Weave Weekly Report
Week 46, 13 Nov— 19 Nov
Objectives
Exciting news! This weekend, we will test out a prototype in the hotel, asking real guests to use it and tell us what they think. We’re a bit excited, a bit nervous, and eager to hear guests’ reactions before we create our final prototype. To do all this, though, we’ve needed a lot from the Tiles Hotel staff. Because our system relies to heavily on them and their local expertise, we’ve conducted a series of workshops, interviews, and co-design sessions with staff over the last few months. Here, I’d like to go into a little more detail about what that process has been like.
Actions
Exploratory interviews| Our first concern when designing a system that relies heavy on staff participation was whether staff would be open to sharing their information. Part of this was a feasibility question, since the system can’t work without staff participation, but more than that it was about uncovering staff motivations and desires. What do they love about their job and how can we support that? Luckily, we found that Tiles Hotel staff were very open to sharing their interests with guests, and that they seemed genuinely excited about the possibility to better connect with guests. Onward!
Experience prototype, profile creation |After talking to staff, our next step was to let them go through the process of creating a profile to share with guests and hear their feedback about it. We created a quick (and hopefully fun!) questionnaire to build profiles and had three staff members participate. We were once again surprised by their enthusiasm for the project! They immediately began collaborating on their answers to the profile-creation questions and posed with goofy enthusiasm when it came time for the their profile picture to be taken.
Participatory design workshop |Next, we wanted to get staff members’ input on what kind of content our system should feature. To do that, we ran a participatory design workshop with three staff member in which we asked them to think of things that guests would want to know and to think of things that they are comfortable sharing with guests. All three members then looked at one another’s contributions and categorized them according to their comfort level and the interest that they think guests would have in that idea. Once again, we were surprised by staff member’s enthusiasm for sharing their interests with guests. As one staff member said when reading another’s contributions: “Oh, that’s Dorita being lovely again!”
Experience prototype, recommendations | Most recently, we deployed 5-day experience prototype in the hotel in which we asked staff members to provide recommendations for guests. Each day, staff members provided recommendations and stories according to a given theme. One day, we asked them for their favorite things to do outside the city. On another day, we asked them to describe their perfect day in Madeira. To try to find things that staff members genuinely like (and help guests see the authenticity of the recommendations), we asked supporting questions about each thing recommended, like why they liked it or whether they had a story about doing it. We then used these recommendations to populate our guest-facing prototype.
Debrief interviews | Coming soon! Next week, we plan to have a one-on-one interview and debrief with each staff member who created a profile for this prototype. We want to hear what they thought of the prototype, what they observed about guests who used it, and their thoughts about seeing their content in the prototype and any follow-up experiences with guests.
Next steps
· Prototype test with guests in the hotel
· Debrief interviews with staff members
· Refine guest-facing prototype
· Create digital prototype of staff-facing screens
