Inside Stanford Design Garage : week 1 / 20
Weekly Summary:
week01: Create our team north star
- Results: Our vision is to create a platform product consists of a production tool for solo travelers to share meaningful travel experiences.
- Key assumption: For our product to be successful, it’s imperative that people trust in each other content enough to buy into these experiences in exchange for chance-encounter and serendipity the travel experience.
- Problem Definition: How might we create a comfortable risk for single ladies and solo travelers to explore branching paths?
- Key prototype: A concept video exploring how much information does it take to spark curiosity and trust in single ladies/ solo travelers to explore unplanned adventures?
- key learning: Travelers are willing to go off from their planned journeys if they feel that the source of information for this branching path is ‘trust-worthy’ and trust-wrothyness was determined by little exchanges between the traveler and their source through question and answer interaction to determine the source’s travel style and personal preference to find a perfect match or an aspiration value.
Welcome to our team weekly blogpost!
Where we will be posting our weekly design process and learnings from a Stanford d.school class called “Design Garage”.
Who we are:
we are a group of interdisciplinary individuals coming from all over campus to work and learn together in this 20 week long design sprint process to turn our visions and ideas into a series of tested prototypes and products that have an impact on real people.
Meet the team!
Varis Niwatsakul, but you can just call me Nott, that’s me, I’m a second-year masters student in the Design Program with a background in architecture and advertising. My research interests explore the expanded definitions of UX/UI current design metaphors that are inherently flat (tabs, windows, cards) to ones that are more immersive and inherently spatial. To see more of my work please visit: www.varis.io
in an alphabetical order
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).
Paul Wallace: A second-year PhD student in the Modern Thought & Literature department. Paul is an immersive storyteller researching exploration-based media, focusing on the spatial elements of narrative and how storytelling unfolds through the act of exploration. He has worked professionally as a filmmaker and an artist for the past eight years, producing award-winning advertising campaigns for video games such as “Assassin’s Creed,” producing projection-mapped stage content for live-shows such as “Marvel Universe Live,” and producing site-specific performance art events such as the “Port Huron Project.”
Rish Gupta: A first-year student at the Stanford Graduate School of Business. Rish co-founded Letsintern in 2010 and grew it to India’s leading internship platform with 4 million users by 2015 when it was acquired. Facebook awarded it as on of the most innovative companies in Student Category in India. As a CEO, he led the business to profitability and acquisition by one of India’s largest Ed-Tech firms Aspiring Minds in 2015.
The seed of our idea:
The project went public during the pitch night:
My project theme that I developed over the fall and presented at the pitch night was:
Open Ethnography Lab: a day-in-the-life crowdsourcing research platform mapping invisible worlds through ubiquitous cameras/cinematography. “Snapchat for research”.
We are on a mission to design the next billion users of the emoathic social media.
Here is the photo from my project at the pitch night:
The days leading up to the Pitch Night
The class is structured in 3 acts and each act spans a whole quarter (10 weeks).
During the first quarter starting in the fall of 2015,the class is catered exclusively for the design program masters students where we go through a series of excercises in trying to define a scope for our projects, which will be used as a lens to teach the design thinking process for the next two quarters. During those two quarters, the class will be opened for any graduate students all over campus to apply and join each individual team with a project scope and topic that interests them.
The very beginning of our journey
Week 01 / 20
Our weekly goals:
We wanted to establish a culture of productive meetings and a clear design process that fits with the team schedule and that fuses many of the best practices from successful frameworks: Design Thinking, Lean-Startup and Design Print.
“The products a startup builds are really experiments”: Eric Ries from the lean startup.
The design process we ended up testing for this week is a design sprint inspired by the folks at Google Ventures. We tailored it to fit with our busy schedule as we couldn’t afford to do a 5 full day design sprint as it was originally designed.
Here is what my weekly co-chair, Paul Wallace, and I came up with. More on the responsibility for the co-chair later.
designating a weekly-co chair is also one of the team/culture design that we thought helped prioritize our team efforts.
Our team design sprint loop: The week starts on Thursday and ends on Tuesday evening after our design garage class where we share our learnings from our weekly needfinding & prototype testing session with our customers.
Before the sprint starts on Thursday, co-chairs meet on Wednesday to discuss our weekly game plan.
Wednesday: co-chairs meet to prep for a smooth and productive week ahead.
What we did:
Me and my weekly co-chair, Paul Wallace, met for an hour to go through our plans for how to best use our time on our Thursday meeting.
How we did it:
As this was the kick off meeting, I volunteered to prepare a whiteboard so that when Paul arrived I could quickly walk him through the plan and get his feedback right away.
Learnings:
Whiteboard is the brain of the team. It really helps to write things down so that they are visible for the team members to see. It helps reduce the cognitive load so that we don’t overload our short term memory.
I find the process of preparing a whiteboard before the meeting even begins really helped save a lot of time and to have a structured feedback.
Thursday (The Start of a Sprint Week): problem scoping, picking a design sprint question and select a target user.
Our Process:
Start at the end exercise: the goal is for each team member to share his/her own project vision/ aspiration and any long term goals.
Assumption dump: or what does it take for our vision to be true: the goal here is to take those long shot goals and visions and come up with things that would prevent us from reaching our goals. The rationale for this process is that for any idea to be successful, we have to test the assumptions that are those ideas assume.
Seeing problems as opportunities: the goal for this step is to focus our attention to turning the problems foreseen into design opportunities.
Select a sprint question and a target user group for Monday testing.
Here is what we came up with at the end of the Thursday meeting:
- A selected problem scope:
How might we create a comfortable risk for single ladies/solo travellers to explore new opportunities?
2. A selected target group
Single ladies / Solo Travellers.
Learnings:
Starting the week with an optimism of sharing our visions for the project and then start to list all the things that could go wrong actually helped we generated a lot of interesting and effective How Might We questions (one of the design thinking techniques used to turn problems into design opportunities). This combination of putting on an optimistic hat and then a pessimistic hat helped we formed HMW questions that tried to resolve tensions, which is always a good proxy for the design team to judge the effectiveness of a HMW question and to avoid any HMW that is too broad, “How might we redesign the future of social media” or too narrow, “how might we design a sharing button” or too generic “how might we design a sharing experience”.
Before Monday: ideation on solution ideas and prototyping those ideas for user testings on Monday.
Questions we want to answer with this prototype:
A concept prototype to test, at a high level, the validity and the potential of our concept (the value hypothesis) whether what we are pursuing will really provide value to our customers.
We also wanted to test the question of how much information does it take to spark curiosity and trust in single ladies/ solo travellers to explore unplanned adventures?
Our process
- Visualize our target user journey (30mins): the goal is to unpack the broad notion of “travel experience” into something we could focus our ideation effort on.
2. Pick a single moment along that travel journey and brainstorm on what kinds of risk are associated with that particular activity. (30 mins)
We were interested in the ‘getting lost’ moment and wanted to explore ways of knowing without knowing that provide a little bit of trust but still leave some room for new adventures.
We came up with this How Might We question:
HMW design a ‘getting lost’ experience that strikes a balance between curiosity and trust?
3. Storyboarding quick and dirty! (30 mins)
4. Shooting (1 hour)
5. Editting (45 mins)
6. Prep testing method for Monday’s needfinding and concept evaluation. (1 hour)
Learnings
done is better than perfect, we were able to go from concept ideations to storyboarding, shooting and editing in 4 hours. We realized that each step in the design thinking process can go from months to 30 minutes. The fact that we were in the mindset of getting stuff done just with enough fidelity to test our assumptions really helped moving things along and at the end of the day we felt like we have accomplished something that we felt could deliver the learnings we were hoping to have for that week sprint question.
Monday: needfinding interviews and concept prototype testings.
stay tuned for our findings!
