Challenge: Describe your challenge, including all relevant information.    Enterprise and corporate mobile apps are in high demand. Since I am part of our organization’s

internal mobile app development team, I and our team were given a challenge to create one

all-in-one mobile app for employees. The mobile app solution should have all the important

features an employee would use frequently and also have a communication channel for

organization news, emergency broadcasts etc. The project scope included top 15 features used

by employees, as identified from the company web portal. Stakeholders and users included the

entire organization, along with the senior management buy-in. The project timeline was two

months. We planned to focus on a mobile app solution by connecting with different stakeholders

- from bottom to top - to uncover both the functional and technical requirements.    Selection: In your own words, briefly describe the tool you selected (e.g., what it is and

why you selected it for your challenge -- including any appropriate video lecture

references).    Since we were more focused on understanding requirements of a large user base, distributed

across many personas, we focused on mind mapping. We did not select visualization since we

did not want to be constrained by technology limitations which could have come up due to a

particular chosen UI or visual interpretation. Mind mapping gave us an opportunity to aim for a

more interconnected and modular mobile solution.    Application: Describe how you applied the tool you selected to your challenge (e.g., what

you did and how the tool was applied effectively or ineffectively).    We divided the entire project of two months (i.e. eight weeks) into three workshops of two weeks

each, with the last two weeks for internal assessment and documentation.    First we connected with different potential users to discover with a ‘what if?’ mindset. We

engaged 12-14 different users, with four personas, in coffee sessions, Q&As, whiteboard - all to

create free-flowing mind maps. This tested our assumption of mobile app architecture and end

user use cases. In this phase, we focused a lot on feelings and empathy.    Next, we connected with the management and corporate communications team to understand

perspective. We did this through formal meetings with digital tools for mind mapping. We asked

them what would they like the user to do when a particular news/broadcast is sent. This helped

us negate (and in few cases, affirm) our assumptions about what is expected from the solution.    Further, we connected with the technical team for mind mapping of different components.

Though this might sound counter-intuitive, it was critical to understand what we could do and

what we could not. We could create mind mappings of technical interactions and their

implications on the end solution.    At the end, during the last two weeks, we documented all the three mind mapping collections.

Insight: Describe the insight you gained from applying the tool you selected to your

challenge (e.g., how an insight affected your thinking about the challenge and about

design thinking more broadly).    With the help of mind mapping exercise, we discovered a lot about our users and stakeholders.

We discovered that rather than a very smart do-it-all mobile app, they want something ‘simple’

and personalized. Further, our assumptions on how users would use this app were broken.    Though before the exercise, we were thinking that we should target all the devices and form

factors, after the exercise we got the data and the insight to stick to 4-5 most popular ones only.    Another critical insight was from a technical implementation standpoint. We discovered that we

do not need to train our team on a technology we had assumed will be used in the solution.

Instead existing competencies could very well be used for the development of the solution.    Approach: Describe what you might do differently next time -- applying the same tool you

selected or a different one -- and the reason(s) why    Since this was a new product to be created, we were able to successfully use the mind mapping

approach to design thinking in the creation of this solution. Next time, since the solution is

already in place, and will need modifications, we will use the visualization approach. It will help

us and all stakeholders better understand what changes we are looking to make in the solution.

