REFLECTION

Challenge and Reflection

One of the challenges in organizations is the need to constantly stay competitive and be at least at par  or ahead of competition to stay in the game. I come from the financial services industry that is currently  is very traditional and undergoing massive digital transformation and I would say whoever provides the  best solution can win the market. Given this marketing condition, you can imagine the work involved  internally. The key challenge is getting products and updates to our platforms quickly to market or  sometimes, it is staying on project delivery schedule to catch up with competitors.

Application

One of the most striking tools for me is the learning launch. Most often than not, due to time or  resource constraints, we tend to think of solutions on our own, or try to force fit a process/ solution and  digitalize things as it is. We assumed this is the way to do things and let users accept it as it is.

Sometime ago, we had a project to develop an app, where we were trying to meet a timeline and were  already in the process of documentation and development requirements gathering. Due to the rush to  meet deadlines, we went ahead and developed screens and flows on how the app interfaces would look  like according to logical order and placement. We also used product names and labels on the UIs and  grouped the icons logically. Normal process is that we also have some usability study before  implementing a UI design for an app – a process where we do an FGD (focus group discussion) to gain  some insights on consumer behaviour but that takes time to do.  We decided to do it later due to time  constraints. For me, upon hearing about learning launch in this course, I was reminded about FGDs.

I was lucky enough to participate in 2-3 FGDs during my career, in different industries. FGDs have  different purpose and methods. Usually in FGDs, a group of people, usually with different profiles and  preferably the target market of the company, are gathered together or interviewed one by one or in  groups by a facilitator. People from our company usually are observers, and provide the guidance and  questions beforehand. Specific questions are asked to the participants, mainly on key items we want to  learn from them, for example what do you think about this product, will you use it, will you be willing to  buy this for this amount, etc. We can also test our assumptions by asking the FGD participants about our  assumptions and verify them. There are instances also when we show an early prototype to the user and  ask them to look for a feature and navigate the app. In other cases, we used ‘learning launch’ via survey  through google sheets or survey sites like survey monkey, even to internal employees to get a quick  initial feedback.

Insight and approach

We pushed through with our “learning launch” after we completed our documentation of requirements.  We showed a mock-up of the screens we have and asked them to navigate to specific portions of the  app or perform specific transactions. What we learned is: unaided, the interviewees found it difficult to  navigate our app based on the logic we designed. They also couldn’t properly relate the transaction  needed versus product names we placed. There were 2 things we missed: 1. The navigation is not  intuitive enough for the user, we needed to regroup the icons and create a landing page for the

different options and present it to the user that way; and 2. The product names are not reflective of the  transaction-either we need to rethink the product names, make more customer education or promote  the product names more. We applied “What Works” too late.

On hindsight, talking to users and potential customers is really important to validate assumptions, test  ideas, and for our case designing the user interface and flows. The learning launch tool of design  thinking process cannot be taken for granted. Talking to customers, learning right where they are, right  in their habitat, going through the journey with them, asking them how they will approach things. This is  a real insight for me.

Not only do we have to redo our design afterwards. We also have to perform and allocate resources to  implement the redesign and add effort in testing our application. We have to double the effort because  we didn’t validate our design implementation with potential users in the first place. From that point on,  we needed to ensure we go through the “learning launch” before proceeding with future  implementations.

