By Michele Schmidt

Better Commute Reflection - Visualization

Challenge

I have in the recent past worked with a few of my peers (group of 6), on a design challenge that is  human centric and was focused on ‘Designing a Better Commute’. Some of the framework we applied  in selecting our target audience after discussion were as follows:

•  The commuter had to be residing and working in a Metropolitan City.

•  In order to narrow down to the most critical commute in a metropolitan city we would  particularly focus on participants commute to work in the morning.

•  Each commuter should have access to and apply atleast 2 means of transport.

It was decided to conduct a 15-20 min interview with 3 commuters, as a group. We noted down the  interviewees experience, needs, wants, likes, dislikes and asked them to make visual representations  of their experience. Our group met to share our observations and then continued to make further  visual notes on our understanding of the problem to come up with some radical solutions. Even the  solutions were approached through visualization.

Selection

Visualization is a tool that is extremely effective in engaging the creative side of the brain. Even those  who are not used to sketching can get past a lot of noise (in the information) and come up with some  innovative insights on the information available. For the stakeholders, visualization generally provides  a deeper meaning into the problem or solution. The advantage of Visualization is also that it can aptly  be used in almost every stage of Design-Thinking. Whether one is trying to gather information from  stakeholder through ethnography, or trying to mind-map in order to come up with design criteria, or  brainstorming for portfolio of ideas, or developing concepts that need to be prototyped or even  creating early prototypes – Visualization can be used and evolved at every touchpoint of the Design  Framework. This is one of the reasons, I have decided to select Visualization as my design tool for  reflection, the other being my recent exposure to visualization when approaching the design challenge  mentioned above.

Application

The participants in our design challenge were interviewed independently. We asked them to share  their experience on their morning commute to work and then followed up by understanding what  they liked, disliked about their time commuting. We also tried digging deeper into understanding what  they need changed and what would improve their experience. At the end, we asked them to sketch  something that comes to their mind when they think about their morning commute.

By Michele Schmidt

We made notes and attached the sketches of the interviewees. Then my design group met to  deliberate on the notes and came up with our observations. We also finally came up with a list of  solutions visually, based on the findings of the interviews. The visualization were able to use the  experiences and other attributes of the interviewees to build concepts for further brainstorming on  viable solutions. I have illustrated some of the solutions that we were able to visually present as part  of the study. (Note: All the visualizations were created on Microsoft Whiteboard)

By Michele Schmidt

Insight

For starters, none of the group members had any prior experience of sketching or art. But what we  realised that within a short time and followed by few iterations of attempting visual notes, we were  each able to come up with satisfactory visualizations that could be used to interpret and further our  understanding on the underlying challenges that our interviewees (stakeholders) were facing. I even  came to notice that our storytelling, mind-mapping and solution propositions became much easier to  be understood and accepted by other stakeholders within the organization. We were also able to build  our list of assumptions and missing data based on the last sketch I have shown above.

I must accept that being our first attempt to visualization and also to human-centric design thinking,  we were still building our understanding of the framework and application. But with Jeanne’s  coursework on Design Thinking in Innovation, I’m able to further see the merits of the visualization  and the role it’ll play in developing intuition into our target audiences’ problems and emotions.

Approach

With all my understanding in Design Thinking at this point, going forward, I will:

•  Prepare some baseline visualizations for the stakeholders to connect with during the  interviews.

•  Try to build more visualizations of an immersive experience during the interviews and get  opinions or comments from the interviewees, which could give valuable insight that might  have been missed during the verbal interview.

