Inside Stanford Design Garage — week 2 / 20

Varis

Published in

Inside Stanford Design Garage

10 min readJan 23, 2017

Weekly summary:

week02: Synthesize and keep on iterating

Weekly goals: laid out what we know so far and what inspired us, then try to identify any patterns and themes we see to come up with interesting point of views and how might we questions (turning problems and needs into design opportunities).
Iterated design frame: How might we redesign the travel research experience into a narrative guided by unique personalities?
Key assumption: Travelers use snap judgement to gauge whether their source of information is trustworthy or not.
Key prototype: A user profile page exploring what kinds of information from locals that would signal a sense of trust-worthiness to travelers?
key learning: 1. Travelers look for opportunities to get involve with locals. “I don’t care what Jimmy did because it doesn’t involve me. I like seeing what Jimmy likes because I can get involve in these activities.” 2. Travelers make a snap judgement based on activity-cues whether a local is an extrovert or an introvert. “I can see from the activities that Jimmy likes such as salsa dancing and going to bars that he is an extrovert. I wouldn’t want to go salsa dancing with him because I don’t want him to hit on me.”

Recap of what we know so far:

Travellers are willing to go off from their planned journeys if they feel that the source of information for this branching path is ‘trust-worthy’.

What constitutes ‘trust worthiness’ for these solo travellers?

they used their visceral interactions they gained through a ‘getting to know’ phase with their source of information (their hostel mates, their local bookstore owner etc.) to determine if that person’s or source’s travel style/profile matches theirs, or if that person/source takes into consideration the fact that they now know a little bit about them based on this exchange of personal information (through the getting to know me phase).

This is a valuable learning milestone that we had from last week prototype and our needfinding interviews.

Welcome to week 2, The Synthesis Week :)

The goal for week 2 is to

identify patterns we observed/heard from our need-finding interviews
share other interesting case studies and personal artifacts related to travel experience that we find personally meaningful.
synthesize the raw information into meaningful frameworks in order to identity interesting design spaces for further explorations.

Here is our general plan:

Wednesday 1/18: co-chairs meeting with Paloma! to prep for a smooth and productive/fun-filled meeting on Thursday.

Meet my weekly co-chair, Paloma.

Paloma Martinez: A first-year MFA Documentary Film and Video student. Born and raised in Houston, Texas, Paloma Martinez has spent the last decade working to create social change through the power of personal narrative. After completing her undergraduate studies in Economics and Communications at Boston University in 2008, Paloma returned to Houston to begin her nearly seven-and-a-half-year long career as a labor organizer and eventual Communications Director of the Service Employees International Union, Texas (SEIU Texas).

Thursday 1/19: our weekly meeting kick-off. This week we focused on synthesis and exploring interesting design spaces.

Beginning on Wednesday with a co-chairs meeting with Paloma

This is when me and my weekly co-chair brainstorm on interesting design exercises to get us the results we need for our weekly meeting on Thursday. And this week the focus is on synthesis to explore interesting design spaces.

“Synthesis takes us from inspiration to ideas, from stories to strategic direction” by aggregating, editing and condensing what we’ve learned, synthesis enables us to establish a new perspective and identify opportunities for innovation. HCD Human Centered Design TOOLKIT by IDEO.

The big idea for this week meeting was to laid out what we know so far and what inspired us, then try to identify any patterns and themes we see to come up with interesting point of views and how might we questions (turning problems and needs into design opportunities).

Here is the break down of our meeting agenda for week 2: a Synthesis week!

Inspiration sharing (10 minutes): the goal here is to recognize the fact that the besides going after our customers’ needs, the project fundamentally needs to be personally meaningful to each team members as well and therefore Paloma came up with this great idea to have each team member bring in something that is personally meaningful to them that is related to travel experience and also for each member to bring in an idea / case study / product / service or any solution that has been proven successful in the world to share with the team.

for each exercise, we also came up with facilitator notes, a set of questions to help direct the team inputs.

Facilitator notes:
Why is this personally meaningful to you?
What do you think is the big idea here?
What problem do you think this idea is solving?

by the end of this exercise, we hope to capture big ideas on post-it notes and have them visually ready for us to remix and match during our How Might We synthesis questions.

2. Need-finding synthesis (30 minutes): the goal here is for Paul and I to share what we found last Monday during our usual weekly need-finding and prototype testing day to the rest of the team and for us as a group to pull out themes, contradictions, stories, needs and insights. The key activity here is to identity any patterns that can be fused together to create interesting design spaces.

Facilitator notes:
So this person said this, what do you think it means? What is the need here?
Can we extrapolate that need to a high level insight? ( Do you think this is about building trust via asking probing questions to establish common ground?)
What theme can we pull from this information?
What does he/she seem to be concerned about?
Is there any contradictions between what he/she said and what actually happened?

What we hope to get to by the end of this exercise is buckets (on the whiteboard) filled with themes, contradictions, needs and insights ready for us to synthesis them into compelling design spaces and forming How Might We opportunities.

3. Turning needs and insights into design opportunities a.k.a How Might We brainstorm (30 minutes): the goal for this exercise is to synthesize the raw data that we have laid out so far into compelling design opportunities.

Facilitator notes:
What are some of the tensions we see that could be addressed by a How Might We?

by the end of this exercise, what we should have is a whiteboard full of interesting How Might We questions that put needs and tensions together to form good springboards for ideation.

4. Dot-voting for the most compelling How Might We question and begin assumption dumping and ideation

Facilitator notes:
What does this how might we question assume to be true?
What aspect of the how might we do we want to test?
What are we trying to learn from this question?

We hope that by the end of this exercise to dissect the selected How Might We into a series of assumptions that could be turned into questions that we can address with the prototype.

Here comes Thursday! It’s time to execute the game plan!

Before the meeting, we set up 3 whiteboards that are prepped with necessary information for the team to go off of.

Themes

Earning locals’ trust
Access to one-of-a-kind information / experience
Meeting local people at their level
Orientation both spatially and linguistically (able to speak the local nuances i.e. street names)

Contradictions / tensions:

Tourists not wanting to seem like tourists
Locals may not be as adventurous as travellers
Buying experiences vs. having to work your way for it

Needs (some needs are lower level than others)

The need to orientate oneself spatially and culturally (to speak the local nuances) in order to feel like a local
The need to feel known
The need for comfortable adventure
The need to be recognized that one is worthy to experience a place like a local
The need to find home where ever one goes (need for a sense of belonging)
The need to feel socially normal in a local scene

Insights: (extrapolations from individual stories into overarching truths)

The known factor (being recognized and also being able to converse with locals using specific local knowledge) helps create a sense of belonging for travellers.
Being able to tell stories from your travel experience makes you stand out from the crowd.
A sense of belonging can be derived from one’s ability to orientate spatially and culturally.
To feel socially normal in a local scene means being able to orientate oneself spatially and culturally.

By the end of the meeting, here is the How Might We question we think is the most compelling from our synthesis of needs and insights.

How might we redesign the travel research experience into a narrative guided by unique personalities?

Here are our assumptions that need to be tested through prototypes.

Some of the best travel experiences and stories came from unexpected interactions with people along the way that led them to interesting places- to what extent is this statement true?

How much effort does one need to give in order to feel a sense of self-discovery and worthiness of information?

How much guidance vs. autonomy does one need to have in order to feel like they are in control of their own adventure story?

How much information does one need?

What is the right level of information?

At what point would people start to contribute back to the story?

Would people feel comfortable to publicly share feedback?

How do we make sure that giving feedback will make the product experience better?

Here are some ideas we are beginning to explore based on our selected How might we question:

Virgil (threshold guardian)

Humanized algorithmic recommendations

Avatarized algorithms

travel research as a dating experience

Survey-based interactive travel research experience (i.e. OKCupid)

Crowdsourced trips adventure from people like you

This week prototype and testing protocols

Prototype #2

Rules: The user will interact with an interface that connects them to a local from London, the city they are planning to visit for FIVE days. The prototype has two phases, both with an A/B version we are testing. As the user moves along, ask them to talk you through their decision making so we can gain insight. Use your phone to get audio of the interactions.

Phase 1: “Getting to Know Me”

Insight we are Testing:

Travelers want to send signals to locals and/or fellow travelers of their travel preferences and style in order to gain special access to local-specific experiences and stories.

Questions we want to test:

What kinds of signals do people want to to give?
How much effort does one need to give in order to feel a sense of self-discovery and worthiness of information

How we are measuring

Length of emoji description
How descriptive is their verbal exchange

Instructions

Prototype screen 1 version A : Graphical Signal

Give the user a prompt “Tell us a bit about your ideal travel journey so we can match you with a travel buddy. Hand them your phone with an iMessage app opened ready to type and send a text message (set it to send the message to you or your co-interviewer). Ask them to answer the prompt by using the emojis on the iPhone’s emoji keyboard. Ask them to think aloud while they are doing it. Ask them if it’s okay to record their voice while they are thinking aloud. Take a photo of how they arrange the emoji or ask them to send that to your / your co-interviewer phone.

2. Prototype screen 1 version B: Textual Signal

Hand the user your phone with a Twitter app. Ask them to use it to answer the prompt.

Phase 2: “Getting to know locals at their level”

Insight we are testing:

People want to feel known

Getting to know locals at their level gives travelers a sense of pride and worthiness of local-specific information.

Questions we are testing:

How much guidance vs. autonomy does one need to have in order to feel a sense of control of their own adventure story?
At what point would people start to contribute back to the story?

Instructions

Prototype screen 2 version A: Jimmy Likes

Prototype screen 2 version A: Jimmy Likes

Based on the user’s personal journey description, they have been matched with Jimmy, a London local. Show the user SLIDE 3. Tell the user they have been matched with Jimmy as someone who could be helpful in their journey.

Ask (open ended):