Microsoft Whiteboard as a Design Thinking Tool
Often during my Design Thinking coaching and mentoring sessions, one question being asked repeatedly about the tools to use for Design Thinking Workshops. I thought of sharing my experience with easily available tool, Microsoft Whiteboard (MS Whiteboard).
There are many smart tools out there like miro, lucid chart, balsamiq, Azure XD and the list goes on and on.
During Design Thinking workshop, pre-preparations like mind mapping, Empathy interviews, Persona mapping and all other stages of design thinking, it will be easy for us to use some tools to capture the inputs and outputs of each stage and finally converge and create a prototype.
I have accidentally discovered Microsoft Whiteboard tool during beginning of this year, and found that it is immensely useful in Design Thinking. Since then I have been using, experimenting Microsoft Whiteboard extensively.
Let me share few examples from my experience of using Microsoft Whiteboard.
When we open a MS Whiteboard from the app you get a + icon clicking on that you get a list of options as illustrated in the below image. We need to select Templates option as this is what our interest for this topic :)
There are a couple of useful templates to start with, for stage one we can use the Empathy Map template. When we engage with our customers, end- users and important stakeholders to understand the challenges/problems they are facing , Empathy map template and Persona builder help us to capture the key points.
By mapping empathy we can build our Customer, user and other important stakeholder personas with the Persona Builder Template. Persona Builder helps us to represent different user types, who might use our product, service etc.
Persona Builder helps to examine different user aspects about the product, helps us to better understand user needs and behaviors in connection with the product or service.
Once we interviewed Customers, end users, other stakeholders and got good understanding about their problems, challenges, pain points then it is time for us to jump into a Brainstorming session and we can use another MS Whiteboard template.
We can even do a napkin pitch or paper prototype using MS Whiteboard. Here is a sample paper prototype.
You might have a question then how to do our “How Migh We’s” (HMW)and “Point of Views” (PoV). I have a very simple answer for your questions :), that is create your own templates as per your requirements using other elements in the MS Whiteboard.
As our requirements will be different and our approach will be completely different and we can create templates as per our need and requirement.
But one downside to using MS Whiteboard for Design Thinking is that the templates we create are not re-usable. I have raised a ticket with Microsoft Support and waiting for their response :).
I am sharing some of the sample templates that I have created for my Workshops.
Hope this blog helps some of you wanting to use Microsoft Whiteboard as a Design Thinking Tool. Try using the Whiteboard App always.
Please let me know your views and any questions.
