Educating agency clients about design & innovation
Type of project
Internal service design project at a small design agency
Role & Team
Solo graduation internship project
Time
February - June 2020, full time
Deliverables
Research report, service prototype, service blueprint
Context & Problem
For my graduation internship, I worked at Stride XL, small design and innovation agency consisting of ten researchers and strategic and product designers. Stride XL wanted to start providing a specific educational service for their clients and my task was to design a concept for it, which would be backed up with research, and afterwards also prototyped and validated.
Disclaimer: because of NDA, project specifics cannot mentioned and parts of the visuals are blurred.
- Creating roadmap
- Market Research
- User Reserach
- Data synthesis
- HMWs
- Ideation workshop
- Further ideation with stakeholders
- Stroyboarding
- Service blueprinting
- Low-fidelity prototypes
- Storyboards
- Designer's journey
Full process
This case study highlights:
🤝 COLLABORATION
I highlighted for you the moments where I involved other people in the project with the 🤝 emoji because I believe design is a lot about involving the right people at the right time.
🎉 LEARNINGS
All my successes (highlighted with 🎉) I take as something to reflect upon and note down as learnings for next time. You can also find a more detailed visualization of my learning process at the end of this case study
💩 FAILS
Admit it, you're most curious about where I failed and what I learned from it, right? :D Well, lucky you, it's all highlighted with the beautiful 💩 emoji :).
Orientation & Planning
COLLABORATION: Creating a plan for the project together with the key stakeholders, my mentor and internal client, who will be also part of the service in the future, proved to be crucial for shared understanding of the project and aligned expectations.Disclaimer: because of NDA, project specifics are not mentioned and parts of the visuals are blurred.
Research
Market research
Mapping competitors and identifying their uniques selling propositions.
User research
I conducted 12 semi-structured interviews with:
- 6 potential users
- 6 potential clients (different target group then users)
LEARNING: Making an interview transcription and distilling findings right after each individual interview made the process a lot easier. Everything was still fresh in my mind and the workload of twelve interviews was devided over time.
Data synthesis
1. Affinity diagramming all findings
Each post-it has one finding tagged with the number of the participant. The post-its are clustered into themes and then placed in relevant phase of the customer journey.1. Affinity diagramming all findings
2. Defining insights and formulating them into presentation
COLLABORATION: Discussing research results with stakeholders and familiarizing them with the research outcomes proved to be key as it increased their involvement and helped them understand who we are designing the service for.
Ideation
HMWs
Together with my mentor helping me, we created five HMWs.
Ideation workshop
The workshop was originally planned to be held physically, but since this was in March and the coronavirus lockdown started a few days before the workshop, I had to quickly pivot into remote setup.
An icebreaker and warm-up exercises helped me to make participants feel comfortable and get them into the right mood for ideating.
COLLABORATION: To get a variety of different ideas, I invited four other designers and researchers to participate.
Workshop set-up
Further ideation with stakeholders
As I wanted to develop the ideas from the creative session further, I again partnered up with my mentor and the internal client to ideate individually and then bring the ideas together and discuss them.
All the ideas split according to the HMWs and evaluated on the scale of value and effort which helped me to select the best ideas.
FAIL: I created three concepts out of these ideas non-systematicly, which prevented me from utilising all of the good ideas in the best possible way.
Concept testing
To get quick feedback on the concepts, I created very simple storyboards visualizing the concepts and showed them to potential users (7 in total) and interviewed them about their perspective.Together with my mentor helping me, we created five HMWs.
The storyboards with gathered feedback on post-its
After the gathered concept feedback I combined the concepts into one and drafted a service blueprint.
Service prototyping & Testing
To test the final concept, I created a prototype consisting of low-fidelity interface prototypes and storyboards.
LEARNING: combining several types of prototypes can enable to prototype the whole service, including digital touchpoints, messages on communication channels and real-life interactions.
The first part of the prototype was the website for service and I asked the participants to highlight with colours what interests them (green), what they find useless (orange) and what confuses them (yellow).
Designer's journey - custom reflection tool
With my mentor Petr Kosnar, we have developed a tool to help me reflect on the whole project. We call it designer's journey because it visualizes the whole journey of me as a designer. You can read more about it in my dedicated article.
Side note: Even though this project has lienar design process, I'm aware and have the experience that this is not normally the case. However, as this project had to follow university guidelines, it had to be carried out in a linear way.
