Mind Mapping - Corporate Social Responsibility Assignment in Indonesia

Challenge and Selection

As part of a Corporate Service Responsibility Program at IBM, I was working with a team of 10 Global  IBMer’s in Indonesia. We were assigned to help Computer Science students from a State University in  West Java. Our Task was to help the startup Student Community with Product Development including  Lean UX & Concept Development. One our greatest challenges with the students was communication in  English. The students were not conversant with English and thus we had an uphill task to complete our  time-boxed workshops. Mind Mapping was a natural selection that evolved in our Internal team  discussions.  We loaded ourselves with Flip-Charts, Post-its, Markers, Flash Cards for Behavior/Strategy  Game to apply this technique to all our workshops.

Application

We planned for a design thinking workshop to enable radical collaboration amongst students to ensure  they co-create great user experience for their products. We identified 20 Students already in advanced  stages of planning their startups to participate in the Design Thinking Workshop. We provided them  templates for Stakeholder Map, Empathy Map and Scenario Map.

The Stakeholder map organized people’s expectation of a project. We asked the teams to Identify  people internally and externally who have a stake in the outcome of the project. Post them to a wall,  using two sticky notes per person. On the first, draw the person’s face and note his or her name and  role. On the second, write a quote expressing the stakeholder’s thoughts, opinions, or expectations.  Arrange the stakeholders on the wall based on dimensions such as organizational relationship or  sentiment.

We then switched over the Empathy Map. We started by Drawing three intersecting lines, and illustrate  the face of the persona in the middle. Fill in with writing or sticky notes: what the user thinks  (expectations and reactions), sees (environment and interface), says (quotes), does (actions), feels  (values), and hears (instructions or feedback) during the experience. At the bottom, list pains  (frustrations and obstacles) and gains (goals and strategies).

The next step was to create a Scenario/Experience map of a Representative User – We had the students  post a row of sticky notes on a wall representing the steps of a user’s as-is workflow. Beneath each step,  create a column of color-coded sticky notes representing questions and comments relating to that step.  For comments, consider the dimensions of the Empathy Map at each step, as well as technologies and  context. Once questions are answered, post comments over them.

With empathy maps and scenarios in sight, students posted sticky notes identifying prominent pain  points. Use a second sticky note color to identify opportunities for the design. Each pain point should  have a corresponding opportunity, though some opportunities might not relate to pain points—for  example those that respond to market trends or anticipate future pain points.

Insight & Approach

There was tremendous value in using Mind Mapping Hands-on with the students as we could deeply  engage the students through the entire process. The Stakeholder map was a way to organize people’s  expectation, the empathy map- was a quick and dirty representation of the user and the scenario map -

was about the experience a user has over time for discrete flow of their product.  Hence Visualization of  the Mind Mapping was much more impactful as there as sense of co-creation through shared  experience. By seeing things laid out in different colored sticky notes, the students could quickly re- organize themselves. There was also greater sense of empathy with the user as the students were  simulating the user experience scenario by scenario enabling them to quickly identify the pain points  and the relevant opportunities for improvement

