ORIFLAME

CHALLENGE

I am an office manager for a company which is situated on a university campus. Clearly its main  customers are students but also our target group is not only focused on students but rather the staff of  the university and corporate companies outside of campus as well as other individuals. Our challenge  was how to draw lots of students and the rest of the target group to come around and use our facility  which is browsing the internet using our computers and also by printing their assignments and other  projects so as to boost our business income. This is because, here in Africa, Ghana, not everyone is able  to access fast internet connection from the comfort of their homes and also not everyone has an  electronic printer for printing documents and others.

SELECTION

Our team decided to go through several design thinking tools and we decided to use or try the mind  mapping tool so as to know why customers find it reluctant to come to our façade to patronize our  business.

APPLICATION

We started the application of this design thinking tool by asking ourselves the current reality on the  ground. That is by asking the “what is?” question. We then did a survey by researching and collecting  data from the students on campus by creating a soft and hard copy questionnaire which was aimed at  asking students what we could do to improve our business and also make life much easier for them on  campus. This in effect was to know the minds of our customers .After collecting this data, we then  moved to the “what if?” question which was based on the data we had collected from the student and  our entire target group. Some of the brainstorm ideas that came up was that, students wanted a more  faster and convenient way where we could provide internet access to them in the comfort of their  hostels. Other customers also wanted a way where they could forward their assignments and  documents to us so as to avoid queuing when they walk into our space.

This challenge really kept us on our toes because these were facts and we needed to develop concepts  in solving the problem. For instance after days of brainstorming, and developing concepts, we realized  that creating individual username and password codes for our customers would wow them and also  grant the  access to use our internet network from the comfort of their hostels and not necessarily  making them walk to our hub. We also noticed that we could create and email account where our target  group or customers could just send us their works or documents to be printed for them and would be  ready by the time they walked in to pick them up.

INSIGHT&APPROACH

By applying this design thinking tool, our team was able to identify and also get positive feedback from  our customers. We still thought through results which would continue to make it more enjoyable and  fruitful.so moving forward our team would review better ways in this insight that would make the future  better.

