Challenge

It is very common nowadays that we buy products online or traditionally visiting  local or multi-stores including but not limited to clothes, appliances e.g. a toaster  or a car as well. Most of them are accompanied with a guarantee of replacement  or repair for a specific period of time. What will happen though when the  guarantee of the product we purchased expired and same will be damaged or  defected? As first solution is to visit the store where we bought same and  request to have it repaired. However most of the stores do not provide such  service as the guarantee is expired and suggest the customer to contact the  manufacturer's repair service and ask for maintenance and repair or to purchase  a new one. As a result of the latter customers very often throw away the  damaged product since they don’t know where to find the right workshop to  repair these devices.  Therefore the customer is facing the challenge to find out where to go to repair  the malfunctioned appliances in order to avoid to throw them away when they  break down after expiration of the manufacturer’s warranty. Needless to say that  it is impossible to know where to find a repair shop unless one is located close by  the customer’s residence or work place.

Selection

I will choose to apply learning launch tool to archive my goal. My purpose is to  generate increased revenues through conducting small experiments in the  marketplace.  A learning launch is a process for testing and improving (or abandoning) a new  idea quickly and inexpensively. Although the process involves selling a new  product or service to a customer or group of customers. Its purpose is not simply  to sell, but to learn as much as possible. It is an experiment designed to  generate insights and actual market feedback that can then be used to refine or  entirely redefine the idea and to determine whether it deserves a larger  commitment of time, people, and other resources.

Application    I made a prototype of my idea, simple and fast. The idea was to make a mobile  application so the people could locate easier and faster the right repair shops  located closer to their home or work, where they could repair their damaged  appliances when their warranty expires.  The prototype was just a piece of paper with a draw of the application showing

main features. I conducted several learning launches inexpensively and quickly,  that really helped me to refine my idea, to satisfy customer needs by learning  from them. That resulted to add more features to my application.

Insight

Learning launch design tool proved valuable for my application. It really helped  me to refine my idea. The result was to add more features to my application.  These features included finding more service points that can repair various  products from electrical appliances such as refrigerators, kitchens, to electronic  appliances such as mobile phones, TVs as well as service points where someone  could repair his car. In addition, have included maps of (have mapping) of each  service point location mentioning important contact information such as a  telephone, address and the website.

Approach

An alternative approach is to apply the visualization tool. Visualization is really  important because it's actually a way of unlocking a different part of our brain. It  allows us to think in a non-verbal way and access parts of our brain, our  creativity. This can be used in every stage of the design thinking process. The 3  skills of Visualization is listening, thinking and drawing. Listening is the input,  thinking is the processing and drawing is the output. It is very helpful for pattern  finding and to define if an idea is good or not. Regarding prototypes,  visualization helps so that your idea will be presented in more details and more  understandable by the stakeholders. It really helps to convince stakeholders  about the worthiness of your idea.

