Week 5: Finding the Opportunity Space
Week 5 included polishing the insights and design challenges, ideation, sketching, sketch brainstorming and a very insightful session with our sponsors to give us a sense of clarity and the opportunity space we would be working in. Later half of the week we went back to doing desk research in the focused space we’re working on, ideated some directions for paper prototyping, had a few more expert interviews with psychologists, and had a retrospective to write down the goods and bads in our project and teamwork. Also had the office summer party on Thursday (great food and music!) and caught countless Pokémons during the lunch breaks in the parks!
This week gave us quite a bit of clarity into which direction we would be focusing in. What we decided was to go with discovering how Artificial Intelligence could help people plan their days according to their productivity and mood. From our user interviews we found out that there are people who enjoy splitting their days into phases of productivity and magnitude of the challenges they were facing, which we took as a source for inspiration. Also a lack of clarity and structure in the tasks led to work spilling over to free time for our interviewees who struggle with worklife balance. From our expert interviews we have conducted, we figured out how stress can be a result from personal resources not meeting up with the subjective expectations of the difficulty of the upcoming task, which we felt leaves a lot of room for Artificial Intelligence to understand better both the personal resources people have at hand, and the difficulty of the task they are facing based on their previous behaviors and observational data we could collect.
Based on the opportunity space we chose, we had a structured ideation around the possibilities that we would like to sketch and show to users. Moving from “Wouldn’t it be nice if .. ?” scenarios to creating actionable challenges, we decided to sketch forward three things:
- AI organized calendar: Based on the productivity, mood and the difficulty of the task, the AI based calendar suggests timeslots for different activities. (Stuff to learn: Would people find this valuable? How would users engage with it? In terms of data input, what can be too personal?)
- AI and breaks: Using AI, identify the gaps in productivity and mood, and suggest the user to take a break (almost like an updated version of the Pomodoro technique). (Stuff to learn: Would people have the suggested breaks? How important do people find breaks? What’s the best medium to communicate this?)
- AI giving you feedback on your weekly performance: Getting a weekly report of your productivity and mood levels, how many breaks you’ve taken and which tasks have over/underexceeded your expectations. (Stuff to learn: Would users change their planning based on the feedback? What kind of feedback is valuable?)
Super excited to show the sketches to users next week, which also marks the halfway of our internship here in London. As someone who has been quite keen on the calendar side of our project, I’d say I have slight (or well, semi-considerable) concerns about our time management, but at the same time if I think how much we have achieved in the last 6 weeks and given the fact that the project seems much more focused and tangible, I am confident we call pull the low and high fidelity user tests off and move onto the development phase quickly. Also user recruitment, which slowed us down a bit, is going in a much smoother fashion as we are constantly thinking of the interviews at hand and the ones coming up.
At the end of the week we had a retrospective on our team performance. We did an exercise where you draw a boat (the project), an anchor (things holding us down), a shark (things you find scary), wind (things that keep us moving in a good pace) and a sun (things we are happy about the project). It was a good way for us to get our thoughts to the table and discuss how we could enhance our performance; we discussed for example dividing focused and unfocused working (mainly having to do with distractions), having more regular check ups with our sponsors and paying attention to unbalanced workload during the days and among the team members.
Some lessons learned:
*Important to keep up with the desk research and stuff out there already, as we move on to directions based on feedback and the project taking new forms
*Actively validating our assumptions and talking to people gives the whole team a boost of confidence
*Keep trying different ways of ideating: post its with random brainfarts require very low effort and can yield to some crazy stuff, while sketching forces us to really consider the user experience hence bring some constraints to our thinking but lead into more actionable results
*Though retrospectives afters sprints are good, no need to keep stuff piling up, and better just to get it out there as soon as possible
Looking forward to week 6!
/Niklas
