Trying to recap the workshop

I haven’t been documenting anything and it bit me in the ass — so I am going to go back and remember as much as I can about the workshop to summarize.

As anyone who has worked at a failed startup (ie me) would realize, there is a huge gap between an app that works, and an app that’s successful. Many Chorus users are not only unfamiliar with the technical aspects of creating an app, they also lack information on how to include users in the app creation process, and how to develop their solution in a way that understands the needs of their target audience. Therefore, the purpose of our workshop was to understand how Chorus users framed and understood their “problem statements,” before they began creating their apps.

We formalized our workshop activities around four concepts used in design thinking strategies; understanding the problem, emphasizing with the patient (user), how an app can help, and brainstorming solutions.

After going through these activities with four participants, we discovered overlapping insights:

• Participants viewed the “purpose of their app” and “the people who would use their app” as separate entities.
• Participants arrived at the workshop with an idea for an app but could not articulate why anyone would need the app and what problem it intended to solve.
• Considering personas, one participant commented, “… persona is not most important information in terms of building an app — of course it’s necessary — but there are other priorities before looking at a realistic person who would access the app.” It was also a challenge for this participant to think of reasons or obstacles that would prevent someone in their target demographic from using their app.
• None of our participants had previously thought about what would be the most important features to put in their app first.

From this workshop we arrived at the conclusion that in addition to providing general onboarding resources (tutorials, templates, etc), we would need to find a way to incorporate design thinking strategies.

As we stress through the process, Chorus does not exist just so they can make an app, we want the app to be successful.