Stakeholder Mapping, Kickoff meeting and Customer Grouping.

Or how we learned to stop worrying and start thinking

Week 3.

As the team and I continue with our project with Polar, we also start to consider the complexity of it all. Who are we designing for? For what purpose? Why? Thing is, you don’t really know. At least not at this stage in the project and certainly not before considering who is invested in the project and what goals they may harbor. When you start considering these 1st, 2nd or even 3rd parties that affect or will be affected by your project, you end up with a massive investigation board and an even larger headache.

“The Stakeholders, this name keeps coming up, over and over again!”

Stakeholder Mapping

To cut through the jumbled mess of red strings, we use a design method called Stakeholder Mapping to make sense of it all. What is stakeholder mapping? To put it in a simple term, Stakeholder mapping is all about plotting out the importance of parties involved in the project and their involvement overall. On the X axis, is influence which is how much this person or party can affect your projects. On the Y axis is the interest, meaning how invested the person is in the project. From this you get 4 general groups of people:

1. High Influence/High Interest
2. High Influence/Low Interest
3. Low Influence/High Interest
4. Low Influence/Low Interest

Cassie Slack from Shopify UX publication has a great post on this: Stakeholder Mapping

In the context of this project being an actual contract, we considered Polar and the UX team as the first group. They, as our client, have a vested interest in the success of our project and can deeply affect how we proceed in the project direction itself. We also are vested in keeping them in the loop and aligning their expectations with our work. As we are mainly ideating solutions for Polar and not going to go into development, we most likely would not see much of their development team, meaning the development team are squarely in the Low Influence High Interest group. Finally, as a student project, the university itself is a party that affects our project. However, the university just doesn’t really have that much interest nor influence over what we do, which is why it is shuffled off to the corner of Low Influence Low Interest.

“MMMMmmm. So good and tasty! (And clean)”

Knowing this information, we know who to keep in the loop and what to look out for in terms of success for the project. We also got rid of our headaches which helped us move on to the next step in the project.

Client Kickoff Meeting

AI? Sports? Uhhhhhhhhh

To align expectations and also to understand more about AI, sports and the issues surrounding our project, we met with Polar’s usability specialist Maija Hautere and Principal Scientist Topi Korhonen in a client kickoff meeting. We gleaned important insights on the market, how Polar operates, their brand image and values as well as what the overall trends of AI is moving towards in terms of the sports data segment. We learned that Polar was really popular with professional athletes. They are the forefathers of sports data collection, being the first to have a wireless heart rate monitor. #BloodSweatAndData is one of their slogans and it shows in terms of their market, visuals and content.

Customer Grouping

Knowing who affects your design is important. However, that is only half the equation. The other half is of course the customers. They are whom our solution needs to help, and whom may pay for our solution. While customers and users are not the same (people who buy your products might not be the ones who use it), we are using it interchangeably at the moment. We used the canvas from Futurice’s lean service creation handbook

They have a lot of great materials to assist in design thinking as well: Lean Service Creation

With the kickoff meeting done, we noted down 3 potential customer groups for our project.

1. Professionals Athletes
2. Coaches
3. Beginners

This is all of course conjecture and without having any validation, not something we will use solely for ideation. Nonetheless, it is good to get customers grouping out for us to form assumptions and align stakeholder in the project. We will be using these three as part of our proto personas as well as a quick and dirty potential user segmentation. In the following weeks, we will be planning and doing interviews then downloading our learnings. From there, ideation will begin and we will move one more step closer to creating a solution for users with AI and sports.

See you next week!