Design thinking for Innovation, Assignment 23 November 2019

1. Challenge: Describe your challenge, including all relevant information.

The overall challenge is to develop voice services to increase overall content streaming for  the audio content of a national broadcaster.

People who like the audio content of a national broadcaster want to be able to access it  easily around their home through their voice activated smart speakers. Our hypothesis is  that activating it using voice services rather than hand held devices is more convenient to  them provided they can easily navigate to the content they want.  We already have lots of  data about the content, frequency of streaming and related user data. However, we think  people would access and listen to more content if it was easier to locate what they liked,  including content they already know about and new content that they might discover.

I selected this challenge because it really meets the criteria of being the right kind of  challenge for design thinking:

• it is not a clearly defined

• it is a human centred problem

• there is a whole eco-system of content and streaming methods and devices to

contemplate

• there is plenty of ambiguity

• it’s a great opportunity for observation and deep-diving to get insights

2. Selection: In your own words, briefly describe the tool you selected (e.g., what it is and

why you selected it for your challenge -- including any appropriate video lecture  references).

The project is recognised as an innovative and high risk, potentially high reward project, so  stakeholders needs to be continually inspired to support, fund and engage with the project  as it evolves.

The tool I’ve selected is Story-telling because it’s such a powerful tool to communicate the  evolving strategy in a project like this. It involves getting deep insights into people who use  voice services and who want to access audio content around their homes from their smart  speakers. And it involves telling those stories to the stakeholders.

3. Application: Describe how you applied the tool you selected to your challenge (e.g.,

what you did and how the tool was applied effectively or ineffectively).

After conducting user research as described below in grey, I used the insights I gathered  from that exercise to identify the different personas and tell their story to the stakeholders:  who they are, what is there lifestyle and day to day life like, what are their likes and dislikes,  what is important to them etc. This created a vivid picture, including actual pictures  of  different types of users, although very limited at this stage due to the small amount of initial  research.

I told the story of how they interact with current voice services today, how they feel about  it, what the pain points are, what ideas they have and what gets them excited about what  they could do if anything was possible.

[I visited people I know in their homes and asked them lots of open ended questions: What  content to they listen to in their home including spoken and music? Why do they listen to  that content? What is it they like about it? When do they listen to it? Which rooms? What  activity are they doing at the same time? Do they listen with someone else? Do they stop,  resume or listen to anything more than once. What are the circumstances that cause them  to stop, resume or listen to anything more than once. How do they feel about accessing the  content using existing voice service? If anything was possible what would they like to be  able to do? I described them different scenarios such as, imagine you’ve decided to sit down  and have a cup of tea and listen to something. Show me what you will do … so I could  observe how they interact with the content under different scenarios.]

4. Insight: Describe the insight you gained from applying the tool you selected to your

challenge (e.g., how an insight affected your thinking about the challenge and about  design thinking more broadly).

I told the story of a common frustration of note being able to forward or rewind 20 seconds  like in the app and described what they users did instead because they couldn’t do this via  the voice services, including frustration about where to find hand held devices.

I told the story about how we could explore the idea of our next small iterations of  development and experimentation and how I planned to engage the users further, wad  what that would look like

5. Approach: Describe what you might do differently next time -- applying the same tool

you selected or a different one -- and the reason(s) why.

I had started with a very small research project in the first instance to test out what worked before  requesting a bigger research budget, however, next time I would probably go wider research for the  initial research project, so that the initial iteration has more insights to support it rather than  pointing to needing more research before we could start and further development of our ideas and  writing user stories etc.

I would probably use visualisation, particularly a collage showing the thought processes of the  individuals researched, to get better insights into the information from the wider user research. This  is because visualisation will help us to access non-verbal parts of our brain when we are looking for  patterns and generating different ideas and concepts so we don’t jump to solutions too quickly. I  think visual representations of insights and information tells a great story.

