Sustainable Network Project — Defining Our Path
Welcome back! We are a team of four Digital Transformation Design trainees from the Systems for Sharing track of the Spring 2021 semester at the Digital Society School. Working in partnership with the University of Amsterdam (UvA) and Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences (HvA) we have the following mission on our hands: To understand and improve the communication system of doing sustainability projects the HvA is now operating under.
Our previous quests in this journey of the Digital Transformation Intensive Program led us to this stage, and we recommend you to read them to get more context on our path before diving into this sprint — Our Call to Adventure and Our first Quest. The time has come to reflect and share our findings and accomplishments from the empathize and definition phase of the design process, where we concentrated on defining our main users and their core needs and challenges.
The next quest to dive in for the sustainable network project was clear as water. At this stage, the goal for the team was
To identify the main user groups and the key problems in their individual experiences with the sustainability network.
Quest Tools
Research & Empathize methodologies:
- Continuation of semi-structured interviews with different stakeholders on both general and specific questions about sustainability and its communication;
- External benchmarking;
- Literature Research and interview with an expert on Behavioural Psychology and Community Building;
- Empathy mapping;
- Building personas;
- User Journey mapping;
- MoSCoW prioritization method.
Unlocked Achievements:
- Definition of specific user personas.
- User Journey Map for each persona.
- Definition of specific Problem Statements for each persona.
- Design Criteria prioritization.
This Sprint began by focusing on gathering and analyzing the correlations and patterns from the stakeholders’ insights. This was meant to allow for a deeper understanding of their perspectives on sustainability’s current state of communication.
Empathy Mapping is a great method to synthesize learnings from the research phase, where we had the opportunity to engage with our users in the field, and dig deeper into their needs. By drawing a map for every identified type of user, we categorized each key player and immersed ourselves in the key group traits’: thoughts and feelings (Think/ Feel), discourses and practices (Say/ Do), observations (See) and impressions (Hear) on the topic.
This empathizing methodology helped, not only, to develop important insights on the pains and gains attached to the current system, but also prompted the identification of core problems and concerns that the users have been facing regarding their involvement in sustainability efforts.
Personas & User Journeys
In order to integrate the many findings of our stakeholder interviews and distil their essence, we designed four personas, based on different key problems encountered during research. The personas are fictional characters created to represent people who find themselves in the situation described by their profile’s needs, motivations and goals. Whilst some details change depending on their position within the university, the personas crystallize the commonalities different stakeholders share when finding themselves in each of those situations.
Using the personas, we then built user journeys that describe how stakeholders emotionally and physically experience the common problems we have identified.
As a result, we highlighted the steps and phases of the stakeholder experience for each situation the personas are facing: Having an Idea, Having a Problem, Sharing Resources, and Gaining Awareness. We then defined key challenges and emotional highs and lows, which helped in the definition of a clear problem statement for each persona.
Having an Idea
This group is made of users who have sustainability ideas and would like to develop them as projects within the university.
Problem statement: the complex bureaucratic procedure of gaining access to information, approval and support when initiating an idea/project is leaving stakeholders disoriented, confused, frustrated and unmotivated.
Having a Problem
This group consists of users who face problems in obtaining resources and expertise on sustainability to apply in their tasks.
Problem Statement: due to a lack of oversight over the skills and resources available in the sustainability community, employees are missing out on opportunities to collaborate in solving problems, leaving them with unanswered questions.
Sharing Resources
This group represents stakeholders involved in sustainability efforts and would like to share their knowledge and resources with other stakeholders who might need those for their projects.
Problem Statement: the complex and unclear process of finding support and resources to build on a sustainability project, together with the lack of supportive infrastructure, incentives and compensation on it is making stakeholders unappreciated, confused, uncertain and frustrated.
Gaining Awareness
This group represents users who are not involved in sustainability efforts within the university but whose attention we want to attract and involve in the sustainability efforts.
Problem statement: the difficulty in finding substantial information on sustainability due to lack of visibility, organisation, and reliability of communication — from the sustainability community — results in confusion, uncertainty, disappointment, and frustration of stakeholders who have genuine interest in getting involved in sustainability.
Research insights on community behaviour
- We learned the value of Cialdini’s social influence principles*: Reciprocity, Commitment and Consistency, Social Proof, Liking, Authority, Scarcity and Unity
- Community building is all about building collaborative and supportive networks fostering self-efficacy
- Participatory Co-creation and decision making is crucial for shared responsibility within the community
- Productively framed, open conversations are a useful tool for designing community solutions
- Top-down commitment to improvement is essential for people to feel motivated
- Communication needs to be focused on shared commonalities of stakeholders
- Narratives need to demonstrate how small actions matter and are appreciated
- Often small practicalities get in the way of effective co-creation
Design Criteria for the potential solution
After having our main user groups defined (personas), we made use of the MoSCoW method to start prioritizing the design criteria for the potential solution. This exercise allowed us to understand that even if all ideas may be considered important, they need to be prioritized to produce the more relevant benefits considering our time frame.
Through this technique, we organized the most important and achievable goals, ideally tackled by our future system, by the following categories:
Some lessons and opportunities we have learned for the next quest
Throughout this sprint, we have learned a lot about the latent needs, motivations and challenges stakeholders face regarding the sustainability community. This enabled us to define our user focus and identify their core issues, which lead us to draw specific problem statements for each. We also learned the values of community building and how we can gain a deeper understanding of how to strengthen it through behavioural psychology.
- Our stakeholders face the following main challenges when getting involved with sustainability at HvA: Having an Idea, Having a Problem, Sharing Resources and Gaining Awareness.
- Participatory Co-creation for decision-making between the different parties in a community has a lot of benefits related to how it allows for the creation of a shared sense of purpose.
This has given us a solid background knowledge to start ideating around innovative and effective solutions to tackle our personas’ challenges. The next quest will be full of brainstorming and “outside of the box” collaboration, so stick around!
Follow our Journey
- Go take a look at Our Call to Adventure and Our first Quest
- Check our project’s web page
- Keep an eye on our breakthroughs on Medium
*Robert Cialdini is a well known American social psychologist and a marketing professor. He is best known for his 1984 book on persuasion and marketing, Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion, where is presented the social influence theory in which Cialdini highlights 7 time-tested principles for persuasion.
