Design Thinking at Mastering Mobility in Melbourne - 18/09/2013

[Former Member]

Around 20 design thinking newbies from different companies out of Australia and New Zealand came together in order to participate at the Design Thinking Experience workshop out of the Mastering Mobility Event to get some insights into the new way of creating ideas and making them tangible.

The group was split in 2 and the first activity of the day was the Marshmallow challenge. Good fun and lessons learned were:

·        fail early and often 🙂

·        be visual

We then provided the group with an intro into the design thinking methodology and how we live it in the development environment of the SAP Labs.

Afterwards the two teams were faced with their Design Challenge for the day – Brainstorm on your Team Design Challenge" and do a complete Fast Forward DT cycle during the day.

Heading into two completely different directions, one team decided to go for an application to enhance the shopping experience of a consumer (shopaholic) and  the other team concluded on a TravelNanny for travellers.

We then went through the different steps in the DT process and below you can see some highlights from their journey:

·        Research – We only did very limited research because of time constraints and mainly focused on research on the internet and gathering personal insights.

• Synthesis - After a classical story telling the two groups put their results into two different frameworks, the TravelNanny team in a more process based one, and the Shopaholics arrived at a complete backbone of the future app, as they had already a lot of experience, also business wise in that area.
• Both teams came up with personas as well:
  Billy Bob, a married man with two kids traveling out of Melbourne to Penang.
  Jason, a married bargain hunter, who shops frequently and uses a smartphone as well.
• Point-of-view - Based on the persona and focusing on 1 aspect out of the process/user stories , the two teams defined a point-of-view per team to ideate on:
  “As Billy Bob, I just arrived in Thailand and sitting in my hotel, and want to get some insight about places of interest nearby in order to discover the area.”
  “As Jason I want to get a shopping list based on my previous shopping history, my geo-location and personal preferences in order to shop efficiently.”

• Prototyping
  Out of the prototyping phase, we got some amazing results ending up with role-plays, paper based mock-ups and nearly ready to implement version of the shopping app; and for sure a new business model by leveraging virtual or real avatars to make you familiar with the environment where you travel.

It was a really interesting day and process to go through. We discovered that Design Thinking is used in a different way by our development teams and this was a great learning exercise for all of us. It was exciting to see how you can build on each other’s ideas and energy and the best part of all, it was great fun! I can’t wait to see that Travel Avatar on my smartphone when I arrive in a new country and have no idea where to start.

A big thank you to our German colleagues, Christian and Oliver, for inspiring us.