Process Innovation
A collaboration with product development teams in experimenting with a new, research and user-centered process
Project Overview
How might we approach product development in a more user-centric way?
The product team I engaged with had been successfully designing innovative products for the market, but were interested in testing a new process to bring research and insights in earlier in the design process. This was a new experience for a cross functional team.
Approach
Research
+ distributed qualitative user interviews with screening survey
+ mining secondary research for relevant insights
+ remote expert interviews
Facilitation and Sharing
Designed and led collaborative sessions to:
+ synthesize the key painpoints expressed by users
+ ideate potential solution spaces
+ converge on most desirable, viable, and feasible options
+ created synthesis report to share with other teams
Outcomes
In a retrospective survey of this experimental process, the majority of participants reported they found the experience valuable and wanted to repeat it the following year.
The team I worked with received funding for some of the concepts proposed.
Learnings
In this project, I built trust in the value of research amongst a critical stakeholder group. I also helped the participants realize that design thinking and research can be scaled to the needs of the project and can be done quickly to inform decisions.
For this project, I had to balance the role of facilitator and team member so that I could help push the project along without mine being the loudest voice.