Reflection – Mind Mapping

Challenge:

While working for a large telecommunication firm, I had been selected, along with 2 other  colleagues, to participate in an internal innovation programme for my idea regarding the  development of a platform to address mental health issues. This was an annual competition across  all the 13 international business units (BUs) and given that our BU had won the previous year, we  had a lot of pressure on our team. This project was planned for three months, and resources were  limited in the sense that we were not given an additional budget to carry out user research or  prototype our product. However, we were asked to develop a minimum viable product (MVP) model  based on extensive user research, which was highly challenging. Our idea was to provide a platform  for mental health issues where users can get all kinds of support, but as a requirement of this  project, we needed to develop the product to cater to the users’ needs rather than providing them  with the elements that we thought they needed. The challenge was to fully understand the needs of  the end users—those seeking help for mental health-related challenges—and to develop a product  that addresses the problems identified.

Selection:

Our team had gone through a number of tactics to understand the root causes behind the problem  we were trying to address, and mind mapping was a tool that we felt was very simple yet highly  effective—and most pertinent for this particular task. We decided to use this tool to effectively  comprehend the big issue we were trying to resolve. This tool is explained more in the videos in  Week 3, and is introduced in Video 2 and thoroughly explained in Video 4. This is an engaging tool  that finds insights and patterns within the large quantity of data collected while exploring the  current state of the issue at hand. It is used to establish the criteria for the next stage, the idea  generation phase. It is a key part of the design thinking process, and highly relevant to our project  because in order to design an effective solution, we needed to thoroughly understand the problem  that needed to be solved.

Application:

We applied this tool to our project after carrying out 20 in-depth interviews of our potential users;  people who have had a history of mental health-related challenges. We used post-it notes on the  mind map to write down the key themes and words that we thought were important while  transcribing the interviews from the recordings. To avoid overlooking key aspects, the three  members of the team completed this task individually, as we tended to focus on different areas.  Once all the themes were written down, we clustered them into larger themes, and developed 4  different personas of the end user.

We used these personas to dive deeper into the features that were desired by each persona, as their  needs were very different. The mind maps were further used to understand the features that each  desired. Our interviews tried to elicit input from the users about what they felt would have helped  them in different stages of their challenges, such as identifying that they had a problem, knowing  when to get help, various ways to get help, and so on. This stage was pivotal in choosing the design  criteria for our ultimate MVP, as it allowed to truly understand which features were necessary, and

which ones were accessory features that could be discarded to make the user experience (UX) better  for the end customer.

Insight:

By applying this tool to our project, we feel that we were able to minimize the numerous iterations  that are typically required to launch a new product; we made a few iterations, but the amount was  significantly lower than the industry standards. This effectively cut our development time in half, and  hence enabled us to focus our efforts on more extensive testing. A team member’s prior experience  with using this tool gave us the idea about using post-it notes, as it made it easier to categorize the  themes identified from the mind mapping exercise—this was definitely a lot more convenient than  having to rewrite all the ideas. I believe this is more of the visualization tool that is also discussed in  this course, but the two steps were very interrelated for this particular project.

Our project was chosen as the winner of this internal innovation competition, and was eventually  launched as a part of an existing e-health product of the company. Our short development time and  extensive user research was lauded across the company, and design thinking has been incorporated  into most of the projects that were initiated after the success of this project.

Approach:

The company has had various levels of success with incorporating design thinking tools into  developing new products, and mind mapping is definitely instrumental in the initial stages when it is  pivotal to understand the exact problem that needs to be addressed. I believe that the other tools  discussed throughout this course can also be merited, for example, storytelling is crucial when  selling or pitching an idea to any stakeholder, but in reflection, mind-mapping is an essential  component when identifying the main problem that one is trying to address or solve.

