Design Thinking For Courses (Define & Ideate)

1. Empathize & understand your customers

2. You define their problems

3. You ideate possible solutions

4. You prototype some of these solutions

5. You test your prototypes

• Gains: here, you will focus in the biggest needs, goals and dreams that your customers have. Remember that we also had a section about Gains in our Empathy Map, but I suggest you to don’t do copy-paste as new ideas may flow, specifically after re-reading the part of what they Need to Do and See.
• Pains: what are the biggest problems, frustrations, and fears that your customers have? Once again, we also had a section about that in the Empathy Map, but find more inspiration by re-reading the sections Hear and Say before filling your ideas in the Value Canvas.
• Customer Jobs: these are about the things that your customers are doing nowadays to try to increase their gains, and reduce their pains. But, many of these might not be working very well. To answer it, we focus and summarize the main activities that our customers is Doing from the Empathy Map.

Up to now, we have focused on summarizing the Empathy Map and defining our main customers’ problems. The next part is about ideating a good solution from our customers’ eyes:

• Gain creators: we already know what our customers want, now let’s convert those dreams and goals into features and benefits that would be of high value for our customer.
• Pain relievers: very similar to the last one. As we already know the problems and fears from our customers, we will focus on what features from our product could reduce or eliminate those pains.
• Products & services: here we summarize everything that we have learned, so we will focus on how to maximize the gains (gain creators) and minimize the pains (pain relievers) of the customers’ jobs.