Design Thinking
The other methods here are things you implement in Jotaid. Design Thinking is not — Jotaid was built around it.
The three tiers (Project → Theme → Note) come from its view of how work organises itself; the built-in templates for problem framing, insight cards and brainstorming each map to a phase; and the two AI features that matter most here do Design Thinking work by design — Smart Theme performs affinity mapping, theme summary performs human-centred synthesis.
This page is about running a round.
What One Round Looks Like
| Phase | What you do in Jotaid |
|---|---|
| Empathise / research | Quick Capture: interview notes, clippings, papers read through the literature template |
| Define | Smart Theme for affinity mapping → theme summary for insights and HMWs → the problem framing template to close |
| Ideate | The brainstorm template to diverge → the canvas to arrange spatially → the co-occurrence matrix for unexpected pairings |
| Prototype / test | The decision record template to pin the choice and its reasoning → the weekly review template to look back → new observations return to empathise |
It is not linear. What actually happens is repeated divergence and convergence, and the three tiers carry exactly that: the note tier always diverges, the theme tier is the first convergence, and the project note is the final one.
Define: Affinity Mapping Is Not Labelling
Smart Theme deliberately does not label topics. It looks for the underlying patterns, tensions and insights a group of notes collectively reveals.
That is affinity mapping as originally meant: sticky notes are grouped not to file them, but to make "why did these end up next to each other" a question you have to answer. So Smart Theme's names tend to be phrases that name a tension rather than category words like "user research".
Adjust the grouping by hand on the canvas afterwards — the AI's clustering is a first draft, and dragging cards around is the thinking.
Define: Insights and HMWs
The theme summary on a theme note is the most Design Thinking-shaped step in Jotaid. It reads every note under the theme and produces four sections:
| Section | Content |
|---|---|
| Overview | What the theme is about, and its core tension or pattern |
| Key Findings | Synthesised points — including connections, contradictions and gaps between notes |
| Insights | 2–4 insight statements, each formatted as a blockquote |
| How Might We | 2–3 HMW questions reframing those insights as design opportunities |
Two constraints are worth knowing:
- Insights state what is happening and why it matters, never solutions — jumping to solutions early is Design Thinking's most common failure, so this step will not do it for you
- Key Findings extract substance rather than repeat note titles — you will not get a table of contents back
Pitching an HMW
A good HMW is neither so broad as "how might we solve everything" nor so narrow as "how might we add a button". Jotaid holds itself to that range when generating them, and it works just as well as a yardstick for the ones you write yourself.
Ideate: Let the Matrix Surprise You
The risk in diverging is only ever reaching what you had already reached. This is where the co-occurrence matrix earns its place: it shows which two concepts keep turning up in the same notes while never having been linked directly.
Put such a pair side by side and you often have an HMW nobody has asked. Bridge nodes in the graph are the same fact in another form — spanning otherwise unrelated clusters, which is where breakthroughs tend to sit.
How It Relates to the Others
| Concerned with | |
|---|---|
| Design Thinking | Material → insight → opportunity — how to think |
| Zettelkasten | How ideas connect and grow |
| PARA | Where things live and when to forget them |
They do not compete: DT supplies the rhythm of thinking, the slip-box supplies the way ideas connect, PARA supplies the discipline of containers.
What It Needs
Smart Theme and theme summaries are AI features, needing Pro and your own API key. Templates, the canvas, the co-occurrence matrix and the graph are all available on the free tier — you can run a complete round without AI, doing the affinity mapping and insight extraction yourself.
Next Steps
- Note Templates — Problem framing, insight cards, brainstorming
- Themes — Smart Theme and theme summaries
- Co-occurrence Matrix — Finding unexpected pairings