This is the Design Thinking slide deck by Reem El Seed from the core curriculum in Science Distributed's Chain Event: Georgetown, a blockchain in health science research symposium held at Georgetown University on 12 May 2018

1. DESIGN THINKING
Blockchain For Research

2. WHAT IS DESIGN THINKING?

3. DESIGN THINKING is a structured process with a set
of skills, tools and methods to solve problems and identify
combining empathy, creativity and user experience.

4. Design Thinking Process
The design thinking process begins with identifying the end-users and understanding their challenges to ensure our
solution addresses the problem at its core
EMPATHIZE IDEATE TEST
DEFINE PROTOTYPE ITERATE

5. EMPATHIZE + DEFINE

6. Persona Development
A persona represents a customer or stakeholder for whom the product or service is designed for. It is a way to model,
summarize, or communicate the people observed or researched
A Persona:
 Reflects a real user’s patterns and behaviors
 Focuses on the current state
 Helps inform design decisions
 Enables designers to prioritize features
 Can be developed iteratively

7. FRUSTRATIONS
• Difficulty in finding the financial reports
• Hard time understanding government terminology, and no easy
way to access definitions of these terms
• Do not understand the why of financial trends
• Information overload – hard to gather insights
GOALS
• Understand where his team obtains information and
credibility of their sources
• Minimize lag in obtaining information critical to his team’s
day-to-day decision making
“ I’m unsure of what information
is even out there to access”
DON MANION – INVESTMENT BANKER
Age
Role
Location
Tier
Archetype
35
Economist
Baltimore, MD
Daily Use
Leader
BIO
Don is a senior economist in the organization’s fixed income team. He leads a team of 5 economists and analysts around the world and
travels 2-3 times a month to meet with his team, clients, and contractors. It helps him stay connected with his team and provides them with
support during his visits.
Since his team is all over the world, he is unsure of the credibility of the information they obtain which could be detrimental to the portfolio
he maintains.
PERSONALITY
Extrovert
Sensing
Thinking
Judging
Introvert
Intuition
Feeling
Perceiving

8. IDEATE + PROTOTYPE

9. Prioritization Matrix
Once personas are developed, we prioritize requirements with the highest impact and technical feasibility
FEASIBILITY
IMPACT
Things to consider:
 How do you measure impact?
 How do you measure success?
 What are your challenges?
 What are your current limitations?
 If you had a magic wand, what would
you change?

10. Wireframes
A Wireframe:
 Is a skeletal blueprint of the end-product
 Comes in 2 forms: Low and High-Fidelity
 Is a stepping stone to a prototype
 Enables designers to validate assumptions before development
 Can be developed iteratively
Before prototyping, wireframes allow us to explore the art of the possible rapidly and cheaply by organizing our requirements
and testing our design hypothesis throughout the ideation phase

11. TEST + ITERATE

12. Prototype
A Prototype:
 Comes in various forms (Paper and/or digital)
 Helps identify usability errors
 Interactive
 Evolves with every iteration
Lastly, once wireframes are finalized, we will create a clickable prototype to simulate the user’s experience with the
final product

13. HOW DO YOU DESIGN FOR BLOCKCHAIN?

14. Design Thinking for Blockchain
In addition to the user-centered design approach, blockchain’s unique capabilities offers users new ways to interact with
digital assets or intellectual property
Blockchain:
 Fosters trust in a trust-less environment
 Enables seamless transfer of assets while maintaining its integrity
 Guarantees quality assurance
 Disintermediates the middle-man therefore, prioritizes the user’s
experience

15. Do you want to be part of the DESIGN
THINKING process?