Preview the Design Tree
Collaborate with your team to complete the empathizing persona the first step in creating your digital story.
Design Thinking 101
Design Thinking gives us a set of methods, strategies, and experiments that allow us to conduct real research gathering both quantitative and qualitative data in a variety of collaborative design thinking methodologies leading to innovative ideas backed by real data.
Welcome to
The Design Tree!
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In this phase, the empathizing phase our goal is to get to know our persona, our users, and our customers to understand who they are and their ethnography.
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In the Defining Problem phase, we wish to define our user needs and validate our persona and their problem.
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In the digital story phase, we will visualize our persona and the critical emotions surrounding their problem.
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In the Collaborative Ideation phase, we want to use our digital story as a prompt and engage our team in a brainstorming session.
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In the Prototyping phase, we will select the best solution from the Ideation phase. Our goal is to expand upon our idea and transform it into a workable prototype.
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In the Testing phase, our goal is to validate our solution. Through a series of conversations, we can test our prototype and gauge if our solution is meeting the needs of our persona.
Step 1
Empathizing Persona
Collaborate to create an empathizing persona that details our users' unique journey as they encounter the problem, capturing their aspirations, frustrations, motivations, and eventual elation along the user timeline.
Group Size: 4-5
Materials Needed: Print Empathizing Persona, Pens, Markers and Post-its
Duration: 30-60 mins
Empathizing Persona
An Empathizing Persona is an observational tool we can use to understand the unique journey of our customers as they move through aspirations, frustrations, motivations, and elation.
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Gain a better understanding of our customers' perspectives to build empathy.
Understand pain points and opportunities or benefits.
Collect information to create a digital story.
Document the team'’ customer insights.
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Work in small 4-5 team member groups. Collaborate to document your persona's ethnography and unique journey capturing their aspirations, frustrations, motivations, elations.
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Step 1. Collaborate and document the ethnography of your most likely customers: their Work, Age Range, Family, and Income.
Step 2. Aspirations: Document the aspirations of your customer. What is their goal? What are they trying to achieve? What road leads them to this problem?
Step 3. Frustrations: What problem will they encounter on this road that their motivations lead them to?
Step 4. Motivations: Document their motivation. What are they trying to accomplish that leads them to the problem and your solution?
Step 5. Elation: How can we solve their problem? What experience can we create that will finally solve their problem?
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Users' ethnography should help determine or predict their journey through the user's timeline.
The user's journey as they move from aspiration, frustration, motivations, and elation should relate to each other.
Utilize user quotes from interviews to document aspirations and frustrations, and motivations.
Try inferring thoughts and feelings from human behavior, tone of body language, interactions, conversations, word selection, and social cues.
Look for contradictions in what the user says and how the user behaves.
Thank you for trying The Design Tree! Click here to learn more about purchasing a set of collaborative strategies that incorporate digital storytelling.