Since the last leg of our relay, we’ve been hard at work synthesizing our results and formulating our design goal for the summer semester. If you’ve sat in front of hundreds of hours of research and could only see the words “what’s next?”, you’ll relate to this story. It’s a daunting, exciting, nerve-wracking, and inspiring feeling. Our approach wasn’t perfect, but where we’re going now is pretty darn cool.
With the addition of findings from last sprint’s pretotype, we knew the best way to set us up for our semester research showcase was to look at everything we’ve accomplished to this point and identify some key themes. Armed with digital sticky notes and caffeine, our team met on a Saturday morning to generate an affinity map that captures all of the big ideas throughout the semester.
Upon generating 14 unique themes (shown above), we decided to evaluate each grouping based on its connection to Optum’s three core values of 2021:
We knew that if we could propose a solution that captured one of these ideas, we’d hit gold.
We evaluated each idea, mapped them out into a diagram, and then…silence. What next? Do we address the themes that capture all three values? Do we choose a targeted value that’s also representative of the team? Or do we scrap the evaluation and keep grouping themes, hoping for the magic pattern that will give us our next idea?
It felt like looking at a map of a hundred different destinations with nowhere in mind to go, and conflicting reasons to go in any direction. After thinking through the ambiguity for a bit, our team found success by exploring two parallel paths.
When first learning about Optum’s 2021 values, it was reassuring that if we kept the values top of mind, we would likely succeed with our primary stakeholders. However, learning this also hit us with an overwhelming ambition to try and meet the needs of a 300,000+ healthcare organization in an 8-month capstone. We had to come to terms that this was unrealistic, and with that we set out to make values of our own.
By taking another look at our affinity diagram, we created a subsequent level of theming to organize the 14 themes we identified into three values backed by our research to inform our future work:
Using these values as our team’s compass, with Optum’s values as our validation, this gave us an extra filter to make sure we pick the right way forward.
After spending the weekend combing through a semester’s worth of research, the most radical idea ended up being our path forward — forget everything. Not really, but just for a moment. Don’t think about the interviews, the exercises, the presentations and work to be done. Instead, we asked ourselves a simple question:
“If you could spend a semester making anything, what do you want to make?”
We gave ourselves 15 minutes to individually think about what a successful project looks like to us, then came together to discuss. Not all of our ideas were applicable to healthcare, but they all stretched our imagination.
Whereas our initial project brief locked us into a mobile app, this thought experiment allowed us to share our interests in designing healthcare services, connected IoT devices, and even video games. We didn’t just focus on “how do we get people to pay attention to their health,” but started asking questions such as “how can we make healthcare feel like Candy Crush?”
This thinking broke us away from the heavy responsibility we felt to make the perfect healthcare app during a pandemic, and instead inspired us to think about how we could bring our professional passions to a domain that was new to the majority of our team.
Moving into our final sprint for the Spring half of our time with Optum, we have three upcoming deliverables to help illustrate a semester of research and our plans for the summer.
Our research report will be delivered to our incredible sponsors and healthcare experts at Optum, ProtectWell, and United Health Group. Many have gotten to see our progress firsthand, but this is a chance to give them a tangible, comprehensive document of our work through this point. I think it’ll look pretty awesome on my coffee table, too.
On May 3rd, we will be presenting our work at a private event to faculty and peers in the Human-Computer Interaction Institute here at Carnegie Mellon. What we know now is we’re the first team in our cohort to present, bright and early on a Monday morning. We’re approaching this as a chance for our team to set a high bar for capstone presentations, and are excited for some thoughtful discussions with faculty and peers around our work.
This is our chance to show the public what we’ve been working on and give people without context of our project an overview of everything we’ve learned to this point. It’s also an opportunity to show our thought leadership in design research methodology and tell the story of how we adapted methods for Optum.
We’ve shown our mettle as a team this sprint through making a plan to overcome ambiguity when deciding where to take our project next. Our advice for teams that are stuck in a project not knowing where to go next would be to think about what the end should look like, both as individuals and as a team. Each of our team members had experiences with the research process that were most memorable to them, and leveraging our individual instincts made it possible to keep progressing. In our next post, our presentation will be delivered and we’ll be looking forward to what the 2021 Summer of Design at CMU has to offer.
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