Start of the summer ☀️
Welcome Back!
Our summer semester kicked off last week after a two-week break. Nevertheless, since our last update, we’ve been super busy. We wrapped up our research from the spring semester and presented it (in-person!) to our clients, faculty, and peers.
Recap of the last few weeks
During the last few weeks of the spring semester, our team was busy at work curating our research report, presentation, website, and finalizing our initial prototypes. During this process, we synthesized our findings and identified three key findings that negated the three assumptions we started with.
Armed with these findings, we tested two design opportunities — ballparking and multiple inputs in which two important design implications were uncovered. These implications and findings are key as we move into the summer semester.
After our spring presentation, we had a comprehensive collaboration session with our clients. We used Tarot Cards of Tech to understand the potential impact of the design opportunities we’ve explored. Using these cards helped broaden everyone’s perspective on the designs and their approach to evaluating how the designs will impact the future in different situations.
Our findings and prototypes were discussed extensively throughout the day, lots of great questions were asked and our ideas were challenged, sparking new inspiration for our project.
Summertime!
Our team is reinvigorated and excited for everything to come for the summer. To get started, we planned out our timeline for the new three months over the course of four sprints.
Design Synthesis and Abductive Reasoning
Equipped with tons of research findings and insights from last semester we are moving forward with lots of designing and testing summer. At this stage of our project, design synthesis and abductive reasoning will be vital as we connect our research and design phases.
Our team has learned that synthesizing design ideas is a combination of “What I saw” + “What I know” which is an effective model for us to keep in mind as we conduct several rounds of testing. Insurance is a service used by everyone and this definition of synthesizing design is a good reminder that we should use our research findings alongside prior knowledge we have on the industry to curate insights. These insights in return will help us define what we should focus on each sprint.
To ideate solutions and develop our prototypes it will be key for us to apply abductive reasoning. Applying abductive reasoning will allow us to put on both our creative, technical, and business caps. In doing so, we view our ideas from multiple perspectives and can clearly define which idea(s) to prototype and test.
In the spring semester, we focused on developing design concepts primarily for one portion of customers’ shopping experience. Now in the summer semester, we are looking to explore the other phases in the process of getting a quote. We defined the group of customers we will primarily focus on and have reframed our concepts to focus on increasing bundling.
What we know
In the spring semester, we focused on optimizing the customer experience to purchase one product to facilitate bundling after their initial purchase. In a preferred state, we want to motivate bundling by instilling a bundling mindset from the start. This preferred state is what we are focused on moving forward.
The team is re-imagining this future customer experience by exploring a wide range of ideas rooted in research. Given all of the ideas we generated, we had extensive discussions and applied abductive reasoning to decide on which two concepts we would move forward.
We have several assumptions about both concepts and formed research goals to align for testing. To define the success of our concepts, we developed success metrics with the help of other capstone teams. These metrics were transformed into qualitative questions during testing.
To affirm our concepts, we created concept specific testing protocol and have conducting testing with 15 participants.
We will be wrapping up our testing and synthesizing our findings soon so stay tuned to learn about our findings!
