Design Thinking for Innovation  University of Virginia - Darden School of Business

Reﬂection - Visualisation

Challenge and Selection

At the ﬁrm that I was working for, one of our goals that we set to during the  pandemic was to increase our social media following in an organic manner and  make sure that our audience was engaged with us. A team of 10 people were  working from 10 diﬀerent cities which make coordination and collaboration very  hard. Everyone had diﬀerent ideas and approaches.

We selected a few people from our audience who were heavily engaged with our  page since the beginning and also have the same passion about the company. We  selected people from ages 16-25 from al over the country who joined us during our  brainstorming sessions and curation sessions to get their feedback.

Application

The process was getting extremely messy so we decided to take 2 days and do  our research and then present our ideas to everyone in order to pick the best one.

We made everyone make vision boards/mood boards/collages of how we wanted  our social media pages to look and a visual representation of how were going to  achieve this. Once we did this, our life became so much simpler. Everyone was  ﬁnally able to understand each others ideas and concepts and we were able to  implement 6 out of 7 ideas.

Once we made a timelines as to when were going to implement which idea, we  started to design experiments. We started posting 6 pictures each with diﬀerent  themes/concepts/ideas and measured the analytics and response that we got from  each of these themes. Once, we do had suﬃcient enough information, we started  roll out more and more posts in similar themes.

We divided the 20 people we selected into randomised groups of 5 varying in age  and location to keep it as neutral as possible. Once each team had come up with  their ﬁnal designs for posts to go up on our social media, we ﬁrst got each team to  react to each others posts and made the necessary modiﬁcations. We also asked  each of the 20 selected people to make their vision boards in order to get a better  understanding of what our audience likes to see.

Insight and Approach

The insight that my team and I got from this experiment was extremely valuable  and the results spoke for themselves. Everybody was able to get a better  understanding of what the other person wanted to do and what they envisioned for  the page. We were also able to get a much better understanding of what our  audience likes, the kind of designs that catch their attention and what ideas and  designs will get them to engage with us even more. After conducting this  experiment, we achieved our 6 month goal in 3 months. We were able to grow our  page by 239% and our followers were highly engaging with us. Our followers  started to engage with us so much that were also able to open our ﬁrst brick-and- mortar store and our sales revenue grew by 400% in 4 months (highest that’s its  ever been since the inception of the company in 2017). People from all over the  country are talking about us, visiting our store and engaging us with highly on  social media.

The visualisation approach that we took helped us majorly as the main problem we  had to solve was the aesthetic of our page which we only ﬁgured out after we used  this approach. We are extremely happy that we uses this approach and are sure  that we will be using this and other approaches much more in the future.


Design Thinking for Innovation University of Virginia - Darden School of Business Reﬂection - Visualisation Challenge and Selection At the ﬁrm that I was working for , one of our goals that we set to during the pandemic was to increase our social media following in an organic manner and make sure that our audience was engaged with us . A team of 10 people were working from 10 diﬀerent cities which make coordination and collaboration very hard . Everyone had diﬀerent ideas and approaches . We selected a few people from our audience who were heavily engaged with our page since the beginning and also have the same passion about the company . We selected people from ages 16 - 25 from al over the country who joined us during our brainstorming sessions and curation sessions to get their feedback . Application The process was getting extremely messy so we decided to take 2 days and do our research and then present our ideas to everyone in order to pick the best one . We made everyone make vision boards / mood boards / collages of how we wanted our social media pages to look and a visual representation of how were going to achieve this . Once we did this , our life became so much simpler . Everyone was ﬁnally able to understand each others ideas and concepts and we were able to implement 6 out of 7 ideas . Once we made a timelines as to when were going to implement which idea , we started to design experiments . We started posting 6 pictures each with diﬀerent themes / concepts / ideas and measured the analytics and response that we got from each of these themes . Once , we do had suﬃcient enough information , we started roll out more and more posts in similar themes . We divided the 20 people we selected into randomised groups of 5 varying in age and location to keep it as neutral as possible . Once each team had come up with their ﬁnal designs for posts to go up on our social media , we ﬁrst got each team to react to each others posts and made the necessary modiﬁcations . We also asked each of the 20 selected people to make their vision boards in order to get a better understanding of what our audience likes to see . Insight and Approach The insight that my team and I got from this experiment was extremely valuable and the results spoke for themselves . Everybody was able to get a better understanding of what the other person wanted to do and what they envisioned for the page . We were also able to get a much better understanding of what our audience likes , the kind of designs that catch their attention and what ideas and designs will get them to engage with us even more . After conducting this experiment , we achieved our 6 month goal in 3 months . We were able to grow our page by 239 % and our followers were highly engaging with us . Our followers started to engage with us so much that were also able to open our ﬁrst brick - and- mortar store and our sales revenue grew by 400 % in 4 months ( highest that ’s its ever been since the inception of the company in 2017 ) . People from all over the country are talking about us , visiting our store and engaging us with highly on social media . The visualisation approach that we took helped us majorly as the main problem we had to solve was the aesthetic of our page which we only ﬁgured out after we used this approach . We are extremely happy that we uses this approach and are sure that we will be using this and other approaches much more in the future .