Research in Service Design
1 min read
What to do when I'm stuck in analysis paralysis?
Here are a few tips I usually give to people who have done so much research that they don't know what to do with it:
- Ideate and prototype in 3 hours: Take an hour to list 10 to 50 ideas that come out of what you learned. And then take 2 hours to transform 3 of these ideas into prototypes with just paper, a pen, sticky notes, tape and scissors.
- Make progressive summaries: it can be hard to summarise what is the key thing you learned. So try to summarise maybe all that you learned in 50 learnings. Then summarise those in 30, 20, 10, 5, 3, 2 and 1. You get the idea. Then find out what level of summary is the right one.
- Write a briefing from a client: Imagine a client comes to you and gives you a problem to solve. Write the email of the client with the problem, the time frame, the budget, etc. This will help you work on the problem where all that you have learned will help.
- Imagine the end result: imagine you are 1 year from now. What's the end result of your project? What's the form it takes? Now prototype this today.
- Outsource: Ask a friend to join you, share with him all that you have learned and ask him to summarise the one important thing that he took out of what you said. Now work on just this.
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