Project description
The COVID-19 challenge was set up by IBM in partnership with the World Design Organisation to target one of 180 challenge statements that had been generated across the globe. You can read about the challenge and see other design responses to COVID-19 on the World Design Organisation page. In an entirely remote Europe/Africa team, I contributed to design thinking activities on a provided How Might We question over the course of a week.
How might we help workers who have lost their jobs due to Covid-19 cope mentally and financially and develop new digital skills and develop or land new digital jobs?
My role
Participant-come-facilitator Although I signed up as a participant, I responded to gaps in facilitation, planning, and coaching in breakout groups.
Activities
The set up of the week was 4 days of work via Webex calls followed by a 5 minute virtual playback on the Friday. A pre-organised Mural along Enterprise Design Thinking methods from the iX Garage was set up by the facilitators.
Team
The team included designers from Nairobi, Italy, and Canada with a variety of backgrounds in immersive tech, service design and much more. Some of the team was familiar with design thinking, but hadn’t experienced Enterprise Design Thinking or got to use it in context yet.
My reflections
How might we statement
The first activity on the agenda was to re-write the provided How might we statement. Since the statement was so verbose, we could all come up with much more specific versions, linked to specific demographics. Our ideas loosely grouped into 4 groups around enabling a workforce through and after COVID-19:
- Pandemic as opportunity: How might we encourage people to be fluid with their job roles - into volunteering, into start-ups - and become more resilient as a result?
- Recovery: How might we shepherd people into roles particularly important for economic recovery after COVID-19?
- Survival: How might we prevent the loss of jobs in the first place during the crisis?
- Skills: How might we better provide/direct skills education? How might we direct large groups into education/roles specific for them?
Users
We then brainstormed the users that we wanted to aim at. There were a few themes, which aligned with what we’d heard of COVID-19 experiences in the press. By converging again, we spotted that a lot of our identified users had an “unconventional” employment status - whether freelance, entrepreneurs, self-employed or in a transition. In hindsight, what we created may have been more of an Archetype. The other group of users we initially identified were entry-level workers in the hospitality industry.
Validation
One of my favourite things about this project was how fast we moved to validate the experiences of the user groups we identified. By the second day, we had in-depth interview insights from 8 individuals which fell into our two archetypes.
I then led a clustering activity of insights, using colour-coding to track the research source to the theme. We found that across the non-conventional worker archetype, themes emerged. Many themes also transcended geographies, although we were aware that we would need to reality-check our ideas across continents and communities. I was pleased to see that insights were consistent across interviewees - as until this point I had been uncomfortable with the team’s assumptions and stereotypes based on each continent’s perceived affluence. A really poignant insight was that non-conventional workers feel under-represented by government and industry support, and under-catered for by services and products.
We decided to move forward with the non-conventional worker because we’d collected far more insights for that archetype than the hospitality worker. We created a persona, dragging insights directly on to the empathy map, and then filled in the gaps to bring him to life.
As-is scenario
The as-is scenario proved one of the hardest parts of our week. While we’d established a lot of data about our desired user, we hadn’t understood that user trying to achieve the task we’d chosen. While our persona, William, explored starting his own business as a result of COVID-19, none of our interviewees had. This meant that a lot of our as-is scenario was filled out with general, non-task related insights, assumption, and our own limited experience.
A major learning point for me here, was that sometimes not just person-based generative research is required, but also task-based research. I guess often in my project work, I’m iterating on existing experience, so this second type of research is implicit.
Needs statements
Three themes came across in brainstorming our needs statements.
- IT and technology needs
- Access to new skills education
- Planning and executing an industry-standard business plan
We certainly felt that the second and third needs were actionable by us as a team. We knew that IBM offered business automation and integration offerings that help set up conventional business. We were starting to imagine a way that tools like this could become applicable to someone considering moving into entrepreneurship and self-employment.
And then… disaster!
In the spirit of speed, the provided workshop template had skipped a vital stage… Ideation! As a result, we came up with a to-be scenario where William had solved all of his own problems - not our service or application!
Our not-so to-be map.
The scenario definitely helped us develop our experience roadmap, but meant that our solution lacked much identity or definition.
Rounding up
Running out of time for the week, we struggled a little. I observed that because canvas-space for it wasn’t included in the Mural, the suggested storyboarding, prototyping, flowcharts and service blueprinting stages were ignored. This meant that our final presentation was a concept without a concept car, however, some edits to our to-be scenario seemed to explain the features and functions we wanted.
When we got to the last canvased activity, the Experience-based roadmap, it all came back together again. In some ways, the structure of Cupcake, Birthday Cake, and Wedding Cake, encouraged big ideas better than the conventional activity does. Perhaps including stimulus for outlandish ideas, like the Wedding cake tier, into Big Ideas, would push us further in future!
Happily, we also re-introduced the need for localisation of our service, and identified that in our “Next steps”.
Impact
Although the project wasn’t taken forwards it received really positive feedback from judges and other participants. I received some really positive feedback on my coaching from the participants I had been in a break-out room with, including:
I have given you a special mention… IBM DT was a mixture of familiar and new for me personally. By having the guidance in understanding the objectives per exercise - it helped work effectively under the timeframe…
In future workshops, I’ll be sure never to neglect the introduction of Enterprise Design Thinking principles, consider whether task research is needed before attempting scenarios (as well as persona validation), and I’ll consider introducing stimulus for bigger ideas in ideation.