The Challenge  We consume a lot of online video, but my particular challenge is understanding what kinds of video  younger audiences want to consume while online shopping, and which kinds of videos will drive more  sales. In the past, this has been a difficult problem to solve because there’s no one right answer, and if  one listens to anecdotes from others, there are a multitude of directions to take ecommerce videos.     Selection  I selected mind mapping, which is a design tool that allows someone to take all the data that they have,  distill it into usable data, look for patterns and insights, and translate those into design criteria. I thought  this was appropriate for the challenge of what younger audiences want from ecommerce video because  we have a wealth of data available on this topic – best practices, user-testing, focus groups, years of  analytics, interviews, and more – but we haven’t been able to take all of this data and turn it into  something useful. Mind mapping and its insights should allow us to better visualize and engage with the  data and turn it into useful information that can influence future experiments.     Application  I applied the tool by gathering all the data that we have available at this point – best practices from  experts, user-testing, focus groups, years of analytics, and interviews – and laying it all out. I then invited  a small group of co-workers from my company to help with this project. We picked out nuggets of data  that we each found interesting, then we talked through those interesting points and combined like  points into groups, and then saw what conclusions or insights we could draw. This seemed to be an  effective way to approach a large amount of data that might have otherwise been unwieldy. In the  future, I would include an even more diverse set of co-workers, so that we’d get more varied  perspectives.    Insight  We gained some insight from this exercise, and it really allowed us to identify patterns from different  pieces of data that we may not have noticed, had we been examining each set of data individually.  Specifically, there are a few needs we identified that we have not yet been addressing in our videos and  we’re planning to test incorporating them in future videos. This seemed like a good tool for our  challenge, because we had gathered so much data but needed a way to organize and distill patterns  from it.     Approach  Next time, I might include a more diverse group of people in the mind mapping session, as I mentioned  before. I think I’d gather more ethnographic interviews prior to the mind mapping session as well, so  there’s more personal information for those in the mind mapping session to consider.

