Assignment – Design Thinking

Reflection – Learning Launch Principles

Challenge

‘The natural death of e-mail’ - We were working on an independent project on proposing social  networking based information dissemination. The background was the fact that the time we spend on  emails connecting with others is reducing, and social networking is taking away a significant pie of that  time. During the course of the project we wanted to perform quick experiments, to see the kind of non- intrusive information dispersion through social networking platforms to replace email inbox with say  one’s facebook page.

Selection

We actually were starting off with focus group discussions, asking people if they will prefer to receive  their emails in a suitable fashion in their facebook page. The responses at the beginning were sort of  mixed and the directions were becoming unclear – this led to asking more and more questions  generating excessive data and we got into statistics generating null and alternate hypotheses and  validating them with the data collected so on and so forth. However a part of our team did not like this  mathematical approach – their view was that in our focus group discussions the ‘user experience’ part  was missing. This led to us making Photoshop images [appendix 1] that described what it meant to  transfer information from email platforms to social networking ones. We naturally slipped into  conducting something like a ‘learning launch mock up’ kind of exercise by heading this way.

Application

  We prepared 7 Photoshop images that were facebook notification/like screenshots embedded  with the information that usually arrives on our email inbox [appendix 1].

  These images were shown to a smaller group of people. Sort of heterogeneous.

  Their qualitative feedback [feeling, expectation etc] about the images was recorded rather than  a yes/no type data logging.

Insights

This was rather a quick and cheap learning cycle we realized. It took us a few hours to prepare the  images and less than a week to collect feedback from the selected group. Now the biggest benefit is that  with a smaller sample size a more concrete outcome is evolving. With survey questionnaire type  approach to reach a specific confidence level we had to do it on a relatively larger sample.

Other insights were, people were enthused by such an approach and referred their friends to participate  in. They did not exhibit any fatigue in seeing the pictures and reflecting on them to respond. In surveys  we found a few just ticking and rushing away.

Assignment – Design Thinking

Approach

Although an experiential mock up is interesting and yielding in good results, some of traditional  principles may have to be incorporated – such as different sessions for different segment of people.  Other than this we have no specific corrections to our ‘experiential learning launch mock up’, if we can  call it that way...

Appendix: Photoshop Images used for our ‘learning launch mock up’

