&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;The O’Reilly Design Podcast: Quickly test ideas like a design thinker.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;In this week’s &lt;a href=&#34;https://www.oreilly.com/ideas/topics/oreilly-design-podcast&#34;&gt;Design Podcast&lt;/a&gt;, I sit down with &lt;a href=&#34;https://twitter.com/SlicedBreadUX&#34;&gt;Julie Stanford&lt;/a&gt;, founder and principal of user experience agency &lt;a href=&#34;http://www.slicedbreaddesign.com/&#34;&gt;Sliced Bread Design&lt;/a&gt;. We talk about how to get in the rapid experimentation mindset, the design thinking process, and how to get started with rapid experimentation at your company. Hint: start small.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;Here are some highlights:&lt;/p&gt;&#xD;&#xA;&#xD;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;What is rapid experimentation?&lt;/h2&gt;&#xD;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&lt;p&gt;Rapid experimentation is a technique for figuring out if you have a good idea. As you&#39;re going around designing things, running a company, being an entrepreneur—whatever it is that you do in your work life or your daily life—you probably have all kinds of ideas that you&#39;re really excited about, and you&#39;re probably thinking, ‘Hey, is there some way I could tell early on without investing a lot of time and energy and resources if this is actually an idea that has legs for people?’&lt;/p&gt;&#xD;&#xA;&#xD;&#xA;&#x9;&lt;p&gt;... Rapid experimentation is a technique for creating experiments that actually test the use of, or engagement with, your idea in action. It&#39;s a process for creating experiences really quickly that are representative of an aspect of some idea you&#39;re excited about. Then, you can see how people are actually engaging with this thing or service or process &amp;nbsp;that you&#39;re trying to design.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xD;&#xA;&#xD;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Why it’s so hard to get in the rapid experimentation mindset&lt;/h2&gt;&#xD;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&lt;p&gt;Starting at a young age, we&#39;re conditioned that when people ask you questions that are factual and have answers, you, as a reasonable, smart person are proving your worth and your knowledge by knowing the answers to those questions. Rapid experimentation is the opposite of that. It starts from a place of, ‘I don&#39;t know the answer to this and I&#39;m never going to find out by sitting at my desk and thinking really hard,’ or even, ‘I&#39;m never going to find out by hanging out with some other really smart people at my work and discussing it for a really long time. I&#39;m still not going to get the answer.’&lt;/p&gt;&#xD;&#xA;&#xD;&#xA;&#x9;&lt;p&gt;It&#39;s admitting that the only way you&#39;re going to get the answer is by running an experiment that might fail. It&#39;s in the word. It&#39;s an experiment. It could be true; it could be false. Who knows. We&#39;ll see. We have a hypothesis about how it might turn out, but a lot of hypotheses are disproven, and this may be a situation like that. Even if we learn that this idea in its current form is not a good idea, we&#39;re going to learn something about why it&#39;s not working as-is, and that&#39;s going to lead to an even better idea.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xD;&#xA;&#xD;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;The 5-second definition of design thinking&lt;/h2&gt;&#xD;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&lt;p&gt;It’s a cyclical process of understanding from users, having that inform some design that you&#39;re doing, and then going back out to users and getting feedback on it. In a nutshell, that’s probably the quickest description of design thinking I have from a process-oriented perspective.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xD;&#xA;&#xD;&#xA;&#xD;&#xA;&#xD;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;How to start using rapid experimentation at your company&lt;/h2&gt;&#xD;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&lt;p&gt;Start small—especially if you don&#39;t have a culture at your work that is okay with failure or that gives you time to do this. Pick a small thing that&#39;s on your plate, come up with a few ideas, and see if you can run a very small test that maybe only you&#39;re privy to. Then once you get the results—and I guarantee you, it&#39;s going to be super interesting—advertise the results. People will get really intrigued and wonder how they might be able to get that kind of data on their own.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/blockquote&gt;

Podurama

Home

Trending

Personal

Your Podcasts

New Episodes

My Files

Favourite Episodes

Tags (Folders)

Recently Played

Bookmarks

Followed Playlists

Julie Stanford on vetting designs through rapid experimentation

O'Reilly Design Podcast - O'Reilly Media Podcast

AI Chapters

AI Insights

Reviews