Weave| Weekly Report
Week 40, 2 Oct— 8 Oct
Objective
With a short week (hello, Portuguese Republic Day!) we aimed to get ourselves aligned and ready to begin prototyping next week. This meant converging our individual storyboards and thinking about our most important goals for initial prototyping.
Actions
We began by debriefing on what we learned from talking to the hotel staff members last week. We found that while some of the staff had worked for the hotel in its previous incarnation (25+ years in some cases!), others joined recently and were recruited by the branding firm Amazing Evolution. These two groups of employees had different approaches to guest interactions, and it will be interesting to think about how our concepts might work for both types of staff member.
We then launched into the storyboards we created over the weekend! First we presented them to one another, then we clustered them by theme, pulling out both similarities and differences between the various visions in a given theme.
Our big thematic clusters included —
Discovering recommendations: How can we help people find the perfect experience for them?
Itineraries and pairings: What if the key to a Madeira vacation experience is ease? Could we help people create or find a perfect day?
Tools to support excellent service: What can we do to support the staff in their providing great service?
Content generation by staff: Could we design tools or processes to help staff create and manage content?
Pre-trip touchpoints: How can we help guest before the journey even begins?
A Pep Talk and a Shakeup
Last week, we presented our work to James Auger, and this week we had a workshop with him to set our project’s direction for the coming months. Our conversation was wide-ranging, but here are a few of the key takeaways:
“There’s this feeling when you walk into a hotel room that you’re the first person who’s ever been there. The toilet paper folded neatly, showing you that someone’s been in and cleaned. The unseen staff. Something you could do would be to profile guests and create that kind of fold-the-toilet-paper experience, but to a much more personal level.”
“What is a perfect day? How do you define that? Obviously it’s different for everyone. Maybe you describe five different perfect days to begin and then you figure out how the thing you design can do that. For example, holidays can be really stressful. Growing up, my family’s worst experiences were on holiday. How do you design the perfect day for a family that are fighting?”
“This is the best time to do project work. The biggest client here is you. Don’t keep your client happy by doing a boring project. It would be far more constructive to come out of this with an exciting, speculative project that shows your imagination. An exciting project…talks about the peculiarity of human beings, the power of systems, and uses technology in a prescient way.”
Next Steps
- Create our first round of prototypes and create a plan for using them as probes to drive discovery.
