IBM Case Study
I was challenged by IBM to design a user-centered solution for a problem in 3 days with my UX design classmates — an unexpected twist led me to work with a team of non-design students to solve a problem with 3 months of research I had never seen before.
IN THE BEGINNING…
My ACC team and I conducted research on the most recent weather catastrophe to design a better way for stakeholders to communicate, organize and mobilize in response to natural disasters, so recovery is more efficient and effective.
Working as a remote team, we mapped out potential stakeholders through Mural to keep our collaborative brainstorming documented in a central location. We ID’d key stakeholders, interviewed business owners, government agencies, first responders, and storm victims. We used the As/Is method to journey map how and what our different types of users think, feel and do during a weather emergency. We gathered quotes, thoughts and opinions through our research, interviews and a few assumptions. In doing so, we learned that no matter how prepared our user thought they were, there was always something that they couldn’t have planned for.
I interviewed storm victims, mostly of tornados, (welcome to Texas), to discover how they were informed about the tornado, how much warning time they were given to get to shelter, and about the aftermath. Some questions I asked were “What were your feelings throughout?”, “What was emergency response like?”, “Did the emergency response work?”, and “What could have gone better?”. I wanted to understand how a person thinks and feels when their lives are in danger because, having never been in an emergency like this before, I needed to gain insight and empathy.
We captured many issues our users faced in their current environment. By doing this, we developed a greater understanding of the pain points they faced as they were trying to navigate before, during and after disaster struck. This deep knowledge set our ACC team up to develop user-centered solutions for our users heading into the IBM workshop.
AT THE CHALLENGE…
A classmate and I were split into a group with 4 Williams College student, who had gathered entirely different research with entirely different goals. My ACC teammate and myself had to learn as much as we could from these students, who are not UX designers, in less than a day about the research they had conducted over the past 3 months. Combining the knowledge I had with the research data they previously collected, I managed to familiarize myself with a multi-faceted problem that was unfamiliar to me earlier that morning.
For the first 2 days, our team was struggling to identify a concrete user and Needs Statement. By helping Williams College sketch out ideas, asking user-centered questions, revisiting their personas, and asking for help from the IBM facilitators, I learned that Williams College and Berkshire County (where Williams College is located) have separate EMS services, separate plans of action, and do not communicate with each other in an emergency. We needed to find a way for Berkshire County first responders to align their preparation plans with Williams College first responders to have a more streamlined emergency response.
We made a Big Idea Vignette to rapidly brainstorm ideas about how we can quickly communicate when there is an emergency and what procedures each stakeholder can take. One of my Big Ideas was to send up a plane with a banner about the emergency plans so the school and city were both made aware.
We also storyboarded to communicate our ideas through user-centric stories. Storyboarding helped everyone on the team to stay focused, given our rapidly dwindling timeline on day 3.
With our Needs Statement nailed down (yet, still flimsy) we decided that we needed a platform that would allow both Williams College and Berkshire County to share and update information so everyone is on the same page. Our thinking was it could be like a shared Google Drive that would hold emergency plans, city maps, important numbers, etc. When this plan was established, I led a prototyping effort to be able to present and effectively communicate our solution idea during the IBM team playback.
IN RETROSPECT…
I would say the problem scope was too large and more research was needed on the ACC students parts to understand the Williams College and Berkshire County dynamic. We were going off of the WC students’ perspective and the second-hand information made it difficult to empathize with users and understand context. If I was conducting the research, I would’ve interviewed the stakeholders and both Berkshire County and Williams College to see at what points the communication broke and how they communicate in general.
A personal pain point was to be encouraging and supportive of the WC students participation during the design thinking process without making the process overly simplified and losing sight of user goals.
I learned how to use open communication with stakeholders and teammates with different areas of expertise. I understand now, from this experience, the importance of creating an environment where participation and open communication are encouraged. In the future, my focus when collaborating will be to nurture common understanding and teamwork towards a common goal.
