MITRE-ITK-Skills

In this physical variant on brainstorming, participants use their body and inexpensive materials or objects to role-play and mimic interaction with a system, product, or experience.

This hands-on activity allows participants to communicate and document their mental model and how they think about a set of information, creating a logical structure (e.g., relationships, sequences, timing).

A fast way to capture and prioritize stakeholders.

A framework based on “influence channels” that shape and define an organization’s culture.

Visually synthesize and communicate a user’s end-to-end experience through actions, pain points, wins, and opportunities in a phased process.

Focus the power of brainstorming using a structured, visual representation of ideas—pushing you to fill out every box with new ideas.

Generate insights into relationships between concepts in a flexible and engaging way to visualize information.

Develop clear statements about your organization’s future aspirations and present activities.

PAIN stands for Persona, Activities, Insights, and Needs – the four main research topics explored in this structured method for gathering insights about users or user identities.

A descriptive model of a person (user, stakeholder, team member, etc), this tool is most often used to help a team define and understand the needs of its customer.

Frame and explore your problem by imagining a future scenario in which the proposed activity fails to achieve its objective.

Explore a problem space and formulate a robust problem statement to ensure you’re solving the right problem.

Developing an early version of a product to convey the look (form-appearance) and feel (function-behavior); can be static or dynamic in nature but is typically built quickly.

A structured, facilitated conversation that helps a team reflect on a completed activity or event by comparing what was expected with what happened and identifying concrete improvements.

Visually categorize positive (rose), potential (bud), or negative (thorn) aspects of a topic (e.g., system, product, process).

Outline and visualize a service to connect the user experience, or “frontstage,” to what happens behind-the-scenes, or “backstage.”

Equip users with a visual vocabulary for discussing complexity and simplicity in a design to assess and express the value of adding or removing design elements.

Ideate a more comprehensive & representative set of relevant stakeholders to your project.

Look across stakeholders and categorize them according to key variables (e.g., interest, influence, impact).

Use this canvas to quickly categorize and prioritize which stakeholders to engage based on power and impact. Highlight impacted stakeholders and ideate on how to elevate their roles on the effort

A quick way to begin developing a plan for effectively engaging a stakeholder.

The inverse of brainstorming, reduce a large collection of ideas, activities, or components to a smaller collection of the most valuable or promising ideas.

Stories add a human element to design and data analysis activities. They foster empathy and let designers walk in the users’ shoes, increasing understanding of needs, activities, interests, and pain points.

This tool captures the key roles, relationships, and dynamics of a system to enhance understanding of the big picture and potential disruptions to the system.

Iteratively remove unnecessary elements from a design using a structured approach to reducing complexity to produce a more elegant, streamlined final product, process, or organization.

Use known solutions to find new solutions to difficult problems.

Map user profiles (i.e., jobs, pains, and gains) to values (i.e., gain creators, products and services, pain relievers) to ensure that a product meets user needs.