Global Service Jam

Context:

Participants come together over the course of a weekend without a team or idea and are given a theme to incorporate in their new-to-the-world design while meeting new people!

Global Service Jam Challenge:

Interpret this year’s Secret Theme with your team of soon-to-be-friends and use the different service design tools to come up with a product!

Approach:

Design Tools

• Brainstorming and affinity mapping
• “How might we?” problem statements
• Concept brainstorm and dot voting
• Persona of customer profile
• Whiteboard sketches
• Write functional requirements
• Conduct intercept interviews
• Storyboarding
• Concept mapping
• Business model canvas

Process

First, we brainstormed interpretations of the Secret Theme and identified the following themes: communications, language learning, cultures.

From there, we turned themes into "How might we?" problem statements in order to brainstorm concepts: relatable scenarios where communications can strain long-distance relationships.

After that, we imagined ideas and concepts that would address the problem statements. The team voted on the most compelling ideas: a service that puts time on the calendar to catch up with long-distance friends and family.

We crafted a persona of the customer that would find value from solving the problem statement: Sarah, the new college freshman moving away from her best friend.

To make sense of how Sarah could use this service, we sketched how a calendar scheduling service could work in order for the team to understand the direction the idea can go.

After interpreting the sketches, we brainstormed functional requirements as far as what we want the service to do for our customer profile.

This was a lot of ideation within the team, so armed with a hypothesis of a problem, we got out of the building and interviewed people to gather research on communications pain points.

Reconvening with the team, we reviewed what interview respondents shared with us. We envisioned a scenario where our customer Sarah will need this service and the outcome it’ll create for her as far as maintaining long-distance friendships, using a storyboard.

Working through a concept mapping exercise, we brainstormed the specific functionality we expect from the Relationship Maintenance Bot.

Using the business model canvas, we evaluated the concept through the different factors required of a successful business model; this helped detail the WHY and HOW as well as get buy-in from the rest of the team.

What I Learned:

• I learned and applied a number of design tools, especially ideation frameworks
• Getting to know a team of people in such a short timeframe showed me how comfortable I am cycling through design tools without paralysis over unfamiliar methods