Wicked Problem at the Museum
First week at Ironhack… first laughter, first doubt, first beer but above all, first group project!
This first project was about combining system thinking and agile methodologies to tackle a wicked problem. The first one is about understanding the components and relationship of a product, while agile methodology is more about improving solution through collaboration and iteration. In Human words, it’s all about making a user’s life better. How beautiful is that?
For this first exercise I worked with four awesome people with that many different backgrounds, ideas and strenght. It was brand new for me, but I loved working as a group. Merging all of our ideas gave birth to some really interesting results that I would have probably never even thought about by myself.
We’ve been given a list of wicked problem and among them, we’ve decided to work on 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?
Empathising
Observe, Engage, Immerse.
After gathering some data online, we came up with the statement that even though foreigners are prone to visit French museums, French visitors are less and less likely to go. Therefore, the goal was now to understand the reason why.
We started running quantitative (surveys) and qualitative (interviews) researches. Both online via Googleform and IRL. This was actually the first step to empathise with our users and trully understand the problem and the reason why people do not feel that close to their cultural heritage.
Mandatory step to know who we are designing for!
Define
Process and synthesize the findings in order to form a user point of view that you will address
Now that we had a clearer view of our users, it was time to define, sort and interprete the data. We started by doing an affinity diagram: a method used to cluster findings so that you can physically see trends and relationships in data.
We transcribed all the information of our surveys and interviews on sticky notes and displayed them on a big white board. It was super messy at first, but we then ordered and labelled them in different categories in order to see the main trends.
Before:
After:
From that, we gave birth to our Persona, Chloe. A persona is a fictionnal character based on behavior patterns uncovered during the course of the user research. Very helpful tool during brainstorming, a persona should translate the user needs, goals, beliefs, motivations and frustrations. The most important reason to create personas is to set a common understanding of the final user.
Now that you’re more familiar with personas, let me introduce you Chloé Savignon:
Chloe is an easy-going 23 years old student who loves spending time with her friends. Recently, she found a new hobby in going to the museum with her group of friends. But the thing is that when you’re 23 and you’re with you’re friends, you tend to talk about many different topics but art. Chloe enjoys going to the museum but at the end of the day, she feels like she wasted her time as she couldn’t really remember a single thing about what she’s just visited. She’s quite frustrated by that and wishes she could interact with the exhibition by itself as much as she does with her friends.
After that, we continued working as a team about what a typical day off for Chloe would look like. This step is called the User journey, and here is what we’ve drawn:
We imagined the whole story behind Chloe’s day off. From the moment she received an invitation from one of her friend to go to the museum, to the time she goes back home. We could guess how thrilling it was for her to meet her friends in front of the museum, how frustrating it could be to see how crowded it was, how relieved she was when she left the museum, etc. It was a super funny and rewarding step. It gave us a holistic view of the customer experience and helped us defining the real pain point for Chloe (and above that, for all the users she stands for). We opted for the moment she comes back home and realise that she didn’t retain any information from her visit.
Problem statement
A clear and concise description of the issue(s) that need to be addressed by a problem-solving team.
We used the so called HowMightWe process to define the problem. It’s actually a way to turn problematics into potential solutions.
We spent a good amount of time on that but as Albert Einstein once said:
“If I had only one hour to save the world, I would spend 55 minutes to define the problem and 5 minutes finding the solution”
Sooooo it’s okay I guess…
Here is the result of this drastically defining step:
We came up with the statement that our “final goal” would be to help Chloe having more interaction with the exhibition. Being more actor than visitor during her visit.
“How might we help Chloe engage more with the content of the museum”
This lead us to the final part…
Ideation
Translate problems into solutions
Time for our wonderful team to squeeze our (exhausted) brains one last time to lay the craziest ideas we could even think about.
We did this in the form of a Crazy 8. The goal is to come up with 8 different ideas in 8 minutes. We were all pretty tired at this stage but no peace for the wicked ̶p̶r̶o̶b̶l̶e̶m̶. The goal is to generate a lots of ideas, even bad ones or very very bad ones. But as you might know, there’s always something good coming out of something bad. And that’s precisely how we got our solution.
We’ve opted for a prototype of virtual reality glasses that would completely change your experience at the museum. It would gave you all the information you want using holograms of the artists, historical re-enactment of antiquities, possibility to zoom-in on frames, etc. You would also be able to interact with your friends and save&download some content on your phone.
Here is a brief 3-framed story of what it would look like:
Next steps
The next step would be actually to test and iterate this prototype to make it perfectly functionnal. It could also be improved by adding some features ( chatbot, facebook live, etc. )
After that we wrapped this up in slides in order to get ready for our presentation on the last day…
Conclusion
This was an epic first week! I’ve learned so many things and went through this crazy journey thanks to the marvelous teachers we’re working with. It was also wonderful for me to work with my team and I’m very thankful for their effort, support and efficiency.
If you survived reading this all, thank you so much, and sorry if I’ve lost you halfway.
Everything is still brand new for me but I’m so happy to share with you the first chapter of my new life. There’s so much more to come, which is scary and freaking thrilling at the same time!
Anyways, that’s all for tonight folks. Have the most wonderfulest day ever!
