Inside Stanford Design Garage — a need-finding milestone presentation to David Kelley.
Weekly summary:
week03–04: Develop a compelling user story
- Weekly goals: frame working user data we have gathered so far and weave them into a compelling narrative
- First pivot: from focusing on travelers to experience hosts of AirBnB. Why? from talking to our users, the biggest friction seems to be on the locals’ side and their hesitation to share their local knowledge with tourists. We figured that if we can unlock this behaviour of locals sharing their local knowledge to travelers, then we could build a whole new category of market and achieve the innovation we are after.
- Iterated design north star: To empower locals to share their knowledge with tourists
- Insights: Experience hosts are concerned with community exploitation due to over-sharing of local knowledge to tourists.
We ended week 4 with our need-finding milestone presentation to the teaching team and the class with David Kelley taking the front row!
Our vision:
To empower locals to open their worlds with tourists and embrace tourism.
Here is what we know about the users so far ( aka. our current assumption about our users)
Dan (the AirBnB experience host) doesn’t want to be exploitative, so he pours a ton of work into his research and production process. By doing this, he creates a sense of welcome-ness for his guests (satisfying Tish’s need), which give them access to local knowledge (M’s need). These experiences strike the balance of pre-curated with unique challenge, thus generating great stories for guests (K’s need).
of course, this is one of our main assumptions that still need to be tested through prototypes.
Here is our design process leading up to that assumption.
Customer-development work continues…
During week 3 we have conducted two more in-depth need-finding and user testing interviews with one extreme user who was a solo traveler roaming around 24 countries for the duration of 12 months and an expert user who produced experiences for people to learn more about LGBT’s community in SF.
A break down of our weekly meeting agenda (co-chaired with Rish Gupta)
- A refresher of the major assumptions we have been testing: recap of our research questions we have tested so far along with our past and current prototypes
- Unpacking our need-finding results: using empathy maps.
- Brainstorm on the design space axes: where we pull out high-level dimensions along which our observations or ideas vary, then look for holes
- Creating design personas: in order to make it easy for the team to remember these characters when needed.
Lessons we learned on design leadership:
Carrying out design frameworks that compliment how human brains work will play to the benefit of having a team meeting. For example, we asked our team members to do an exercise on empathy mapping, which involved unpacking our need-finding interview findings into 4 buckets consist of;
What the user said (Objective observation)
What the user did (Objective observation)
What the user felt (Inferred from objective observation)
What the user thought (Inferred from objective observation)
We did this by having the team to populate the top half of the quadrants first, which is based on objective observation (e.g. what the user said and did) then move on the infer what he/she might think and feel.
We learned that it’s better to start with a quote that the user said and take it through the loop one at a time rather than incorporating many quotes at once. One of the reasons for that is the bottom half of the quadrants (think and feel) require logical inference from the objective observation from the top half (do and say). Hence, by having a controlled process of adding one element at a time and systematically asking; he said this and did this, what might he be feeling or thinking? would work better to our human cognition of short-term memory.
Design Space Axes
on the x-axis: (left) unorganized and (right) organized.
on the y-axis: (top) informational and (bottom) experiential.
The diagonal lines in each quadrant represent the spectrum between very challenging (top) to not challenging (bottom).
We were interested in the bottom half quadrants, which focuses more on providing experience rather than information to travelers. We also thought that hitting the sweet spot between curation (organized) and serendipity (unorganized) was also something we would like to explore further. On the challenge axes, what drew our attention was the notion of comfortable risk, something what slightly makes you vulnerable, but still in control.
Personifying our travelers
We met K
“At that point, I wanted a challenge. I really enjoyed challenge. Looking back, Europe is so easy. There is no challenge. They are so easy. Costa Rica was the same thing. Their tourist infrastructure is down. They have got it down. I felt like I was cheating.”
A 34 year old lady from a farm in Michigan who is currently living and working in SF as a marketing copy writer. She is a self-proclaimed introvert, who is known by her readers as the wallflower wanderer. She has just completed her around the world travel expedition, which took her to 24 countries. She has a keen aspiration to become an exceptional travel writer and and she was trying to do exactly that during her year-long trip by keeping a travel blog. As an introvert, she wanted to meet real people and have real local experiences, but contrary to her wishes, she hired tour guides and was too shy to speak to anyone during the beginning of the trip that started in Spain. She said she likes to give herself challenges and is proud of herself for overcoming hardships during her money crisis in Cuba. Currently planning a trip to Amsterdam, a city that she said is going to be so easy for her, but would do it anyway for her love of history.
We met M
“I like to do things according to my own time. I feel anxious if people have to wait for me.”
M is a 24 year old female student from Bangkok, Thailand who is currently living and studying strategic design management in New York City. As a graphic designer and a former architecture student, M has a keen passion for places that inspire her creativity. She loves the romantic vibes of watching cities’ skylines turned orange as the sun sets. She values freedom when it comes to travel, which means being able to do whatever she wants and whenever she wants without having to wait or reach a group consensus. This makes travelling solo a perfect type of journey for M. Contrary to her wishes to do things according to her own time, one of the things in her bucket list is to do a volunteer work with kids in South Africa, which she did just that, to work and live amongst dozen of strangers from around the world who came to participate in the same travel-volunteer program as she did. While taking a break to carve out some alone time for herself to recharge, M often takes pride in meeting locals at their level, which means that she loves being able to show her knowledge of local nuances by speaking in local terms, whether it’s about referring to a specific street name or being able to name local places with a taxi driver. These are a couple of things she tried hard to get right. Grasping a sense of orientation is also very important to M because it gives her a sense of being in a place and not just floating around like what most tourists do. She loves meeting new people and forming new friendships through little exchanges of questions and interactions in the hope to get people to know her in her own terms and based on the initial impressions they have of her she hopes they would give her tailor-made suggestions on places and things she might like to do.
We met Dan
“Everyone’s always trying to do good work, but you have to do it in the right way.”
Dan is a 30-something male living and working in SF, splitting his time between running a queer activism nonprofit and a travel abroad program for college students. He is producing and running his first trip — a queer history bike tour through SF. Dan got lucky, since he had a decade’s worth of community building techniques to draw from; however, producing his trip still took months of research, planning, and hard work in the community. It was exhausting to plan, but Dan did it because it was a labor of love, benefiting not only his guests, but the community as a whole. For Dan, great trips mean producing great stories built through community trust.
“I didn’t assume I belonged there… I wanted to make sure it didn’t feel like exploitation… The definition of being an insider is building relationships… It was this really amazing experience of telling these stories of queer community and queer people looking out for each other, and then experiencing that in real time.”
Behind the scene photos:
