Connecting small business owners to save time, money, and the environment
Creating a new experience to help New Zealand’s entrepreneurs share resources
Facilitation | Prototyping | User Research
As a way to refresh my facilitation and prototyping skills, I took IDEO U’s From Ideas to Action course. Throughout the course, I developed and refined a solution to the question, “How might we inspire small business owners to adopt more sustainable travel practices for a more sustainable world?” The result was a way for people to share resources while traveling, and more importantly, connect with one another.
Role: Student / Designer
Team: n/a
Methods: Brainstorming, Interviews, Rapid Prototyping, Group Ideation
A brisk ideation, prototyping, and iteration cycle pushed me to conduct lean user research and draw on colleagues for feedback. I quickly moved from a generic problem statement to one that had more impact, and from a flash-in-the-pan idea to a paper prototype. Plus, I got to practice a variety of fun group and solo ideation and prototyping activities.
Outcome:
This was a great exercise in creativity and pushed me to keep moving with an idea even though I didn’t have a ton of resources at my disposal. As a researcher, I can get held back by my own ideology when it comes to building out ideas without doing “enough” research. The course reminded me that even a few feedback sessions can evolve an idea into a tangible thing that people can get excited by.