iadp day 2 reflection

The design challenge for day 2 was to redesign the hawker food experience in PJ. And for day 2, we had a reshuffle of team members - it was a good thing as I got an opportunity to work with other classmates. For the empathy stage, we were introduced to three tools namely journey map, wordstorm and stakeholder map. And were reminded to ask plenty of "WHY" in order to dig deeper.

It was somewhat exciting having the opportunity to go out to a hawker centre to interview people on their hawker food experience. The team decided that we wanted to interview both the customers (that's our focus) as well as hawkers during our field trip. Most of the interviews were carried out in Mandarin, and therefore it was truly a challenge for me to jot down notes, what more ask questions! Although, I misunderstood some of the responses; I did quite well in note taking accurate responses most of the time. Then it was time for unpacking our interviews back at the studio with the empathy map. This time around, we had to decide on a persona as our interviewees are just so diverse. It was not easy to pick one, but somehow we managed by voting.

Developing a Point of View (POV) ain't easy at all. The coaches shared an example of the difference between a 1 star POV, and a 5 star POV. We really struggled to get an all star POV. This reminded me of how I also struggled writing POV in my earlier consulting days. I believe with more practice, we would be able to craft better POV in the future. Recently, I've also tuned in to the Design Thinking Action Lab MOOC google hangout for some tips in crafting POVs :)

I have always thought that ideation wasn't a challenge for me at all. I guess I'm wrong. I realized that I tend to evaluate my ideas before sharing it with the team. And when pressed to come out with ideas in a short amount of time, I just wrote down whatever that came across my mind be it a "ground breaking" or "normal" idea. To be honest, it was one of the ideas that I came out with (which was further built upon) and got picked for prototyping. This experience has taught me to truly go for quantity, rather than focus on whether the idea was "creative".

During the prototyping stage, we were informed that we need to build a prototype where the user (a classmate from another team) can interact with during the testing stage. It was a curve ball thrown at us the very last minute, as we were finalising our sketch/presentation. It was a challenge that I felt we had to embrace and somehow figure it out. Although most of us felt kinda confused, somehow we managed to make things happen. We tested our prototype with users (classmates from another team), and had an opportunity to observe how our users interacted with our prototype. Our prototype was to offer customers 20% discount if they were to bring their own utensils - similar to the Starbucks tumbler concept. The coaches mentioned that it was crystal clear how our prototype was designed based on our user needs - hygiene while maintaining affordability. We also got feedback to sell utensils in addition to our proposed prototype. And surprisingly another team prototyped a food container which is perfect to go together with our prototype.

This is my 2nd prototype of a service, and I've learned quite a lot from it. Although the idea is quite straightforward and simple, it addresses the needs of our user. Also, it's crucial to develop prototypes where one can observe how users interact with the prototype in order to gain "real" feedback.

Other activities on day 2 include:

1. Team activity to build a paper plane with your non dominant hand & no verbal communication

2. Reframing your answers - No, Yes... but, Yes... and

It's only day 2, and I've gone through 3 design thinking challenges. Can't wait for the next one! And to work on a design challenge with a partner organisation.