Sprint 2: Officially on the road, fueled by research
After our kick-off, our team was excited to dive into research. We were eager to better understand what it means to be a digital insurer.
Designing for service emphasizes the importance of customer satisfaction in a way that’s more closely tied to the broader needs across the lifetime of a customer. A successful service encompasses complex human emotions and nuances, which needs to be fueled by research. According to Evenson’s exploratory, generative, and evaluative research phases, our team is planning to dedicate this sprint to exploratory research.
Sprint 2, Week 1
Secondary research
We started by brainstorming our research goals based on the information we gathered through client kick-off meetings and our one-page project proposal. After categorizing what we wish to understand by topic, and who might be able to provide answers, etc. We realized we need to take the first week of the Sprint 2 to do a thorough secondary research before actually talking to end-users. Therefore, in our secondary research plan, we took the below approaches:
- Product Walk-throughs
Each teammate takes on a few flows from both Progressive and its competitors that we wish to familiarize ourselves with. To experience first-handedly the current user experience regarding Multi-product quoting. - Expert Inquiries
Since our problem space taps into trust and leveraging AI power for interactions, we want to orient ourselves with established research. We reached out to renowned professors from the CMU community to see what their take on the topic of designing for human-AI interaction and instill trust from their expertise in transformational design and AI product innovations. Luckily, we got pointed to valuable resources and conducted literature reviews. - Internal / executive interviews
Our team curated a list of questions for internal stakeholders and scheduled 1:1s. This article elucidating the benefits of conducting internal stakeholder interviews helped inform how we conducted these interviews. We saw value in the perspective of stakeholder who closely interacts with our target user. For instance, customer success teams or human agents at the call center. This would help us construct a better service proposition — one that considers both a bottom-up, needs-based approach from customers, and a top-down one from the stakeholders.
Synthesis
Halfway through Sprint 2, we were able to synthesize a significant amount of secondary research data and insights that we individually collected from the internal interviews and product walk-throughs via affinity diagramming. To converge the information gathered, our team laid out our ideas on a physical whiteboard in our MHCI lab room. Before we gathered, each team member brought 3+ key insights from their research. After we all got our thoughts on the board, we all individually “walked the wall” and then created affinity clusters together.
A question we asked ourselves before diving into the sea of information we’d gathered: What do we want to walk away with from this activity?
Looking back at the huge board we worked was very rewarding! We walked away from our 2 two hour session with a shared understanding of the information we gathered so far and assumptions we wanted to validate. As we move into the next week, we hope to use this session to inform our screening and interview questions.
Sprint 2 Week 2
Primary research Plan
Looking ahead into Sprint 3, we’re thinking of the following as we start curating curating primary research protocols and screening questions:
What are the social, emotional dimensions of the job?
We value primary research as it provides us an opportunity to take in-depth investigation in the lived-experience of end-users. We attempt to resonate not just with the functional dimensions of the job-to-be-done, such as understanding insurance benefits and acquiring one to meet the requirement, but also with the emotional and social ones, especially when insurance is tied closely with personal growth values like empowerment.
What methods to employ?
While we think semi structured interviews, think-alouds and directed storytelling are great starting points for our primary research we want to adapt these traditional methods to better fit the purpose of our unique research goals. We might even create new success metrics to help guide our insights.
Other Takeaways
Separation of Concerns
We aim to restructure the following Sprint review meetings to more of a showcase demonstrating our progress, rather than a brief status update and continue digging into Q&A. Although it’s tempting to get more information from our client to help us better orient the problem space in the initial phase of the project, we believe separating the demonstration from asking for input will keep us on a healthier rhythm when moving forward.
