I’ve always been interested in why people do what they do. Why does someone prefer the taste of chocolate to vanilla? What makes someone use an app or not? The psychology behind customers / the User Experience has always fascinated me.
When I heard that some people were getting together to form a pilot “Innovation Dojo” aka a Design Thinking Session (a two and a half day long session led by an external consulting company in their Midtown, NYC office), I quickly got my name on the list.
Day 1: The session started early on a chilly March Wednesday morning and just like any other work event, we started off with some ice-breakers. After going over “elevator pitch” and becoming comfortable with our pilot class ~20 people from different businesses we started on what is design thinking and why would we use it.
The first lesson was about holistically understanding why design thinking matters, and a concept called Horizons (developed by Mckinsey) on “managing your current business growth and how to maximize future growth opportunities":
We then moved on to understanding “jobs to be done” otherwise known as what solution the consumer really needs solved. Making the best product is only a single facet in how well a product does. You (the product creator) can make the best and most shiny product on the market, but if it does not meet all three functional, social, & emotional needs of the consumer — all your hard work will go to waste.
After understanding the needs we were solving for, we were introduced to our "dojo-long" project (to learn by applying design thinking skills): an app to improve the NYC Tourist's Experience.
The first step to this task was problem validation where we tried to understand if the problem is the real problem that needs solving. In order to understand what we were solving for, we were instructed to walk down Manhattan’s 5th avenue to ask tourists on the streets some open-ended questions about their trip to NYC. The purpose of this step was to be as brief as possible - as the researcher - so that the tourists were free to talk about their true experiences. The intention was to gain un-biased qualitative feedback to understand the underlying problem of the tourist experience.
My teammates did not like the interviews with strangers, but personally this was the most exciting part of the entire activity! I loved interacting with the tourists and learning about the cultural differences and array of different experiences/emotions they faced in my home city.
The next step was to start documenting our interview findings and ideas through a template called LEAN Canvas: this process "forced us to distill the essence of our product" and get right to the core strategy of our product.
From this activity we were able to define that a huge problem tourists faced was under preparing for the New York City weather. Many of these tourists came from substantially warmer climates and in many cases did not even own parkas, hats, snow boots etc.
*Side note: if you have not been to NYC in the winter, it’s quite brutal. Not only is it freezing (because Manhattan is an island) but also there are constant wind tunnels and dirty slush on the sidewalks/streets.
Ah-ha! An app idea was born : dress for the weather!
Day 2: Arrived early on Thursday morning to begin session two of the dojo
The first lesson of the day was to understand client centricity, making sure to always keep the customer at the core, and knowing what the customers need before they do. This consisted of coming up with user-persona's & stories to become the customer.
After becoming the under prepared NYC tourist trapped in a mere sweatshirt on a bone-cold day, we wireframed the application interface. We finally had a more tangible product (even if it was just rough wireframes) and the next important lesson was to learn to effectively communicate with your target customers (externally) along with your development / design teams (internally); if no one can understand your vision / strategy the product will likely fail. For the purpose of this "dojo" we did not have dev & design teams as it was only a two and a half day "sprint", so instead we built a small paper prototype of our app to test how potential users would respond to it.
*The important thing to note here is that these paper prototypes were merely a hypothesis for a solution based on our initial interview findings.
Round 2 of interviews commenced and again we walked along 5th ave interviewing tourists off the streets to see how they responded to the prototype. This time it proved a lot more difficult to get the attention of people / have them take us seriously (maybe it's because we were approaching them with sheets of paper?) but the few people we did manage to flag down gave us very interesting perspectives.
I really felt the value of this exercise (and the agile method) from getting the immediate user-feedback through the paper prototype and going back to the LEAN Canvas to incorporate it. Instead of wasting time and resources to come up with a product that consumers might not even use, we made a minimal viable product to validate our solution (that tourists need easy access to winter clothing).
Once we iterated the design, and validated via another interview - our newest prototype proved to be more successful than the first.
Day 3: the final session was where we shared our wireframes and business models, along with a short "pitch" to our investors (the rest of the pilot class) on our product. After having the class support our project & getting their approval, we had a big lunch and networked for the end part of the dojo.
Afterthoughts: While this was a fun social/networking event, it also taught be a lot about the design thinking process, as well as the emotional intelligence that a product owner has to manage. In most cases we build products to generate revenue, but this activity provided the perspective that we build products as solutions for people, which thereby generates the revenue. While technical skills are important (engineering, designing, selling the product) the emotional attributes have equal, if not higher, importance. People are guided more by their feelings rather than logic, so if you can appeal to the feelings the product will be a success. It also proved the agile method is the most efficient. I hate wasting my time, and if we had applied the "waterfall method" to our product, came up with an actual mobile prototype, and the consumers hated it, a lot of time would have been wasted. Instead, when consistently iterating through all steps (non-linearly) and keeping the consumer engaged throughout all steps it creates a "perpetual loop" of information to develop better understandings to the problem in order to create an even better solution.
This activity inspired me so much, I took it upon myself to make some mobile mock-ups that originated from this dojo. As I said earlier, there are consistent iterations, many trials and errors, so my mock-up is quite different than what we originally discussed in the session -- but hey, I'm putting what I learned into practice!
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