Analogy

Analogy helps you to gain fresh understandings in terms of cultural differences and users' interests, you might find inspiration to design solutions.

Source:

https://www.interaction-design.org/literature/article/learn-how-to-use-the-best-ideation-methods-analogies

By: Rikke Dam & Teo Sian

Use: Methods of acknowledging cultural variables; Methods of defining Stakeholders' pain points and needs 

Relevant methods: Survey; Story Mining

"Analogies help us empathise with our users and to find inspiration to our design problem’s solution in unrelated fields by comparing your problem with their problems and solutions. We have all the more reason as designers to capture the attention and imagination of our users through this ingenious and wonderfully simple way of building empathy with them. When using analogies, you should try to identify the aspects of a situation which are the most important or interesting ones. For instance, if you are working on improving a supermarket experience, some of the key aspects might be containing and separating different goods in the shopping cart, making a decision when presented with many options, and speeding up the processing of long waiting lines as effectively as possible. Then, find other experiences that contain any of these aspects — doing so will help you gain a better understanding of users, and also spark new ideas for improving their experiences."

"For us in the design world, things may be different, but the principle holds just as true. You can use analogies for several purposes. Analogies are a great way for us to build empathy with users, to synthesise and define information and to generate new ideas around a problem. We use analogies to gain a fresh way of looking at an environment, and we use them in instances where direct observation is hard to achieve. The cause-and-effect dynamics between many events are similar; only scale and complexity present themselves as obstacles. So, the trick is to come up with an analogy that’s appropriate for the context."