UX Visioning Workshops | Weekly Report

Week 39, 25 Sep — 1 Oct

Miki, Catherine, Mike Walking the Wall After Visioning

Objective

This week, we tried to cross the hurdle of converging our ideas and gain further insights on the hotel by meeting with staff.

Actions

We conducted a third visioning workshop, narrowed our concepts a bit more, and conducted interviews with the hotel manager and staff.

As a team, we held a workshop to collaboratively synthesize our ideas. We first visioned another set of ideas based on the list of distilled ideas from the past week(you can find those here). We, then, let those ideas soak in for a day and went back to critique them based on three evaluation metrics: “+”, “-”, and “?.” We walked the wall and silently marked anything we liked, had concerns on, or questions about using stickies. This allowed us to open up and discuss each idea, while still being very high level.

Our discussion raised some valuable points about what was important to each of us in terms of where the project was headed.

While we work on converging our ideas, we also had the task of visiting the hotel to conduct staff interviews and meet with the operations manager. We spent a few hours thoroughly interviewing each available staff member and asked them questions related to the operations, management, individual tasks, guest recommendations, and past work experience. This gave us some great insights as we learned some of the staff were past employees of the old Hotel Gorgulho and were rehired along with new hires from other resorts.

Miki, Trisha, & Catherine waiting to conduct staff interviews at Tiles Hotel, Madeira

Visioned again, now what?

We presented our current state of the project to our mentors to understand how to narrow in on our concept. They recommended we focus on specific personas, challenge ourselves to think about something that gets us excited, and also told us to make the most of the project despite the hurdles we’re facing on the client side.

This lead us to create another plan to get us one step closer to converging. Let’s see what happens on the island next week!

Next Steps

• Storyboard concepts we’re individually excited about to regroup and discuss again
• Synthesize research insights (transcribe staff interview audio)
• Determine scope of our ideas to present to mentor
• Create Codesign/Prototyping plan