I previously about my experience has a weeklong Design Thinking Bootcamp participation at Stanford design School (aka d.school). I was amazed with all the responses and comments I received on Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook, where people asked me to write more. It has even been picked up and syndicated by Wired.com! Boot Camp was truly a fabulous experience, so I'm excited to share more.
My first article centered on the art of empathy with your users to really understand their needs. I told the story of d.school mentor Doug Dietz and how he redesigned scary MRI scanner kids on a fun adventure to take, and how in our own boot camp experience, we were asked, "to make the airport experience new" in San Francisco International (SFO). In this article I will dive deeper into how we attacked the airport problem and what I learned from it.
As a reminder, after being dropped off at SFO, my partner Amy and I interviewed dozens of people about their feelings for the airport. Many of these interviews went nowhere - until we decided to visit the car rental place. There we found frustrated people who wanted to share their feelings! One of the most memorable was a New Yorker named Ray who had to get his car to wait for almost an hour. He was so excited frustrated by the experience that he never wanted to use SFO. Ray was furious and share in a mood, how he felt - complete with the kind of colorful language that are I've come to expect from native New Yorker! We talked with Ray and others much as he, in the depths, before returning to the bus-hopping to Stanford.
Too d.school return we met in a group of six students, as well as our mentor Empire and all of our observations "unpacked". Each team of two interviewers shared a few of their most interesting topics. There were some really cool characters that people know, but the whole team decided after some discussion that Raging Ray was a truly compelling user to design for.
Now that we had a target user in mind, and an understanding of their history to help us empathize, we have a use key design Thinking tool, were interviewed. We had to create our Point of View statement. These usually take the form of:
- We met ...
- We were surprised to see, ...
- What happens if we .. .
Our position in the next phase of the process at the start was:
- We met Raging Ray a deeply frustrated customer tries a car hire
- we were amazed to see that the last part of his journey day had ruined all his travel
- What if we could make the car rental experience a way to stress his journey relieve and welcome him to his destination
Once we had our position statement we were ready to start brainstorming. Our team spent an hour record ideas on how we could make Ray's experience better. Few of them include:
- A "San Francisco" concierge service to provide coffee and snack machines in the pavilion inside information about the city, while you waited
- a central check-in desk in place a line at each rental
- a restaurant-style pager that would go if it was the turn of
- an automated check- in kiosk, would side your phone when you turn came
- A VIP lounge area
- Supersized touchscreens on the walls that you can browse information about the city
- A system that would automatically would deliver your luggage off the plane to the car
- And many, many more
We were all very excited. There were clearly so many things that we could do here that we were sure that we could make the world a better place for Ray! But before we could with our airport design project, we took all those keen to help us for the next step in the design thinking process in an exercise.
The Marshmallow Challenge
We all moved to another room and were divided into teams of four. Each group was given a set of materials:
- 20 pieces of uncooked spaghetti
- 1 meter masking take
- 1 meter string
- 1 Marshmallow
We were then given a challenge. We had 18 minutes to work as a team, with a new group that we had never met, and build a tower that would hold the marshmallow so high off the table as possible. There were no further instructions. We were out of the race!
Our group was quick to agree that a pyramid structure was to go a good way. We started with a square base, but quickly changed to a triangular base for our pyramid. We discussed where we needed two pieces of spaghetti taped together for strength or whether we could risk a single piece in a key area, so we would have more material to build higher. As the clock ticked down, we looked to grow in the other towers around the room. Some teams were almost completely Search, and other teams seemed to be barely above the ground.
With about a minute we leave our marshmallow on a tower at the top of our pyramid set. It looked pretty good. to go with less than 30 seconds, we began to hear cries of fear around the room, as some structures under the weight of the marshmallow collapsed. When the time was called, circulated a judge to measure each tower.
We were to have measured our tower of the first team, and we were the highest on the scoreboard - at least at first. As the judges went to, we were finally defeated and began to fall down in the rankings. However, an interesting pattern emerged. Almost half of the teams scored zero! Its towers were completely collapsed right as the clock on the final seconds ticked down. They had waited until the last moment to put their marshmallow on top and did not have time to recover if things went wrong. These teams completely failed the challenge!
wereAfter the final rankings published each applauded the winning team, we lost about 4 inches, and started the mentors to talk about what we could learn from this challenge.
arises, called this particular exercise of the marshmallow challenge was studied deeply. We were shown a table like that. It was no surprise that a group of trained architects would do better than graduates Business School. But there was another category that has been studied, in which the results than the trained architects were almost as good. Can you guess what it was? It was Kindergarteners!
Studies have shown that a key to success is iteration in this challenge. Teams that spent too much time, the organization, the planning and design for the problem we were susceptible had seen just play. Their structure was not tested until they were almost out of time. If it is not the first time perfecting, they could fail completely. On the other hand, the kindergarteners generally start by a structure of some sort putting up to see the results of changing the structure. His natural part of how they play. The kindergarteners were almost decent results simply guaranteed as they iterate and getting better as they went. You could not have a group of trained architects fit, but they were blown off other groups of high-IQ adults!
our mantra for the rest of the week has been set "that marshmallow early on the tower and often! " This would deeply affect the next part of our project. We could not suffer from analysis paralysis, if we were to succeed in this pressure cooker environment.
Our prototype and the guinea pigs
It was to start making time! We detained a corner of a design studio and began to build our new car rental pavilion. We were given only 20 minutes to build. There was no time for fancy prototypes. We had materials such as construction paper, pipe cleaners, cardboard, glue sticks, foam cube and the like. Actually, it was a bit of all the things you would expect to find in a kindergarten classroom. Coincidence? Probably not!
We sketched quickly a plan for our gazebo. It included a central check-in desk with wireless pager, an automated check-in kiosk, a VIP lounge, San Francisco: concierge services, high-tech touch screens, free Wi-Fi and food and vending machines. We constructed all this from a pair of wheels desks, a spare bed and a number of construction paper in the course of a few minutes. It was fantastic. We were pretty impressed with ourselves.
Then it came time for the rubber to hit the road. We had a pool of volunteers "users" told it outside of our experience were willing to court. On our team we have agreed to play different roles quickly. Amy ran the check-in desk, while I occupied the concierge. , was designated Joe notes to take, as our visitors liked the various amenities
Build After superfast, we brought in our first user - one-by-one. We had time, about five users running through our prototype. In general, the rough nature of our prototype was no problem at all experience. All understood what we wanted to do. After a short role play, we interviewed have (our new empathy techniques!) To see what they thought. Most found something to like, but many were overwhelmed by all the options. While everyone was polite, we were not enthusiastic feedback received we expected.
our users by After running, we sat down as a team down debriefing. We agreed in general we had failed in our design. We support Ray and tried to figure out what he would say. What did he need? He did not need all these fancy amenities. He needed a shorter line and a human touch. That's all! We had lost had contact with our target users and this short, informal user testing that proved immediately. What if we had spent weeks and thousands of dollars just to build a "real" prototype of this area? What a waste that would have been
Our final solution: The owner Genius
We were some time given our design to change before it will present to the other teams and a group of airport executives. Armed with more data, we threw our whole concept and slimmed it on bare bones down. We threw all desks and all the amenities! If you entered the pavilion were greeted instead by a car rental genius with a wireless tablet (hat tip to the Apple Store). Your genius would look up your driver's license or credit card swipe and your reservation. You could get insurance options and your car directly on the tablet and sign all your papers. They were ready to go. It was much easier and it felt like Ray would like.
The rapid-fire nature of the week, we not a second round of user testing condition - which would have been an obvious next step. However, we have to construct a new, simpler prototype (in only about 5 minutes) and demonstrated it to the group. It felt like a good answer, and we would definitely come to us a long way. The feedback from the airport executives was really positive
Moral of the story :. Get the marshmallow on top of your tower early and often! Design, test, repeat.
Steve is the VP of cloud products at Citrix where his team developed software products like Citrix XenServer, Citrix Cloud Platform and Citrix Cloud portal Business Manager. His team is currently design thinking techniques to build a completely new software product to ship early 2015. He's pretty excited.
Follow @virtualsteve on Twitter
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