Week 4: “The combination of components or elements to form a connected whole”

Another week flew by with things taking a slightly graspable form here at the Wharf. During the week we conducted user interviews, expert interviews, created interview summaries and playbacked them, followed by an exhausting and seemingly never-ending project of synthesis.

We collected notes, ideas and quotes from the interviews to shuffle around

We’ve been gathering both expert and user insights through one-on-one interviews and pair interviews. Despite the steamy Skype hut, the sessions have been successful and the interview template we created and tested seems to give purposeful results. Emerging themes have been struggling to get offline from work during outside hours, different productivity levels during the day and optimizing for them, breaks and rewards, and feedback and roles and expectations within the organization. From the mental health side, challenges such as stigma and cynicism, difficulty of communication (with traditional platforms), avoidance and not knowing how to help have arisen. At the moment we can see two very different paths in our original problem space — going deeper in the themes within the mental health space, or concentrating more in the productivity and control side. Next week we will have a chat with our sponsors to doublecheck we’re all on the same page.

Bringing all the data we have collected so far — namely desk research, interviews and observations, on Thursday we had our first synthesis.

As broad as what you get with define:synthesis from Google is, that’s how challenging our first synthesis ended up to be. Despite the great help of our mentors and decks provided, finding those themes and themes inside the themes and making sure everyone agrees on the direction we’re going, it was quite the task! Nevertheless after hours of iterating we were able to find those underlying insights, which we turned into challenges to guide our next week.

INsights and CHallenges

Next week we’ll prioritize and narrow down the challenges further to hopefully end up with around 4 or so to guide our ideation and sketching.

On another note, Jack took us on Thursday to check the New Designers 2016 event which was held just around our office. It’s always inspiring to see what the new grads have to show, and this time was no exception! There were also a couple of projects which were interesting from our project’s point of view as well:

Jack trying out a board you can set underneath your desk to keep your blood circulating throughout the day

Helping herbs: indoor gardening kit. While aimed for a different kind of clientele, we’ve researched how greenery can have an impact on the workplace as well

One of the spaces very early on we were interested in was how to humanize digital (communication) services, and remove the “Space the technology has put between us” (quote from an interviewee)

It was super interesting to meet Rich, one of our interviewees at the exhibition as well. Rich’s invention tracks mood based on text messages, and aims to make mental health a more tangible, everyday topic (Yougraph).

Altogether great week, and looking forward narrowing the space further and starting sketching and user testing next week!

/Niklas

Our new teammate from New Designers 2016