To be honest, this was my least favorite part of the design thinking process because I am more of a conceptual, idea generating person over the hands on creation of an actual physical product person. However, I still enjoyed the process, especially over the Tribe Innovation prototyping workshop. The workshop was extremely well-run, but I struggled with being given a problem I hadn’t been thinking of before and only having ten minutes to create something addressing it. I liked that we were working off of an idea and company that we have spent countless weeks researching and thinking about. There were lower stakes in class of thinking on my feet because there was so much formal build up beforehand. I would like to break up my reactions to the process via useful skills I learned, challenges we encountered, and things that surprised me about the process.
USEFUL
I think the suggestion that I made to my group on Tuesday, the first day of prototyping was very effective. We went back to the white board and re-wrote the LP facets we were addressing, our HMW statement, and the primary characteristics of our persona. This was really helpful in re-centering our focus because we were feeling a little overwhelmed about where to start, so we now re-remembered what problem specifically we were trying to solve. It was great sharing our idea with Professor Luchs because we had two ideas, and we weren’t sure if both were too bold. He gave us great feedback which was to go bigger then wait for feedback then we could potentially to scale down. I thought this was especially impactful as a very practical, realistic person who even last week had trouble coming up with wacky ideas for the ideation process. Therefore, I accepted the fact that I was wrong in initially shooting down both more bold ideas for Olay until we had potential consumers to give us feedback on our pitch.
CHALLENGING
The most difficult part of the prototyping process for me was the storyboard part because we all created our own draft individually then shared, but I was far from satisfied with mine. I knew what ideas I wanted to share, but I had trouble figuring out how it would conceptually and aesthetically flow along the board. I definitely hit my first “design thinking mind block” because all I could think of was a “before” and “after” concept board with a line down the middle. I realized all the before stuff wasn’t as necessary to include because that could be verbalized and most people are aware of the health and beauty industry for using single-use plastics. Luckily, everyone had some overlapping and different ideas, so we were able to combine all of our ideas into four main slots of the board: “persona,” “packaging,” “customizability,” and “in-store re-design.”
SURPRISING
I was surprised at how easily I group made compromises at the actual product design stage and the story board creation process. We logically weighed the pros and cons between an open lip screw off top versus as plastic reusable tube-like structure, and we came to a conclusion we all agreed with—an aluminum screw-off container. Additionally, we decided to meet from 3:30-5:30 pm on Friday, and we were so productive! It was so cool seeing our storyboard sketch come alive, and we were very proud of it. We didn’t realize how many words we had put on it, so we plan to come back to class on Tuesday and re-assess it, like the way we think of powerpoint presentations. I think we should only have the most necessary words on the board because the rest can just be verbalized.