Mapping Postmates as a Service from the Drivers’ Perspective
For Molly Steenson’s Designing for Service, Spring 2016
By Justin Finkenaur, Saumya Kharbanda, Julia Petrich, Tracy Potter, and Diana Sun
Initial Brainstorming (1/26/16)
We began by brainstorming the actors (people, objects, etc.) that relate to the driver and the actions that drivers take throughout their journey using and participating in the service. Researched the elements of the service that the drivers interact with, we looked at information on Postmates website and read articles, blogposts, and forums to get a sense of the service from the more visible to the more hidden elements. From there, we began to consider the concerns that drivers might have and started to map them onto the driver’s actions throughout the journey.
Driver Journey and Stakeholder Value Flows (1/28/16)
We began today’s class session by discussing the driver journey map and what elements we’d want to include. At this stage, we considered the backend (that which is invisible to the driver), the driver’s actions, the driver’s touchpoints to the service, the “conquences” (or rather, what results from the actions, and the driver’s emotions. In beginning to consider the value flow between stakeholders, we started to see how the drivers exist as an intersection between the place-based community which Postmates enters, and Postmates as service or organization of people.
Coming to a Consensus (1/30/16)
We finalized the driver journey and stakeholder maps as a group and then moved on to discussing the proposition and problem definitions. We really struggled with this one, not finding it that useful. It seemed so tied to sentence structure and therefore inflexible and overly complex. We also took issue with the form: which “petals” were situated closer to one another and the lack of any strong visual connection between them. We didn’t feel for this exercise that it seemed valuable to dig deeper into what a better form might be, as we also felt a bit like we were reverse engineering a rationale for Postmates as a service for drivers/other mobile people. While this exercise did produce a rationale, it felt mostly like guesswork.
Our Final Diagrams (2/2/16)
