This course was a great complement to the Sustainability Inspired Innovation course I took last semester. Although they differ in content and objectives, they both drew upon collaboration and the design process to teach me four key lessons. Be Bold Throughout the project, there were opportunities for us to share our ideas. There were overt […]

Concept testing was incredibly insightful. We held our concept testing session with 7 volunteers in a classroom in the business school on the undergraduate side. We first discussed healthy lifestyles and living. That discussion included a certain amount of dialogue amongst the members. Finally, we presented them with two interfaces to evaluate: a mockup of […]

Prototyping our product was done digitally. We created a website and a mock-up of an application. These two items worked to highlight the the key differentiators of our product in order to demonstrate the aspects of our product that most need evaluation from testers through concept testing. This process was not too difficult as it […]

The ideation process involved brainstorming solutions to our curated set of insights. The following summarizes what came of our ideation brainstorming sessions, and valuable lessons learned in the process. Outcomes Our first brainstorming session attempted to find a way to accommodate for our target market’s on-the-go lifestyle, as they are young traveling millennials. Our ideas […]

Insight synthesis was a process that involved creating a problem statement that identified a need for our customer segment and a reason behind that need. It helped me to draw upon my experiences with observation and interviewing to find a key insight. Thursday’s class included only me and one other teammate, so we had only […]

This is certainly not the first time I’ve drafted personas for a project. I was part of the Sustainability-Inspired Innovation course last semester that involved work with personas, and my internship this summer also lent some experience in developing user profiles. Each iteration of this activity affords further insight into the philosophy of human-centered design, […]

The interview process was quite smooth. Interviews were easily scheduled, conducted without delay, and recorded effortlessly. My two interviews happened over FaceTime audio, and were recorded on a Voice Memos app on my phone. The interviewees were both females who work for Deloitte Consulting in the D.C. area named Autumn and Kailyn. I’ve broken down […]

Admittedly, the Observation step proved to be difficult. Logistics challenged our group’s timeline to say the least, and our target segment is nearly impossible to reach from campus. Because of this challenge, we needed to find alternative forms of observation. One solution was to observe graduate students, for they share some characteristics with our target […]

Although this is my second design thinking bootcamp, there were several important observations I made throughout my experience this time. Discussion is research. While asking questions of my partner, David, I remembered to ask about stories. I remembered to ask about “fit.” I remembered to ask about lifestyle. However, this time I paid close attention […]