Studio Reflections-Community Bazaar
A way to promote home-based business in gated communities
The studio on service, system and infrastructure design played a major role in the changing my perspective on how a platform is built in entirety. The studio focused on gated community applications. Several questions like why such a platform for managing communities are built, are they really serving the purpose, are all the features being used and to what extent are they being used, what are the gaps in such a platform, how can the system be made inclusive, are there any sites of improvements in the platform, does the traditional approach of no-app work better in some situations and many more that arose in the studio from various groups prompted me to think deeper than my understanding and look if the system is really human-centred.
Takeaways
I realized that most of the time we think that the designed service serves the needs of all the stakeholders but it is crucial to know that some other indirect participants of the platforms are forgotten or rather assumed to be happy with the service. Hence, as a designer the experience of every direct and indirect participants should be looked closely. It was also great to learn how designing for experiences where real world acts as a playground is different from designing experiences where fictional world (the playground in our control) acts as a playground.
The topic we chose to work on
As most of the gated community applications had several features in them already we focused on how the platform can help residents more. Hence our target audience were the residents of the gated communities. With this in mind, and from several observations and discussions we realized most of the apps out there have not really focused a lot on making the life of people who stay at home in gated communities better. The discussions gave several insights that many are interested and also are practicing home-based businesses because they all want to participate in the economic growth of the family.
Assumptions vs reality
Thus, the assumptions that business is the main focus of people staying at home ruled my mind until actual interviews confused, rather diverted the thought. Not everybody wanted their interests to turn into a business, some (especially elderly) want to provide free service too. For them, it is really important to talk to community people, have more interactions than making money. The problem statement toggled between commercial or non-commercial aspect of our topic. We made use of different scenarios, mapped them and built different journeys to decide on one topic. In the process we realized that interviews play a major role in deciding the problem statement. Also, deciding a problem statement that includes everyone and also functions perfectly is a real talent that can come only with deep understanding and a lot of study!
Competitors!
This was the first time where I had done a thorough competitor analysis and yet could not actually come up with a strong supporting argument on how our concept is different and calls for an action to buy. Thus, yet another takeaway from the studio was to perform a detailed competitor analysis before jumping into the problem statement. Understanding and taking a firm stand on the problem statement is probably the most important and longest step in service design. With clear motivation and justification of the statement making of the service gets easier.
So clearly, our research statement changed back and forth when we finally decided to look into commercial side of the concept. The thought on how the service can be designed having both commercial, non-commercial and the ways it can affect social collaboration in gated communities still pertains. It is also significant to know how big a concept should be to be deployed as a platform and how different a platform is from an application. Also, can some concepts can just be added as a feature in the existing applications and how would it change the service blueprints. Learning about the service blueprint making also gave several insights on how important it is to know the service not only from the customer side but also from the technology used, service provider and affected sources side as well.
Is app a solution always?
After feedback, we also tried to look into how the same system could work offline (no application). It indeed gave insights on how sometimes simple issues are taken into applications instead of trying to correct or improve them in a traditional way. Due to less time, we could not build a really sensible system but tried the best to showcase the rough service blueprint of the same. As another learning, I understood to not look into any problem space as only interface building but also try to look into all possible ways to solve it.
Learning from peers
Also, from other teams and the teams who focused on research through design, I learnt that understanding the user, building the rapport, taking care of the biases in the user, understanding the user’s surrounding is also important for a good design.
Conclusion
To conclude, the studio itself was a great learning from building the service and thinking at system level to focusing on a topic to give the best possible result. It did increase the confidence in me in building the service as the exposure to the tools gave the capability to think deeper. In short, I learnt that building a system takes lot of understanding, ideating, scratching off some of the ideas and iterating the same process to improve the end result at every step.
