IDEO x Datascope Analytics: The Role of Design Thinking in Data Science and Vice Versa
IDEO is a design company that pioneered the birth of Design Thinking, a framework that is popularly used in producing creative and human-centered solutions. As the founder, IDEO is surely proficient in applying Design Thinking to the projects they work on. Together with Datascope Analytics, a company engaged in data analysis, these two companies success to implement Design Thinking in Data Science projects. They prove that Design Thinking is not a framework fit only on UI/UX design, but also in a wider area.
Design Thinking in Data Science
One of the steps in Design Thinking is prototyping.
IDEO and Datascope Analytics tell that they have successfully built a dashboard to display text analysis to the executives of a company. The dashboard should be customizable, but simple enough to use so the executives could quickly understand the context of the problem.
In Design Thinking, the final product is not simply developed from the beginning of development to the final product, but through an iterative process that involves the users’ feedback. The following figure explains the iterative process.
In the dashboard development, there are repetitions of the prototyping and testing process in a rapid manner. Hence, it is called also rapid prototyping. Thus, rather than building a fully functional dashboard from the very beginning of development, an iterative process involving users as is typical in design thinking can produce a final product that covers all user requirements in relatively less time.
And Vice Versa: Data Science in Design Thinking
In design thinking, once again, users are intensely involved through the feedback they provide. In the case of a large number of users, feedback is generally obtained through surveys. From the results of the survey, a group of respondents will be selected to be interviewed.
Most online survey platforms only provide an exploratory feature of survey responses in the form of a summary, such as how many answers A or B were chosen. However, Datascope Analytics and IDEO need a basis for selecting the target group as the interview target. The only way to deal with this is to find out the correlation between the responses and group the respondents coherently.
Datascope Analytics and IDEO then build a visualization tool they called catcorr.js. catcorr.js can visualize the correlation between responses of a survey. Its main purpose is to help generate a hypothesis and tell the story about the data in a better way. The development project of catcorr.js claimed to be a great success in its role to explore the responses of a survey. Datascope Analytics and IDEO then decide to publish the source code of catcorr.js on the Github platform.
Now, we have seen how Design Thinking could be used in the Data Science area. Something that, maybe several people, think it could not be. So, back to the prolog, Design Thinking is a framework that is not only fit to be implemented in UI/UX Design projects. It could be used in a wider area to solve problems with a human-centric approach.
