Inside Stanford Design Garage- A Weekly Experiment Recap (week 01 / 20)
1. Creation of our team design’s north star:
we came up with a few visions for our project, here is my attempt in pulling them together in one sentence:
Our vision is to create a platform product consists of a production tool for solo travellers to share meaningful travel experiences.
Caveat: based on our weekly need finding interviews and prototype testings we will come back and deepen the scope of our vision. Noticing that now it contains vague terms such as ‘a production tool’ and ‘sharing meaning travel experiences’. In order for us to do the design work, these terms need to be well scoped and that is what our weekly needfinding and prototyping efforts will come into play.
2. Identified a design sprint question
Q: Based on our shared vision that eventually this production tool will enable solo travellers around the world to curate and share their travel secrets and stories, will other people risk their planned journey for other experiences not yet known?
3. reframing problems into opportunities (using How Might We statements)
How might we create a comfortable risk for single ladies and solo travellers to explore branching paths?
4. Our concept video generated from the above HMW question to test our weekly sprint question.
4. Our needfinding results
Q: Based on our shared vision that eventually this production tool will enable solo travellers around the world to curate and share their travel secrets and stories, will other people risk their planned journey for other experiences not yet known?
A: Yes, but they do it in a very interesting way!
Here is how:
We met Tishia, a graphic designer designing greeting cards working in SF who has traveled around the world for a year with a meticulous trip-planning skill. Tishia takes calculated risks all the time.
We were amazed to learn that:
finding reliable travel secrets that she can trust is like a dating experience, she looks for clues of matching taste in travel style in order for her to gauge her source’s level of travel expertise and travel taste.
Traveling for her is like embarking on a loosely structured narrative that is unfolding as she literally puts herself into situations that collectively add up to one giant revealing plot at the end.
We met M, a masters student studying strategic design management who lives in NYC and is an aspiring solo traveller. M also takes calculated risks based on her interactions with the local people.
We were amazed to learn that:
M usually offers herself up for conversations with local people in order for them to get to know her interests in the hope that they would give her tailored-made recommendations on new experiences that she’d likely enjoy.
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Here are other nuggets from need-finding interviews that we find super interesting!
We were amazed to learn that M:
M takes pride in being able to show her knowledge of a place by speaking in a “local language” (referencing specific street names and places names etc.) in conversation with the local people.
M felt like she has become part of the local scenes when she could create a mental model of the places she’s been to and to use it as a way for her to talk about her experiences like a local.
We were amazed to learn that Tishia:
wanted to be perceived as an explorer or a visitor and hated the idea of being a tourist, although she admits that she is one.
has moved away from sight-seeing and more into finding experiences that are worth telling stories about.
Traveling for her is like embarking on a loosely structured narrative that is unfolding as she literally puts herself into situations that collectively add up to one giant revealing plot at the end.
Next steps! Stay tuned!
- Use the findings we collected through need-finding interviews to deepen and define our design’s north star by identifying the scope of vague terms backed by the data from the users we know so far.
- Design user personas and journey maps to understand the broader ecosystem of their travel experiences.
- Create a weekly learning milestone (things we have to learn this week about our vision and users in order to validate our value assumption (if the idea we are pursuing will deliver some value to our users.)
- Free association exercise to map possible design spaces (what if travel is like a film? etc.)
- Prototype competing ideas to get the validated learning.
