Noa Cohen

Reflection - Learning Launch

Challenge & Selection    The tool I chose to use was Learning Launch, due to the current stage of my client project. I  work with government clients in the technology space creating digital products. The digital  product my team is currently working on has already passed the Design Thinking steps 1-3. We  are in the “What works?” phase which is where the Learning Launch tool becomes important.  My team and I have gone through face-to-face user interviews with several stakeholder groups,  in addition to mind mapping exercises and persona creation based on our qualitative data from  interviews. Our goal for conducting the Learning Launch tool is to understand where our  current product fails and succeeds. We want to dive deep into user feedback and implement  changes to make our product the best it can be for our users.    Application    We want our testing to be iterative. Our Learning Launch will not be conducted in a silo.  Following in line with the Design Thinking timeline, we want to fail early to succeed sooner. We  will start the process by understanding the needs that our current product addresses. Then we  will craft a script made up of open-ended questions to ask users as they test our product. Users  will test our product via a digital prototype.    For the first Learning Launch, we wanted to test the main “happy path” through the product.  Our goal is to understand, “Can a user successfully get from point A to point B?”. This test will  be conducted with one of our several user groups. We conducted 30 user tests with a digital  prototype over the course of one week. Each test was 45 minutes, with 15 minutes to debrief  with our team afterwards. We also took notes during each session and used a voice recording.  We learned that users were able to successfully get from point A to point B, however a few key  visual elements threw our users off. Specifically, we realized there was a disconnect between  our product’s visual elements and the same visual elements used in the real world that provide  a different experience. After our first Learning Launch, we decided to circle back with the visual  team to rework some key elements that tripped our users up. The newly designed elements fell  in line with what users had expected to see in the “happy path”.    For the second Learning Launch, we decided to test a financial portion of the product. We  wanted to see if two different user groups could successfully navigate creating, submitting,  reviewing, and paying an invoice. We asked users to complete various tasks that led them  through different experiences within the prototype. Our initial assessments of the invoicing  flows were that they would require a decent amount of change. We used this second round of  testing purely as iterative and experimental. We wanted to understand specifically what data is  vital to our users to successfully complete the above tasks. This test was a great learning  experience for our entire team because our takeaways helped us to fully design the invoicing  process, utilizing the most important data.

Noa Cohen

Insight & Approach    As I learned from Ashley in the Design Thinking course, “True competitive advantage lies in  addressing people’s unarticulated needs.” Utilizing the Learning Launch tool, we were able to  uncover our users’ unarticulated needs. Observing users’ behaviors led us to get a sense of the  pain points and desires we need to address in our prototypes. Our results for both tests were  similarly in line to what we had anticipated. The first Learning Launch we successfully  understood the needs of our user group and only had to iterate on a few key visual elements.  The second Learning Launch we knew going into it that the prototype would not be successful  because we did not have a larger understanding of what the process should be. Our testing  from the second launch gave us the information we needed to design the best experience  possible for those user groups. The Learning Launch tool reaffirmed my trust in the design  thinking process because you will never create a successful product without asking your users  directly what they think. I learned that you need to ask question after question, to uncover your  users’ true desires and create a product that uniquely benefits your users.    As previously mentioned, given the stage our team is at for this product’s timeline, the Learning  Launch tool best suits our needs at the moment. However, our team would not be where we  are today without utilizing the earlier design thinking tools at the beginning of our process. We  have analyzed the feedback from our two Learning Launches and implemented the changes to  our prototypes. In the future, we intend to conduct additional Learning Launches in an effort to  continuously better our product. Even post-deployment of our product, I think it would create  value to continue testing because a product can always be improved with user feedback.

