Use Design Thinking to Craft Meaningful and Effective Learning Experiences

Integrating design thinking into your instructional design process can increase the effectiveness of training through the creation of meaningful learning experiences for participants.

Whether you are designing instruction using a waterfall approach like ADDIE, or an agile approach like SAM, you can use principles of design thinking to improve learning outcomes. One method that you can use is Empathy Mapping. I'll introduce it here, and then in a follow-up post, I'll share the full activity that you can try on your next project. It is an easy way to begin integrating design thinking into your current process.

What is Design-thinking?

Design Thinking is a human-centered approach to problem-solving for complex problems. There is an emphasis on using empathy to understand the needs of the user and clearly define the problem. Design thinking in practice, much like the scientific method, is a non-linear approach that leads to rapid information-gathering, idea-generation, and hypothesis-testing.

Where will Empathy Mapping fit into Instructional Design (ID) Models?

The most popular models used to design instruction are ADDIE and SAM. In both ID models, there is an initial phase of analysis and planning-- defining the problem, identifying ideal outcomes, identifying the target audience, identifying learning goals and objectives, etc. So, the Analyze phase is where you will use Empathy Mapping. 

ADDIE 
The classic “waterfall” design process.

SAM
The “agile” approach.

But... what is Empathy Mapping?

Empathy Mapping is a technique that was created way-back-when by Dave Gray/XPLANE, a strategy consulting firm. It became a go-to activity for members of the agile software development community and UX designers to better design products for customers. It is an evolution of the user persona technique of researching user needs. 

Why Empathy Map?

Each team member involved in the design of a product has an idea of who the customer is and what the customer wants/needs. Empathy Mapping is a way for product teams to externalize these assumptions to create a shared understanding of the customer, their needs, and to define the problem that a solution will solve. This shared understanding acts as a decision filter, keeping all members on the team focused on the customer throughout the design process. 

Okay… What does an Empathy Map look like?

This is the most basic (and Picasso-esque/horrifying) template for an empathy map:

So... now what?

Check out the follow-up post! I present an Empathy Mapping activity that you can use to synthesize both the Empathize and Define steps of design thinking and integrate into your current instructional design process.

PS. I’ll modify terms to match those used in ID (i.e., user/customer = learner).