Solving local problems with design thinking and web technology

How do we leverage web development technology to solve local challenges in our communities?
We introduced our web development students to the fundamentals of Design Thinking to define, ideate, test and develop tech solutions for local problems in their community.

The workshop was held on August 20, 2020 as part of the Ghana Tech Lab’s National Web development program.



The Design Thinking Workshop started with a presentation on design thinking: its meaning, the five nodes according to Stanford University’s d. school, success stories (The Clean Team Ghana’s story), and how design thinking can be used to solve wicked problems.
During the presentation the students were taught how to create and use design thinking tools such as Interviews, Empathy maps, Persona, Point-of-views (PoVs), Brainstorming, Mind Mapping, Prototyping using Adobe XD, and a Feedback grid.



After the presentation, the students were tasked to practice what they had been taught using a familiar design problem they face everyday. The randomly formed four groups of five members to collaborate and work on the design problem. The Teams, Alpha, Beta, Gamma and D interviewed each other in turns for 15 fifteen minutes to deep dive into the “whys” of the problem.

The teams played the improv game "That’s me" to spark their creativity for the subsequent activities. The exciting game energized the students for the empathy interview session of the design thinking workshop.

Data gathered during the interviews was used to create an empathy map to understand their users. The students created personas and point-of-views based on the data they gathered during interviews. Subsequently the students developed a “How-Might-we” question to guide them in the ideation phase. They were given time to brainstorm and come up with a lot of ideas to start creating solutions based on their point-of-views or problem statements. They brainstormed and came up with lots of ideas and filtered the ideas using a Post-it Voting method. Each group was allowed to vote among themselves based on the following criteria: Delight the user, most feasible, most radical. Prototype building using Adobe XD considering their users’ needs followed the ideation stage.



In the end, each team was given the opportunity to present their prototypes. Their users (colleagues) interacted with the prototypes and judged if what they built was what their users really needed. The testing phase ended with students gathering feedback about their prototypes to determine what worked, what did not, new ideas and further questions for development.

We hope the students would utilise the design thinking skills and their web development skills in developing their upcoming projects.