Design Thinking – Reflection on Learning Launch    Challenge  The situation I’m going to describes involves the IT department of an organization I was  working at. The department included about 100 people, working in three different locations  across two continents. Some of the infrastructure in use was more than 30 years old, or just  based on very old systems that were too complex to replace. Next to that the company also  had state of the art IT systems. This lead to a huge amount of documentation on various  different platforms, old and new ones, and chaotic processes where no one knew where to find  the relevant information.   The challenge for me was to find a way of organizing all this information in a way that people  could easily find it, without the need to check in various different platforms and tools. On top  of that, this had to be a low cost solution, as this needed to happen next to our daily job and  within only a few weeks.    Selection  The tool I selected was Learning Launch. The idea of Learning Launch is to test your idea on  the field, and learn what works and what not directly from the customer or end user (see also  the video of Ed Hesse in lesson 4). In our case we didn’t want to spend too much time  discussing the best solution. We needed to reorganize the resources people used on a daily  basis – the structure had to reflect the way they think, not the way I think. We thus decided to  let the people try out our idea, to gather their feedback and then improve our solution based  on how well it helped them find the information they were looking for.    Application  Due to the time and resource constraints it was not possible to migrate everything to a new  tool so everything would be in one place. What we did instead was to create an entry portal  which could be used to navigate to the various resources. People would no longer need to look  in various places for information, but could just navigate to all the resources from one single  point of entry. The challenge was to set up a structure for the navigation that would work for  the IT people and match their way of thinking. After discussing with some people on the team,  we pretty quickly set up the entry portal with an initial structure. We let the people use it for  several weeks and gathered usage data during this time. We also interviewed people and had  various informal chats during coffee breaks to understand how they felt about the structure.  Based on these feedbacks we made some changes to the navigation, then again let people  use it and gathered feedbacks on the new structure. This time the feedback was great and we  decided to keep this structure.    Insight  The big challenge here was that we had to think of a structure for information that was intended  to people with a very different way of thinking than mine. We had to create a product designed  specifically for them, and only they could know how information is interconnected in their mind.  However, putting these interconnections to paper is very hard. Explaining why a certain way  of organizing the information does not work was much easier. Additionally, the acceptance  was very high, as the team felt that we were doing this for them, not for their boss.     Approach   We applied Learning Launch only after the solution was already clear. The tool was used to  optimize the solution we had already agreed on, instead of trying out an idea and see if it  works. Due to the time and resources available it was not an option to discard the idea and  pursue a different one if we would have found out that it did not work. This is somehow contrary  to the idea of Design Thinking. In future situations, I would like to really use Learning Launch  to test an idea and have the option to test another one if the first idea fails.

