Reflection: Visualization Tool

Challenge

I am a master student in entrepreneurship and I have a small business of mills, my challenge was  that my business was not improving as I wanted to increase our area of location and also our way  of working to be closer to our customers. In order to overcome this challenge, we needed to  understand our customers more and found out what they expect from us, but also to make the  employees more aware of our goals and see together how we can achieve them.

Selection

As the design thinking is a problem solving approach, that's where the visualization as a design  thinking tool came into play. The visualization tool is better for to achieve a sense of agreement  and consensus with my employees and get things done as for to resolve my challenges,  employees had to understand me and align their ideas with mine and it is better when we're  looking at customers and we're looking at new user segments. My small business have used other  design thinking tools like mind mapping tool when we wanted to collect information for  the  challenge of the best and strategic location for our business.

Application

I started by taking a day where I divided the employees into two groups where the first group  accompanied and observed the clients from their home to our workplace, observe how the other  group works, ask questions to the clients so that they can share their experience. The next day, as  it was two groups of 15 employees each, each group made a presentation of yesterday's day after  I mixed the two and made three groups of 10 employees to exchange on the observations made  by each group before and I encouraged them to try to see what was missing and that everyone  contributed in the exchange.

Each group made a presentation of the outcome of the exchange made. The exchange took 1hour  and they prepared together the presentation. All the presentation have been done by using  photography to explain what they want to say, diagrams, power point with color on key points  and so on.

After those two part of presentation, we discussed together by trying to understand together our  customers, what we miss within our business for to meet goals, in which area our services are  needed, we discussed by using charts, diagrams, symbols, power point with color on key points  and so on.

Insight

By applying the visualization tool, we have found that that the service offered to our clients  should be improved, be more welcoming, and be closer to them by developing empathy between  us. Start work an hour earlier but also open another work point close to our customers to reduce  the waiting line and be closer to those who come from far away.

The visualization tool proved to be effective even if the expected results are not the ones we  found. We have thought that we need to expand our area of working but we found out that we  need to exploit more the area we are in.

Approach

As I and my employees have seen the merits of design thinking especially this visualization tool  in which our team came out more united, understanding more where we are heading, ready to  implement the insights gained to improve our performance.

