Geographic location
3. Job title or industry
4. Gender
5. Constraints such as availability, proximity to test site, etc.
6. Family status

You can also use any paid services such as usertesting.com or userinterviews.com, or go with more traditional approaches such as hallway testing, or a third-party recruiting agency If you can afford it.

Step 3: Prepare interview questions

Based on your research goals, form interview questions to ask your user group. Remember to ask open-ended questions along with follow-up questions.

By the end of a successful interview, what started off as stand-alone pain points come together to create a better understanding of what needs to happen to improve the product.

Conducting the interview

The interview process can be divided into four parts:

1. Meet the participant
   • Build a good rapport
   • Review legal details
   • Gather basic information about the candidate
   • Let participants know there are no right or wrong answers
2. Conduct the interview
   • Ask open-ended questions
   • Ask follow-up questions based on how the participant answers the initial question.
3. Take Notes (helps reduce primacy and recency bias)
   • Highlight compelling quotes
   • Document observations about the participants
   • Consider recording interviews
4. Wrap up
   • Give a chance to share final thoughts
   • Share the offered incentives, if any

Empathy Maps

One of the many tools designers can use to identify user needs is called empathy maps. It can be of two types:

1. One-user empathy maps: Taking the data from one user's interview and turning it into an empathy map
2. Aggregated empathy maps: Created by creating multiple one-user empathy maps, then combining the maps where users expressed similar things into a new empathy map.

Pain points

Pain points are any UX issues that frustrate the user and block the user from getting what they need. Most pain points fall into one of four categories:

1. Financial: Any problem involving money
2. Product: Any problem because of confusing functionality
3. Process: Frustrations that stop the user from going from point A to point B.
4. Support: If users can't find answers to their questions, they won't feel supported.

Personas

1. In UX design, personas are fictional users whose goals and characteristics represent the needs of a larger group of users. Personas can help us identify patterns of behavior in users and hence their pain points.
2. As we do user research, we form images in our heads about our users. These will become the personas.
3. Why are personas useful:
   • They help humanize our users.
   • Example: There are about 533,000 people over the age of 100 living in the world today. This fact, although interesting, will be forgotten pretty quickly by you. But if we talk about Mavis Hunter, a competitive runner who only picked up the sport two years ago after turning 100 years old, chances are she makes a long-lasting impression.
   • A wide variety of personas stress-test the designs.
4. Generally, creating 3 to 8 personas is enough to represent the majority of a product’s user base.
5. A persona can be brought to life by adding its basic demographics, family background, and a humanizing photo or face to relate to. Their story can be fleshed out to give context about their goals and frustrations while using services similar to yours.
6. More examples of personas here.

Here is my attempt trying to solve a design problem for the local bookstore app. Going from the research goal to defining the target audience and gathering attendees, to creating interview questions and conducting them, and finally organizing the data and taking valuable inferences from that.
I found out that the final output is very different from the initial biases that I had.
And here is my attempt to create personas out of the user group.

I had to omit some details here and there for the namesake of short notes.🥸
Please do let me know if it doesn't make logical sense somewhere, if it's hard to connect the dots, or if skipped something important altogether.