Learning Launch is a great tool that could be used in various cases.  Learning launch helps to understand what inspires customers and what ideas will work in a real environment, not just hypothetically. After generating ideas, you need to test them quickly and cheaply, that's what this tool is appropriate for. My team chose it when were developing a communication concept in the tourism industry. The challenge was to establish contact with foreign tourists in a new way. St. Petersburg does not have modern communication programs that would combine all relevant materials for foreigners from Europe and the USA. Most of the time, international tourist exhibitions and official tourist web-portals are used to form the image of the city in the eyes of foreigners, but we noticed that these tools don't work.  Our decision was to create a resource that will build a connection between objects, locations and St. Petersburg's community with new niches of foreign tourists, as well as to focus on the unique content of new routes.

While generating ideas, we wanted to use different media resources and, first of all, create a site with a friendly TOV. After a  brainstorm, we realized that the easiest way to build loyalty and user engagement  is to use sensory stimulation and lifestyle presentation. The medium of such content is YouTube, so we decided to focus on prototyping this resource. We shot and edited the first short video about St. Petersburg, which reflected the communication style we needed. Then we presented it at a business tourism conference, where our potential partners gathered. This was necessary in order to track what emotional response our prototype would receive, just as it was in the story of IBM, which presented a new prototype of the exhibition stand at Sibos and after that collected data about new human interactions.

What were our main insights? Firstly, the production of content on YouTube is much faster and cheaper than developing applications or a website, and requires much less resources. A very small team could begin to shape a new image of the city. Secondly, a small prototype and its quick presentation helps to quickly understand whether our product will produce a "wow-effect" or not. This time our video got a positive emotional response, but didn't amaze the audience very much. Our mistake was incorrect positioning of the product and inaccuracy in choosing the scenario for the video. In addition, if we were in a slightly different situation with timing, it would be necessary to wait for the reaction directly from the YouTube audience, because it was our main goal.

However, the Learning Launch and flexible approach to design thinking tools allowed us to understand that starting any project can be much easier than in the traditional model. From this course, I learned that mistakes are not our enemies, but our assistants, so our difficulties inspired us to fix the shortcomings and continue working further.

