Week 2: Research and Ideation
What we’ve been up to this week…
Research
After a week of researching opportunities for a new product in the area of mental health, we were ready to move on to the next phase: more research! However, this time around we had narrowed down our topic space quite a bit — we determined that we wanted to target our product toward adolescents, young adults, expecting parents and new parents. In the area of mental health, we also decided that we wanted to focus on preventing and managing stress and anxiety. Feeling good about our new research space, we went back to our desks to look further into how stress and anxiety affect young people and how how they handle these areas of mental health.
Organizing and Mapping
We spent a lot of time this week doing exercises to organize our thoughts. One of the most rewarding of these was making a project charter. A project charter entails creating a chart with seven different sections: current situation, why, assumptions, constraints, risks, initial objectives, and success metrics. We filled each section with ideas related to that topic in order to get a better understanding of the problem, why we are creating the product now and some goals for the project. We did this exercise with HJ, Christine, and Ian to ensure that we were looking at our problem space from a variety of angles.
Generating Ideas
Once we had a better idea of our user and the area we wanted to focus on, it was time to start thinking about ideas for our product. We called in everyone in the office to help us by doing a sketching exercise led by HJ, Christine, and Ian. How this worked was someone would announce a prompt (for example, “Sketch an idea for something that would make you happy”). Then we would have a few minutes to sketch an idea and announce it to everyone in the room. We heard a bunch of really cool (and some really odd) ideas during this hour. After the session ended, Debbie, Sherry and I went through each of the ideas and organized them into categories to see if there were any recurring themes that a lot of people suggested. We saw that a lot of people came up with ideas involving mapping where the user is, suggesting activities for the user to do (like taking a walk or getting food), and randomly generated positive messages.
Preparing for interviews
Next week we will begin interviewing subject matter experts and target users to get a better understanding of what kind of product would be most useful. In preparation for this, we have been figuring out what kind of information we are looking to get from the interviews and coming up with questions to ask in order to get that information. We sent out a ton of emails today and are in the process of scheduling time to meet with people next week. We look forward to beginning the interviewing on Monday!
