Update: Week of October 2nd
This week was a very productive week for team Plates. We started our session by voting on all of our ideas that came from our rapid ideation session. Our board was full of post-its with ideas ranging from brilliant to wacky. We went through everyone and voted thumbs up or thumbs down. After this we moved all the notes with 3 votes or higher to a high impact low impact model. At first we had a feasibility axis containing hard to execute & easy to execute. This later disappeared as we realized that shouldn’t be a factor for deciding on the value of an idea. This class is about making a solid business plan that makes sense to investors and provides a great product for our consumers. It’s easy as interaction designers to try and steer away from things that aren’t app or internet service based but I believe thats one of the main points of this class that it doesn’t matter if you’re asking for $1 Million for a dating app or $100 Million for a fleet of jetliners; as long as you have a strong business plan and sound evidence to back up your claims the sky is the limit.
After we had our ideas arranged from most impactful to least impactful we removed the lower half, it was a day of harsh criticism, being realistic, and ultimately purging. After looking at what was remaining two strong concepts appeared to me. One was dealing with post earthquake services; how might we deliver kits to people who failed to prepared right after an earthquake or how might we house thousands of earthquake refugees. The other strong concept was community; how might we help people take responsibility for their preparedness and build a sense of community with group initiatives. Both really stuck out to me because they were in relatively blue oceans. This is how we are going to get out 9x.
Personally I see the post earthquake as more of a blue ocean ripe for innovation. We have one strong insight to back that up. Almost everyone you ask about how prepared they are says “I should be, but I’m not”. Everyone knows they should be but not a lot of people are. There are already a plethora of options to buy kits and supplies so why aren’t people using them? I think people have an innate sense of “out of sight out of mind” So why make another kit service that people wont use. The really disruption comes from getting supplies to people who need them most after a quake. As well as housing the large number of people that will ultimately be displaced by the next “big one” Food for thought: the US National Archive states in relation to the 1906 San Francisco earthquake “Despite a quick response from San Francisco’s large military population, the city was devastated. The earthquake and fires killed an estimated 3,000 people and left half of the city’s 400,000 residents homeless.” If you extrapolate for today; half of the 830,000 people that live in this city, 415,000 could potentially be homeless. Post earthquake services for me seems like a much bluer ocean. I made these points to my group during ideation but we decided as a team that community is what we are going to explore first.
So we re-wrote our elevator pitch.
Our community prep tool helps SF neighbors who want to get prepared together by establishing plan of action and feeling secure and motivated about stuff you wouldn’t do otherwise unlike anything else.
I was initially inspired by the concept of community preparation it seemed like there could be some really valuable innovation in there somewhere. However, as we continued to debate by the white board the idea of being a “9x” product seemed to slip farther and farther away.
Our next move was to develop tests using the value proposition canvas. In the book Nº 6 states it’s essential to identify idea killers first. Our main idea killer could be “do people even want to get prepared in a community with their neighbors?”
So we made storyboards, a participatory road map, and a new interview and headed out to wait by Whole Foods. We were lucky enough to have a uniformed SF Fire Department worker walk buy he referred to himself as “the NERT guys” As we gave him our elevator pitch he told us it seems hard this would be a grassroots movement which are traditionally hard to get off the ground then he gave us an amazing quote. He said “do not reinvent the wheel” I thought this was great advice. However we also talked to a school teacher who lives in a community with a lot of ESL people and she loved the idea. As we press forward I am going to urge myself and my teammates to not fall victim to confirmation bias.
confirmation bias (n.) is the tendency to search for, interpret, favor, and recall information in a way that confirms one’s preexisting beliefs or hypotheses, while giving disproportionately less consideration to alternative possibilities.