The Tool:

Mind Mapping

Challenge and Selection – Why I selected the tool:

I work for a large insurance company. Like most of the giant corporate world guided  heavily by compliance, my organization is invested in linear thinking, streamlining processes and  avoiding waste. As a result, there are very few small ideas. The management and business don’t  think through customer lens.  The challenge was to have organizational mind shift from thinking  too big and too long term return on investment to breaking it down to small incremental steps  towards achieving big.

In a web redesign project, a large team was invested, a 3 year road map was defined and its  first release was scheduled at 6 months. I used the mind mapping tool to generate ideas, to  understand the customer’s needs and generate general ideas to solve customer issues. Rather  than giving the product development team a traditional list of requirements, I immersed them in  the research data. Therefore, the early re-designs we created could be deployed and refined in  the context of real user interaction.

Application: How I used it:

We used mind mapping in various different settings and gathered information/data, we

reviewed customer complaints through social media, collected internal customer care  feedback and interviewed a group of end users. I will discuss one example of the mind mapping  example that we used: “interviewing a group of end users”

We organized an offsite session in an informal setting consisting of people with good mix of  business users, stakeholders and customers from different ethnic backgrounds and varying levels  of tech savviness. We categorized all the users into three groups: “Buy and Renew”, “understand  and manage” and “Engage and access”. Then within these categories we created 3 sub- groups per category consisting of people of different skill sets/understanding of health insurance  business. The team had two important objectives. First was to focus on finding stay with the  objective of what do you see as a pain full experience in customer journey using our website  and second what are some of the new features and functionality we can implement to improve  the digital customer experience.  We reiterated that all ideas are good. Each group was given a  white board to either list or create a visual of new ideas. We also asked them to rank the ideas  we asked them to rank high to low importance to them.

We gave them 30 mins to discuss and whiteboard the information. Then we have each  group report out on their ideas while pointing to the mark-ups on their White boards. After the  session, we reviewed all the white board information and created a visual of consolidated Ideas  the first 20 ideas with the highest rank were taken to next level of analysis.

Insight and Feedback - what I learned:

What I have learned from conducting the mind mapping exercise is that it is very  important to have a mix of group to get complete set of ideas.   There were some very significant ideas that were generated and ranked high that were  not listed in initial backlog that the team had put together prior to the exercise.  We had to keep reminding the team of the objective and insights any deviation should  be corrected and brought back to the theme. The most important was to be very  approachable for all ideas and make the group feel more engaged. In the course of this  exercise we had to lot of challenging questions from our business and stake holders on  why we need this exercise as there is already an existing requirement/backlog from them  and what would be the output and would they see any of these implemented.                Learning was to include the mind mapping exercise as a beginning of any  project we implement for digital strategy. I also feel we need to add more visualization  tools have a person from each group draw the ideas out/provide a visual designer to the  team make it more visual interactive and fun.

