Week 6: Synthesis and Decision-Making
As we reach the end of the week, we are confronted with the realization that we have completed six weeks of our twelve week internship. It’s hard to believe we’re already halfway through our summer — it feels like it was just last week that we were introduced to the studio and our project. We’ve come a long way since then and, especially this week, we have made a lot of progress.
After completing our paper prototype interviews last week, we were excited to start looking into the information we discovered. We spent the end of last week and majority of this week synthesizing our data and coming up with key insights that came out of the first round of testing last week. We came up with a deck of our main insights about how users expect to see a mental health product. Once our insights were put together, we came up with a set of hypotheses to look into in our next round of user testing starting next week.
Of the six ideas we tested, two really stuck out during the paper prototype interviews. One utilizes location and user-generated ratings to identify calm areas to destress near you. The other is a journaling app that deletes your entry after you’re done writing it. Both are relatively simple ideas that build on several clinical best practices for dealing with stress and anxiety — namely, journaling, going outside, walking and reflecting. With two such different ideas, we were unsure what to do next. Do we keep testing both?
We reached out to Adam for guidance at this step. He told us that now was the time to take a “leap of faith”. This meant we had to choose one idea to pursue further for the next round of testing and to iterate on for the rest of the summer. With such a big decision, we turned to the trusty pro/con list for each idea.
Even after the pro/con list was done, there was no clear winning idea. They had similar numbers of pros and cons, which made the selection less straightforward than we anticipated. Once again, Adam provided some valuable insight: when choosing a path to go using pros and cons, look at the cons. Are they interesting design challenges or are they real obstacles that will impede on your product as a whole? With this in mind, we set out to a silent, anonymous vote where we would put either “P” for the place idea or “J” for the journal idea.
Which one won?
With a unanimous vote of seven “J”s, we have decided that we will be pursuing the disappearing journal idea.
We are super excited about this development and are starting to formulate a game plan for the rest of the summer to test, design and develop this idea. Next week we will begin by making our next round of prototypes (higher fidelity this time around), then will move to testing and synthesis at the end of the week.
Check back next week to see how our next round of prototyping and testing goes! Until next Friday:
