Remotly
It’s been three weeks of intensive training on design thinking at Innovate for Africa (IFA). During this time, I found myself in a team of four vibrant people in a hackathon — an event consisting of a group of people collaborating to create prototypes that innovate on a theme or improve upon an existing project. This was organized to help understand the processes of design thinking as we saw ourselves gradually implementing each step of design thinking into our project.
Design thinking is an iterative process that provides a solution-based approach to solving problems. Faced with the challenge of unreliable electricity supply and poor network services in many part of the country, remote workers face lots of challenges in relation to finding affordable and convenient workspaces. My team and I embarked on a journey to provide a solution, and to do so, we adopted the design thinking methodology.
Empathise
Empathy is the foundation of human-centered design. To empathize, you need to observe users and their behavior in the context of their lives, engage them and immerse yourself in their experiences.
Potential candidates were asked to fill out a Google form indicating their interest and availability. Following that, we began conducting interviews with our potential users over the phone and in person, asking the following questions.
PMR Interview Questions
Getting to know our users
- Tell me what you do.
- Tell me about your workspace.
- What does a typical day at work looks like for you?
Problem specific Questions
- Tell me the problems with your workspace & how it affects your productivity.
- When was the last time you shared a workspace.
- What’s your biggest pain point with sharing workspace.
- How do you currently address that pain point?
- What do you like about shared workspace.
- What do you dislike about shared workspaces.
- How much time do you currently spend at your workspace.
- What are the essential facilities you need for a conducive co-working space/shared home workspace.(E.g electricity, games, convenience, kitchen etc)
- Tell me about your experience with using a co-workspace.
- What’s your current budget for electricity daily?
- How do you solve your electricity problem during work?
- What could be made to make remote working easier for you?
- If you have a home workspace, will you be willing to share?
- How many people are you comfortable working with?
- Will you be willing to pay & share a private home work space, and how much for what number of hours?
Define
In this stage, the specific needs of the intended users are defined. Problem reframing must be implemented based on the information collected from the interview during the empathize stage. Some complained about the lack of awareness about mental health and lack of mental health care due to the cost of seeking professional help, influenced by the shortage of therapists. Others wanted a way to connect with those who’d gone through similar issues, while most just needed to seek help while being anonymous without worrying about the stigmatization that comes with it.
To ensure we have a solution tailored to the users’ needs, we analyzed the responses and reframed our problem statement based on the potential users’ insights. We also created user personas from the analyzed responses.
Ideate
Here, ideas to help generate an efficient solution for the users are birthed. Design alternatives are generated from various sources and conditions from which you can build prototypes to test with users.
Having grown to understand the users’ needs and analyzed them, we explored the various solutions for the reframed problem statement. At the end of the day, my teammates and I came up with a solution —Remotly, a platform that connects remote workers together and allows them to rent out their home workspaces to save time when searching for workspace, grow side income while sharing, and save money when working remotely.
Prototype
Prototyping gets ideas out of your head and into the world. It is termed Build-to-think and Think-to-build stage. Good product design is achieved when prototypes are done early as it ensures early feedbacks which enables us to develop better ideas and come up with efficient solutions. Prototyping isn’t just a way to test functionality but also serves as a way of gaining empathy, exploring, testing, and inspiring. At this stage, we created a digital prototype for Remotly.
Test
This stage captures ideas on how to produce a better product and create room for more questions on the product. Being that it is an iterative process, we continuously ensured that feedbacks of users gotten from testing the prototype was taken into consideration and evaluated.
PITCH DAY
We had to present our ideas and findings to our facilitators, fellows, and a couple of judges present. I was one of the two fellows nominated to represent my team. We talked about the problem and the steps we took to proffer an efficient solution, our value proposition, market strategy, and business plan. Our Pitch deck consisted of all these.
At the end of the presentation, my team was declared the best team of the competition as we beat the other teams to win the hackathon. It was a proud moment for me and I am grateful for the opportunity and support provided for my team and I by the Novustack team.
This hackathon was an avenue for me to learn a whole lot of things. I understood how the design thinking process helps one in fully understanding the problem from the user’s perspective and creating the right solution.
I got to embody the core values of IFA; Collaboration with teammates, Growth Mindset as we kept learning and improving from each mistake, Innovation, as we’d successfully thought of an innovative solution, Inclusivity, and Diversity, and most importantly Grit, as that was what kept us through the whole process.
Having learned these values, I can easily apply them in a startup and contribute greatly towards the success of that startup as these are some of the key skills required for the growth of any startup, skills, which I now possess.
