Solving a Wicked Problem
“A problem whose social complexity means that it has no determinable stopping point” — Cameron Tonkwise
The first project we were working on at the Ironhack Bootcamp was finding a solution to a problem which is basically not solvable. This time I was not working alone, but we were a group of four girls facing the following problem:
Since the 70s, museums and other public institutions have been suffering a profound crisis. In the heart of this kind of institutions, there’s the mission of making heritage accessible for all.
They build the bridges between objects and people, for them to be enjoyed by citizens. How Might We help museums and other public institutions bring people closer and fulfill their mission to preserve and activate cultural heritage in the 21st century?
Design Thinking Process
Since this project was also meant as a deep dive into UX Design, it was the first time we were confronted with Design Thinking Process and tried to stick to the original guideline this process is serving.
Following this path we started with the empathize phase, where we tried to gather as much information as possible to tackle the problem and figure out what target group we’re facing and trying to help. Therefore we set up a small user survey with google forms (is actually anything out there google is not providing a service for?). Our goal was to get more insights about the current feelings, thoughts and behavior of people regarding museums. We’ve got 61 answers what’s for sure not enough to get statistically significant statements, but enough to be a base for our interview preparation. We decided that the focus of the interview needs to be to get some information about the WHY are people actually not going to museums and other public institutions and besides that what they doing instead. So first big challenge of this project was that we need to leave the classroom, go out and ask random people about their relationship to museums. Obviously it was not the favorite part of any one in our group but glad to say: We did it! And got 6 interviewees.
Lolla our teacher told as before to ask as much WHY as possible, but honestly I can’t remember, that we asked that many whys in our interviews. So lesson for the next time remember the WHY and get used to!
Back in our classroom we put all the information together and started the define phase in a super stereotypical way for designers: Writing all our notes and insights on post-its and put them on the wall and then clustered them.
Actually I’m used to tasks like this, because we doing it at work all the time. But it was my first time, that we clustered while being completely silent and actually I liked, that it didn’t end in big discussions, and fastened the process.
After clustering we asked some how-might-we (HMW) questions and did dot-voting to decide for our final HMW we want to work on: HMW make time in museums feel more useful?
Since we obviously didn’t defined any “CEO”, who would do the final vote in case of a tie, our teacher Gianpaolo decided, that we need to take that HMW on the upper left. Just to spoiler you: We didn’t have any CEOs for the following dot-votings as well. So learning curve for dot voting near zero.
Persona & User Journey
Next step and also still part of our define phase was to create a user persona: Fabian.
Ok, honestly, Fabian turned out to be a stereotypical young man, who’s a social follower, loves gym & tinder and obviously he’s not interested in art at all.
Sorry for that, but what did you expect when a group of four women is supposed to build a male user persona? So lessons learned: Next time try to be more objective. And maybe go for a mixed team or at least let the persona challenge by some other genders.
As stereotypical as Fabian is also his user journey:
Promise! Next user journey will be more visual. Guess I need to get more into this sketching and step up the relationship to my sharpie.
Brainstorming and Concept Definition
Who’s into the design thinking process knows what’s coming next: Exactly! Ideation-Phase. Goal is to create as much ideas as possible to figure out what actually could work and will make it into the final core concept. Therefor Gianpaolo introduced us three easy but effective methods to brainstorm and just generate ideas. So we did a Round Robin, the Crazy-8 and the bad ideas.
Actually the bad idea method was quite fun. Even if it was hard to come up with shitty and stupid ideas after just brainstorming good ideas, it was fun to laugh about the ideas and try to turn them into good or at least better ideas. So maybeeee there will be the Tinder for Art at one time. So stay tuned!
Honestly there were quite a bunch of good ideas on the wall. For example the running through a museum in your gym, the explain me this art app, a audio guide where you could add your own thoughts to an art piece or listen to the opinions of other visitors or the art escape room.
In the end we decided to go for a app which would work simular to Pokemòn-Go, just that you would go for a virtual art hunt through your city. And here’s what we finally defined as our core concept:
An app that engages people to get in contact with art by playing a virtual game which leads you crosswise through a city, makes you collaborate and share your achievements with your friends and leads you into the nearby museums who are taking part.
Storyboard and Benefits
This project was meant to end with the first steps of the prototyping phase, what means we created a storyboard which shows how the product will work and present it to our classmates to get some feedback what could be seen as a early stage of concept testing.
To break it down: The app is working like Pokemòn-Go. She will lead you through the city, where you will find virtual art pieces of the museums who joining. To Level-Up or to get some achievements it all ends with actually visiting the museums.
And of course here are our answers to our HWM: We make museum experience more fun through the game
- We get even people who are not into art through the game
- We let people discover new museums and exhibitions which makes them actually know about them and increase the visitor numbers
- We make museums part of a daily life of people through social media, virtual art on the streets and the collaboration option with your friends
- You don’t need extra time and effort for museums because the actually want to play the game and will find time to do it on their daily ways through the city
I think we can be quite happy about our result and thanks to the feedback of our teachers and classmates we already have some ideas for adjustments we need to make: Cooperation with museums for entry fee discounts, a trophy collection in the game… but I think that’s how this design process is supposed to work right? You test to adjust.. and test to adjust..
Even though I felt a bit lost and overwhelmed in the very beginning of the project and could not even imagine where this is supposed to lead us.It turned out that this whole thing was way more fun as expected and honestly I feel like we came up with something, what could actually work. And I’m really looking forward to continue working on it!
What to you think? Any feedback to our idea? Would you actually play the game?
