Reflection :Visualization

Challenge

This February prior to epidemic, I have completed my first ever 10k marathon run without any formal  training with huge physical and mental challenge. As I completed my run beyond stipulated time, I realised  the importance of regular fitness training for maintaining acceptable level of fitness. After the run during  our casual conversions with my friend (Arvind & Suresh) who are seasonal runner, we released that there  is a need for professional fitness training and people are willing to pay for it given that convince of time  and space which needs to be much more customised than heavy duty gym. During the award ceremony  later in the week I meet with Ravi, professional athlete & seasoned ultra-marathon runner who trains people  to prepare for marathons and Ravi also trains at education centre where school hires his certified trainers  (“Ravi & Co”) service to provide physical fitness training to student in school a part of curriculum. The  problem Ravi shared was that its really tough for his team to maintain roster manually and assign trainers  to school and doing all activity tracking, performance data monitoring, onboarding schools, trainers,  preparing training curriculum and calendar events etc. Ravi mentioned was that he and his trainers are used  to host outdoor training events at public space like Parks and podiums where individuals can join to get  trained, provide personal fitness trainer at home apart from conducting marathon focused group training.  For all these Ravi & Co needs a product solutions which makes it easier for people to collaborate online  using phone application for finding professional trainer for personal fitness training at home location,  conducting  group training sessions, onboarding new trainers, automated allocation of trainer based on geo- location.

The challenge was to come up with something which is not yet available or anyone had experienced before.  Yes, we have training facilities at Govt. athletic stadium or other institutions like olds school private gym.  Those are primarily focused on qualified state, sponsored athletes or for body builders, seasoned fitness  pro who works out with mostly weights. So this is a kind of potential new market for all of us, with rapid  consumption of smart phones, smart watches, fitness gadgets and corporate sponsored fitness events and  increased awareness around personal health and fitness thanks to omnipresent social media in this digital  age.

Selection

Visualization is the transformation of information data in our mind to images that we see, either literally  with our eyes or figuratively with our own imagination. I choose Visualization technique to stich the  scattered ideas into a meaningful story that can be correlated to a vivid use cases. This design thinking tool  helps to translate the ideas into tangible and concrete user experience flow. With Visualization, risk of  running into unmatched design understanding is also less. Since there are multiple stockholders to involved,  with visualization we can develop shared visual perception about the basic building blocks of the feature  set that we want to develop. When discussed the problem statement each one of us had developed own  imagination with respect to the probable solution, visualization technique makes it much simple to agreed  up shared understanding.

Application

During What is phase we had lengthy discussions on the specifics of problem statement  and consumer  (Ravi& Co and retail user ) journey and took lots of notes, observations, comments to piled up. Next we  processed all those comments, observations and make documentation of things that really matter towards  solving the problem, for example how to do background check on newly onboarded professional athletes  as fitness trainer ? how to keep check on the attendance of trainer visiting a school assigned to?    With Visualization technique we also come up with new concepts like pay as you go for individual sessions  rather than monthly subscriptions which one may not be inclined to commit for. In What if we came up  with ideas like integrating fitness tracker data (Fitbit, Apple Watch or other smart watch) along with the  platform to give a dashboard visualization to each end user trainee.    We used a notebook to draw sketch and depict the visual story which were sequence of events for trainer  and trainee and calendar event. Using rectangle to develop the context, stick figures to represent each  persona and speech baubles to capture their mind and thoughts. From the insight we got from our extended  discussions and observations we develop three main persona – Professional trainer, Retail user, and School  authority. With these three persona, I asked them two top most important use cases for each persona type  to recommend. Once we had the total six use cases within half an hour, we did brain storming next half an  hour to prioritised  them according to the importance of each one with respect to current state of business  to eventually we figured out our most viable product feature set. Features that are most important and user  is ready to pay for it.

Insight

Using Don Roam’s who, what, how, much, where, when, how and why we break down the challenge into  multiple components. Then created visuals of each component and shared with Ravi and his trainers who  are ultimate users (trainer) which resulted a consumer validation of the tangible concept that works. Asked  them couple of key questions – who & what else is missing in the visuals? The feedback received was  enlightening to us like, school/organisations works differently compared to individual clients while  engaging with fitness trainer.  With the graphical presentation each user group type was able to share their  perspective and potential loopholes in the offering solution.     Visual walkthrough helped us to figure out the most obvious thing but least focused area of customer (retail  user, school authority, trainers) satisfaction and addressing any of their concern regarding training schedule,  trainer quality or any other operational issue. This give us the most important insight into user retention on  the platform. We were able to refine more on areas which were highlighted less in initial discussions,  customer service or grievance redressal. By applying Visualization tool we also understood our  assumptions that each persona uses same technologies was incorrect. While school administrations are  more inclined towards using a desktop Web version of the application whereas retail users and professional  trainers prefers smart phone application, this is based on the available data set. So we have to develop the  solution for both platforms one native app for smart phone and web version. We figured out that there  should two kinds of interface one for the retail end users and other for business user like system  administrator who can maintain, monitor and develop the program roster which is done manually by Ravi.

The last but not the least important thing came out of this exercise was Personal Data Security. With  visualization of user data generation and storing of user profile and other financial transactional information  it unfolded another dimension to our original problem statement to solve the issue of profession fitness  trainer using technology. This is something Ravi & Co completely unaware of, hence we needed to rework  on our prioritization of tasks and process. This is conjunction of internet technology, professional fitness  services and legal compliance of user generated data which needs to be curated according to the Govt. rules  and regulation. This resulted in adding legal provisioning to our original concept.

Approach

Visualization tool did a great job for us to get into the field where we hardly had any kind of insight. This  exercise helped immensely to understanding the nitty-gritty of professional fitness training regime and kind  of solution offering required and trad-off using technology. Visualization tool makes it so simple to  transform ideas in our mind to whiteboard for developing a new concept here. For next time I would like  to apply Launch learning tool to test the concept with actual end users demonstrating their interest. Does  developing an smart phone app bring value to them ? Does it makes life easier for some who wants personal  fitness trainer at home? Do they use it the way they said they would? We need responds to those questions  before we commit to build the scaled new offerings. With set concrete limits on key variables, such as time,  targeted audience, geolocation, features, and partner organization like school and others, we need to choose  an initial constrained launch before going full scale.

