Shamsun Fawzy

Reflection – Mind Mapping

Challenge & Selection

Mind mapping is a powerful tool that I use to look for patterns and insights in the  large quantity of data. Together with my design team, I work in a home  furnishing retail company, creating inspirational, beautiful and functional home  furnishing solutions to create a better everday life for the many people in our  local market. In order to turn their dreams into beautiful, functional solutions; we  conduct home visits. We visit 30 homes every two years and collect qualified and  detailed information. We interview people with different living situations to  understand their needs, their physical surroundings, the activities at home and  their dreams. We take photographs of their homes.

The physical spaces that they are living in, their living situations, their tastes, the  income levels and their wants and dreams differ a lot. Once we gather the data,  we look at similarities and we categorise the people into personas. In order to  generate ideas, we mind map our findings with a group of diverse background  colleagues. This gives us an opportunity to translate the insights into design  criteria. With the design criterias we pick, we create solutions in our media to  solve the needs and dreams of our customers.

Application

Last year, after completing the home visit for our primary market area, we set  up a workshop and invite the sales, logistics and customer relations teams  together with the design team. We gave them the data and let them explore the  findings on their own. Then we made teams of five and asked them to cluster the  stuff they found interesting and worth finding a solution for. There were themes  like “lack of space”, “safety”, etc. The teams created insight statements for the  themes. “Lack of space” becomes people can’t figure out how to organise their  personal and shared areas at home. “Safety” becomes families with small  children are in need of safety solutions at home, however some of them are  unaware of that. Then the teams identified the insights related to each cluster  and noted the connections.

Insight

By applying the mind mapping tool, we were ready to establish design criteria for  the what if idea generation. We asked the participants to tour the store media by  keeping in mind the mind mapping that they have generated and come back to  the workshop. We asked them if anything possible what design criteria they  would want to implement as a solution in the store. They have come up with new  ideas that were easy to implement in the store. Organise your living throughout  all areas of the home was the biggest focus possibility that could be implemented

with small, clever and inspirational solutions. After implementing the ideas (as  small tests) in the selected media, we see an increase in sales. We continued to  implement the ideas in the medias and at the end of the year the overall  customer satisfaction index in inspiration increased from 72% to 80%.

Approach

Since I have seen the benefits of mind mapping tool and generating ideas with  different background colleagues, I might consider applying the same metodology  in improving the customer shopping experience in the store or in other  innovative projects together with my team. Although it is taking more time to  explore, it is worth the effort!

