IDEO: Design Thinking Challenge
Understanding humans before designing systems
Design ThinkingUser ResearchPrototypingSynthesisDivergent → ConvergentStorytelling
Challenge
- Loneliness is widely discussed but poorly understood in practice
- Most products treat it as a social-graph problem and miss emotional/contextual reality
- Understand how people lose and rebuild connection during life transitions
- Resist jumping to solutions; optimize for insight quality over feature output
Role
- Project Lead — research, synthesis, and narrative
- Planned and conducted primary interviews (stories over opinions)
- Led sensemaking sessions and clustered qualitative signals into insights
- Sketched concepts to test shared understanding before committing to direction
- Owned final narrative and presented to IDEO judges
Approach & Decisions
observe → synthesize → frame → diverge → converge → prototype → test → iterate
Led qualitative discovery under ambiguity
Used deep interviews to surface lived experiences, not abstractions.
- Open-ended prompts (“Tell me about the last time…”)
- Stories of connection vs invisibility
Treated humans as the system
Mapped emotional signals as indirect inputs and avoided premature quantification.
- Loneliness as perspective, not constant state
- Signals like withdrawal or routine-seeking
Synthesized insight before ideation
Formed judgment first, then used it to constrain what should exist.
- Loneliness is contextual/episodic
- Consistency > intensity
- Shared activity builds bonds
Prototyped to test understanding (not scale)
Built low-fidelity flows to validate resonance before committing to a product direction.
- Reflection check-ins (not broadcasting)
- Inner-circle reminders (not engagement scores)
Outcomes
- Reframed loneliness from “lack of people” to misalignment between emotion, routine, and connection
- Designed a coherent concept (“Lonely Hearts Club”) grounded directly in validated behaviors
- Demonstrated disciplined product judgment by avoiding gamification and shallow engagement loops
- Delivered a clear narrative and prototype walkthrough to IDEO judges
Learnings
- Human behavior is the most important—and least instrumented—part of any system
- Clarity comes from synthesis, not data volume
- Products fail when they encode assumptions instead of understanding