Final Assignment – Design Thinking of Innovation- Maria Panagiotopoulou – Visualization

Challenge & selection

I  am a member of my organization’s  customer experience department. The company  defined a challenge: to significantly improve the experience of the new customer (the  customer who visits for the first time a branch of the organization's network) in order to  increase the market share and customer loyalty. In order to meet this challenge, a team of  12 members  was set up, involving executives from the Process Improvement Division, IT, HR  and other business departments. Since the challenge was wide, the team decided to apply  many of the principles and tools of design thinking for empathizing , such as observation in  branches, interviewing new customers & branch managers,  identification & observation of  extreme/ analogous users-industries   & form insights (discover what is).

The next step was to form and describe the insights, to conceptualize solutions  and ideate,  to explore  IT solutions that can improve customer experience, optimize current procedures   and of course to create and test our prototypes(describe what if)  . The visualization tool  that we used in order to create and then test our prototypes was the storyboards .This tool  was very helpful to achieve a shared understanding of our ideas, to agree to the core  assumptions that we wanted to test with our customers-users and to have something  concrete to show to the customers when we would addressing to them in order to test the  prototype . I will describe in detail the procedure we followed using the visualization tool in  the application section below.

Application

We decided to do the prototyping actions related to the three of the ten insights we have  identified.  For the activity, the group divided into smaller groups of four participants each representing  an idea for prototyping action   In order to make concrete our ideas we decided that each group  to use a poster size  white  paper  to design  a storyboard in which the members could simply draw a high level story,   which consisted of 4 to 6 pictures in order to describe the idea and the customer journey  related to that. The activity had to be completed within 10 minutes.  When the storyboards were ready each team presented the story to the members of the  other teams .Every member of the other team had to say 2 things that he liked in this story  and one that makes him wonder about something else, to write them  down in 3 post – it    and stick them to the relative picture.   For example in a storyboard of one team which described the story of  a new customer who  applied digitally through website for a financial service offered by the company, one  member of the other team said and wrote in post – it:  I like that the customer has the possibility for digital application anytime he prefers,  I like  that he could avoid the queues in the branches in order to be serviced by an officer for his  application (something that usually degrades the customer experience), I wonder if the  customer is not using digital ways in order to be serviced and prefers the human touch with  an employee.  Then every team had to take into consideration and maintain the feature which the other  teams liked and to find ways to redesign / clarify the features they have make some

Final Assignment – Design Thinking of Innovation- Maria Panagiotopoulou – Visualization

members to wonder and in a new poster size white paper to design  the new, refined  storyboard. This process had to be repeated two more times before we go with the final  storyboard to the customer/user to test our prototype.   When the final storyboard was ready, each team had first to decide to the core assumption  related to the prototype that was necessary to be tested.  Then every team needed to find a user and make an appointment with him to show him the  storyboard (prototype) and experiment-test it - get feedback from the  customer-user by  making him open questions in order not to direct his answers , to give him the chance by this  way to express himself about what he  thinks, feels, says, does about the story, what he  likes, dislikes or suggests  in order to improve about the idea.  After this procedure, every team had to take into account all the things that emerged  through this experiment and to design a new even more refined storyboard, which had to  test it with another user.    We agreed to repeat this test 5 times trying to evolve our ideas and then the team had a  workshop in order to discuss, present  the final storyboards of each team and decided which  ideas considered viable  & feasible to deal with in order to significantly improve the new  customer’s experience. We managed to define what wows to the customer & what works.     Insight & Approach  What I have learned from conducting this exercise is  that the usage of a storyboard  – especially the final-refined storyboard that incorporates the feedback of the members of the  team & the customers feedback – is very significant for reinforcing the understanding of the  problem the group trying to solve.  But the aspect of the activity that has significant value is that the team during this process  shares insights and learning that emerge while they are trying to define the space of their  problem.  The storyboard gives the diverse group of members,   a focal point for discussion which gives  them the opportunity to share their perspectives and develop insights into potential root  causes of their problems.  While the team could use a narrative to describe their ideas ,and then after discussion to  rewrite and refine the narrative to describe the idea,  by using visualization tools such as  storyboards, managed to engage the logical & the creative side of their brains (and the  customers brain during the experiment). Unlike the narrative that can in each one's mind  create different images, the usage of simple sketch can help make our ideas more  understandable to someone else, and allows ideas to be heart and built upon.  By using simple storyboards to design prototypes we have proven to the company that it is  not necessary to invest a lot of time and resources in order to design and run an experiment  in order to learn about aspects of our   ideas. We understood that by using simple  visualization tools like storyboards,   we could conduct low risk experiments, at a minimal  cost with a safe audience, which are easy, quick to design & run and most important to be  generative and help the  teams to learn and grow the ideas. It think that it would be a good  idea next time to combine the storyboard with a simple role-play with the customer, in  order to have a more interactive and more vibrant experience during the experimentation.

