Get Directions to the nearest Conceptual Prototype
With Sprint 4 in progress, our team is super excited to start using our data and insights as a foundation for our conceptual prototype. We made great strides in Sprint 2 and Sprint 3 and we are confident in our progress and direction as we start to narrow down on areas of focus and design opportunities.
Brainstorming for the Conceptual Prototype
We’ve dedicated ample time to our research and further solidifying our teams’ understanding of the customer experience at CarMax. Now, it’s time to start testing and validating our insights as we move toward our conceptual prototype.
Slushy Ideation Card Game
Before diving into our conceptual prototype, we wanted to conduct a fun, lightweight, activity that would get the whole team thinking critically about the data we identified in a low-pressure setting that would get everyone involved in the process.
To do so, we created a card game that would have each team member switch between roles as a brain stormer, recorder, and third-party perspective, all while constraining our focus to specific problem areas and primary recipients of value. We met up as a team, picked up some of our favorite caffeine and sugar-fueled slushies from a nearby market, and started thinking of blue-sky ideas for our project!
While most of the ideas we generated were out of scope for our project, such as large RPG-style wayfinder beacons for the car lot, the game served as a really fun activity for the team and further expanded our thinking to areas we hadn’t been considering before.
Conceptual Prototype Brainstorming
For the first pass of our conceptual prototype, our team narrowed down on several different problem areas identified on our Opportunity Space Activity from Sprint 3.
We went through and identified specific problems we wanted to address and how solving said problems with a conversational agent would create value for the customer and CarMax. Leveraging the data gathered from our research and service blueprints, we started thinking of ways that we could use a Wizard of Oz approach to simulate the experience of talking with a conversational agent and, just as important, wherein the car buying process these interactions would take place.
Despite our best efforts at this brainstorming, our team hit a critical point where we ultimately decided that we wanted to conduct more research to make sure that we were all confident in the area we were addressing with our conceptual prototype. This kicked off a greater conversation around the data we had gathered and how we could use it to inspire new research endeavors. In reflecting on our project up until this point, we were all very proud of the research we had conducted but felt a need to a bit more targeted research to make sure we were all confident in our rationale for the conceptual prototype.
Revisiting our Research
The first step in changing direction on our conceptual prototype was revisiting our customer interviews and approaching the data with customer goals and pain points in mind. We split up the customer interviews and each team member went back through the interview notes to record what goals and pain points came up during their interviews. After going through each of our interviews, we met back together as a team to discuss what we found and started to identify new trends in the data.
We used this discussion to transform our individual insights into a greater holistic evaluation of the data gathered across all of our research. Doing all of this in the lens of what CarMax currently (and could potentially) provide, we shifted our attention on creating needs statements that would encompass the values and behaviors expressed across our customer interviews. We created six needs statements that represented, and aimed to address, the prevailing goals and problems identified in our research. After defining our needs statements, we decided that the best way to evaluate and communicate these needs in our research would be to create storyboards and conduct speed dating sessions with CarMax customers to evaluate the perception of our identified needs and efficacy of possible solutions.
Storyboards Ideation & Creation
Initial Storyboard Ideation
Coming off of the creation of our six needs statements, the team split off individually to come up with storyboard ideas that would address the pain points inherit to each need and provide a solution that users could evaluate. We kept this process very open-ended, provided that all solutions needed to utilize a conversational agent in some way — what embodiment or modality that agent utilized, however, was left entirely to the imagination of each team member.
After completing our individual storyboards, we had each team member walk through their scenarios. We set-up a separate area on our Miro board to categorize each idea based on the need it was addressing.
Finally, after walking through all of the ideas, we discussed them as a team to determine which ideas we would be iterating on for our final storyboards. This activity got everyone thinking critically about the project and provided an implicit look into our understanding of the problem space and the solutions we think could be used to create value for customers and CarMax.
Final Storyboard Scenarios
We got started on the final storyboard scenarios by drafting text-based storyboards that described the interactions that would be taking place between the stakeholders and our conversational agent.
After evaluating these drafts, and making some edits, Will and Christie started to create visuals for each board.
With the needs identified and storyboards created, we started to look toward the method by which we would evaluate our ideas.
Conceptual Prototype, here we come!
To evaluate our storyboard scenarios, we will be conducting speed dating sessions in the coming weeks with CarMax customers to validate that our identified opportunity spaces are, in fact, areas of need felt by customers. We’re excited to continue this journey and look forward to learning more!
