Inside Stanford Design Garage, week 05–06 / 20
Weekly summary:
week05–06: Accelerate learning around a new pivot through rapid prototyping and testing (Iteration 1)
- Weekly goals: design quick experiments to test the riskiest assumption about this new pivot
- Key assumption: For our product to succeed, it’s necessary that we bridge the gap between the power of sharing of local knowledge and the fear of tourists-gentrification of local places.
- key prototype: our thought experiment prototype called “Circle of Sharing” was designed to answer two key questions. 1. what are the “gates” for these gatekeepers of local-knowledge? 2. When is the tipping point in this knowledge is power metaphor in the world of travel?
- Key learning: we learned two things from our prototype 1.Protecton of Access. which applies to certain kinds of locations and experiences such as outdoor/nature experiences. The logic behind protection of access is that the value of going to these places is to not be overwhelmed by people. The reality might be that everyone knows about these places. They are not pristine areas, but sharing that publically on a social media might lead to overcrowding of such favourite places. Hence, people would likely protect limited access to their favourite local spots. 2. The best-friend list, where it’s really not about how impressive the place is in and of itself, but more emphasis on people and overall ambience of being there with the people.
Our guiding vision
To empower locals to share their knowledge with tourists
Users of the week
This week we focused our need-finding effort on “experience hosts” who have produced experiences for AirBnB.
Reasons for our pivot in user group
we learned from our last interview with Jack that experience hosts are a growing community of deeply passionate and interesting folks whose set of needs are being underserved. They are folks who think a lot about their community, passion and the relationship of both related to travelers and tourism at large, hence, one of our assumptions is that by talking to these folks we would be able to help them solve problems at a system scale.
Emerging themes that fascinate us from our interactions with these experience hosts.
Hosts are concerned with community exploitation
We met Jane (a fictional name to protect the person’s privacy), a 30 something woman who is a pioneer participant in AirBnB’s pilot program for hosting beyond home.
We were amazed to learn that:
Generating new trip ideas is not a problem for Jane, contrary to that, she had so many ideas to the point where she felt like she was held back by the lack of trust from the people during the vetting process although she was one of the main person who helped AirBnB pioneered this new feature.
She was concerned about having the consciousness in regard to scaling this platform and thinking about possible negative impacts of sharing local favorite spots with guests since there might be a group of locals who would be less welcoming to share their best kept secrets with AirBnB people (tourists).
“AirBnB is selling this as locals’ secrete spots, but that is going to last for like a year, and all of those favorite secrete spots that we have, AirBnB people (tourists) are gonna be there.”
“I’ve learned through experience that if you take people to your favorite spots there are going to be locals there who don’t like it. You are going to be having some possible negative impacts unless you are responsible and maybe do a little homework ahead of time”
Design opportunities for this user group:
From a handful of design opportunities (using How Might We opportunity statements), we selected two most promising design questions that we want to prototype for based on the high-level problems we saw across our users.
Critical assumptions we want to validate with our prototypes:
For our product to succeed, it’s necessary that people feel like their passion is something worthwhile for others to enjoy.
For our product to succeed, it’s necessary that we bridge the gap between the power of sharing of local knowledge and the fear of tourists-gentrification of local places.
Focusing on the latter assumption we created this prototype to find out more about this tension.
Stay tuned for our user-testing results!!
Designing our design process:
The goal for the design process for this week is to : formalize our team process for unpacking need-finding interviews in order to make the most out of our valuable need-finding effort.
- We divided the interview we did with Jane for 45 mins into 11 min chunk, each of us take that 11 min chunk and take a pass through it while writing down interesting quotes or problems that come up.
- Each team member send their notes consist of quotes, themes, or any interesting patterns one noticed to co-chairs to prepare for brain board (one of our many distributed cognition tools!). (where co-chairs will print out these quotes and other interesting findings on cards and display them on a board ready for any synthesis activities during meetings)
- Co-chairs create a shared document that summarizes key lessons we as a group learned from this person (using this framework: We met (a person name), we were amazed to learn that (interesting snippets / problems) Co-chairs will print this out and hand it to team members at the beginning of every meeting.
- Generate design opportunities (using How Might We questions) and pick two most promising ones for parallel prototyping.
