Challenge

I work for an educational non-profit that develops curricular solutions for professors who are struggling  to educate their students in the classroom. We were approached by a professor of entrepreneurship at  La Salle College who was having difficulty breaking his students out of the mindset that failure is  bad. After all, entrepreneurs fail all the time, and learning from failure is the most important element of  being an entrepreneur. But his students were afraid to fail. The challenge we faced was to develop a  learning tool that inculcated the mindset that failure is not only good, but essential to being a successful  entrepreneur.

We had 6 months to develop something and a host of capabilities to help us along the way, including a  wonderful video production team and a robust network of scholars we could draw from to partner with  on developing a solution. Our core team consisted of two people, but we were able to pull in members  of other teams to help with brainstorming and analysis.

Selection

Our team held an ideas brainstorm to get at many possible solutions on the table. After the brainstorm,  we narrowed the possible solutions down to four and encouraged the team to storyboard possible  implementations of the solution. I chose visualization because storyboarding was perhaps the most  dynamic moment of our design process. The members of my team tend to think linearly, but visualizing  ideas allowed us to think differently and to generate wild new applications of our ideas. Visualization  also helped us align on what the actual solutions looked like because there was some confusion and  disagreement beforehand.

Application

We handed out multiple “comic book frame” white sheets to each member of the team and asked  everyone to write out their idea as if they were drawing a page in a comic book. We thought this would  add a little fun to the project and also do a great job of visualizing the concepts. A comic book style helps  to convey cause, effect, and progress. It quite literally tells a story using pictures. We gave each person  in the room (8 people) fifteen minutes to draw their comic book story illustrating how a potential user  would interact with an actual product based on one of the concepts, and we assigned two people to  each concept. We gave each person a set of colored crayons and pencils to draw his or her comic strip.

Insight

One thing we learned from this visualization exercise was that it is easier to surface key assumptions  when you’re actually able to see the product “in action”. Members of the team who thought they had a  great idea realized that the idea would be logistically difficult if implemented, but they only discovered  this after drawing it out.

It also made it easier for the team to collaborate in a positive way on tinkering with the concepts. When  you discuss concepts at the abstract level, it is easier to poke holes than to have a “yes, and” mentality.

When you see something on paper, you think “that looks cool! What if we did it this way instead…” It’s  also a much more fun way to develop products and gets the team excited, which should not be  underestimated.

Approach

While we used visualization at the development stage, I can imagine using visualization much earlier on  in the process as well. In the “What is?” phase, our team did very little observation, relying mostly on  phone interviews with professors and secondary research to discover the problem we needed to solve.  We could take photographs or videos of the professors in action, actually teaching the class. And we  could develop personas of our target audience using actual photographs of the professors.

