Design Thinking: Phone Apps Via Learning Launch

I decided to enroll in Design Thinking and Innovation to help execute projects better at work. My role

involves implementing new projects and tweaking already existing projects related to phone apps. Two apps are  already up and running and require little input from me. A third new app, however, is a different story. Figuring  out how to best implement this new, upcoming app has been a challenge, and this course has been helpful in  thinking through ideas.     While any of the tools could be used to help me in my quest, I decided to us the learning launch

method. Funds were already limited on figuring out what needed to be done to improve my app so it worked out  quite well since testing shouldn’t be expensive. My team spent funds on breakfast items and stickers then  canvassed work to engage employees. By spending less than $400 we were able to successfully engage our 1,000  person building and invite people to test our app and provide feedback via a free survey. Each feedback on the  survey was sent to the Apps Team to implement or upgrade whatever glitch internal employees discovered within  the app.     We noticed in our user ratings that this new app is rated higher than the current apps, and internal

employees enjoy being allowed to participate in a product that will one day be customer facing. All who have  helped us have volunteered their time for free, and their feedback has been invaluable. Our first learning launch of  handing out breakfast and training on the app went over well which caused a spillover effect of the survey being  well utilized. This resulted in good feedback to improve the product and enhanced employee satisfaction because  they were part of the improvement process.     The team noticed that by planning ahead and taking advantage of free advertising and inexpensive

promotional items we had a group of app experts internally. We didn’t have to pay external people to test our  product! Based on the high level of interaction we decided to do a second learning launch event. This was run like  a focus group and invited participants to come provide additional app feedback in exchange for coffee and  desserts. Like the first event, this one also had a low cost (under $200 for the desserts, and renting the room at  work was free). We had 27% of participants from the first event attend and provide even more in depth  information. This new info will be used to further enhance the product and may be used to create a third and final  learning launch event.     While I learned a lot through this class and was able to implement the lessons quickly at work, there

are some things I would have done differently in my learning launches. The second learning event was done closer  to Christmas, and several would-be participants had already left for the holidays. We also rented a room that is  more difficult to get to in the building. I believe both of these resulted in the event being less attended than we had  hoped for so in the future I would have the event sooner and in a more visible area of the office. The new survey  we used was also free response print out which we thought was a great idea. It’s true that we got good feedback,  but it’s difficult to assign everything together for reporting purposes. Some handwriting is also difficult to read.  Next time I would make the survey more numbers based and online only like the first survey.    Overall the information I learned in this course helped me to test things we thought would go over

well quickly and find information fast. These are vital needs when working with phone apps which are constantly  changing. Being stuck in how things have always been or being unwilling to look at things in a different light  would keep our apps from being successful and would ultimately harm customer satisfaction—two things a  successful business cannot afford.

