Design Thinking for Innovation by University of Virginia  Week 5 – Final Assignment

Submitted by Manoj Mohanan    Example Reflection – Mind Mapping (Module 3)

Challenge

I’m the manager of a web development team, with a challenge to re- design and improve an aging organization-employee focused portal. My  stakeholder intended for a new generation employee website with  direction to build on previous version. After initial study of the project  using year old web analytic and survey results, it was clear that the  direction provided was too narrow. I envisaged that the project needed  focused discussions with diverse groups like employees, new sub- organizations and management to help define the scope, ensure  identification of pain points and capture un-articulated views. So before  identifying a direct solution to the problem we stepped back as we  realized there was a greater opportunity at hand.

Selection

I identified 'Mind Mapping' as the design tool that could help prepare  with reliable logical decisions as a go forward strategy to co-create the  opportunity to learn from the stakeholders. The reasoning being an  availability of a wide variety of data from feedback surveys, personas of  stakeholders, touchpoints and channels. My inspiration was Tony Buzan,  who popularized the modern mind mapping term.

Application

I started the process to put everything together by capturing the static  articulated views from the existing data to help my internal investigation  or planned assumptions. I created a template listing down my groups

(personas) listed in Challenge section, emotions to enlist frustration or  happiness, touchpoints like organization activities of groups and  channels like website, customer support mailbox or newsletters for  interaction. A collaborative workshop between groups sets the perfect  setting to capture the various facets of personas and experiences in a  scenario. For the exercise I created groups of 5 individuals, each  representing respective groups. I provided them with stickies to write  comments to the different questions. Each questions in the activity  focused on improving my observations from their experiences and  thereby help me to build insights from their experience.

Questions focused on identified personas, capturing emotions especially  pain points, generating new touchpoints and identifying channels. Next  all these stickies were assembled on a board and used markers to create  common themes. Each individual came forward to lead a specific theme  being the subject matter expert for that theme. Next I created a mind  map from my records of each group and circulated with the participants  and the final agreed revised mind map represented the new insights and  un-articulated views as a group.

Insight

This exercise with different stakeholders provides an opportunity to  bring out the true voice in each group and articulate the results in to a  visual with agreed consensus to provide meaningful insights. The mind  map matched my expectations and provided a direction with a larger  footprint of ideas not thought through earlier. Our survey results were  hinged on the existing portal and so our thinking would have been  otherwise limited to design in a specific way, but this new findings will  feed in to broaden the horizons of thinking to encompass new visual  directions. Next steps for the team will be to review new insights and to  brainstorm resulting in improved user experience down the road.

Approach

This exercise has helped bring sub organizations under a common roof  to help capture un-articulated views and the shared insights and learning  and without a doubt mind map is the right tool for the task. This is a new  learning and next time I would start the project using journey mapping  as the starting point along with findings reflected from touchpoints and  channels established and surveys. It will be interesting to see how it  would work in succession as part of 'What Is' journey.

