Saturday 25 June 2022
The last few days have been a bit of a whirlwind, but I wanted to get a few things down while it’s all still fresh.
On Wednesday we were introduced to the topic for our first rapid ideation sprint. A random selection was made from a deck of tarot cards and our theme was revealed to be … death.
Yep. Death.
In all honesty, I didn’t feel all that thrilled after the big reveal. I was hoping for something a bit more visual, having heard whispers that Dixit cards had been used as inspirational prompts in past sessions. Still, I jotted down a few initial thoughts, then decided to let my subconscious brain do its thing for a while while I ate my tea.
That little incubation period did actually work some mini wonders. Since I’m following the design sprint process as much as I can for this first rapid ideation sprint, I decided to complete the pre-sprint activities – known as ‘Setting the stage’ – while the theme was still hot off the coals on Wednesday evening.
This is where I hit the first snag of attempting to carry out a design sprint method created for multidisciplinary teams of at least 7 people as a solo practitioner. (...)
Several of the pre-sprint activities, particularly ‘Recruit a sprint team’, just aren’t applicable to my solo situation. ‘Book a room with two whiteboards’ and ‘Block five full days on the calendar’ are also irrelevant, given that I’m not working on the sprint within a company setting and that I have a full time job where I can’t realistically block a whole week off.
However, happily, some of the requirements were much more achievable: ‘gather supplies’ (Post-Its, (handmade) 3D paper, pens, dot stickers), ‘get snacks’ (a family-size jar of Nutella counts as a snack, right?), and ‘Choose a big challenge’.
The idea of choosing a big, meaty challenge is based on Sprint author and design sprint founder Jake Knapp’s adage that “the bigger the challenge, the better the sprint” (2016: 22). By going after the most important problem, you can make sure you’re keeping your efforts focused on exploring the right area.
Given that I don’t yet have a specific problem to solve, I started with a comprehensive brainstorm, jotting down everything that came to mind in relation to ‘death’, even if it wasn’t related to the topic in a particularly literal way. As a secondary prompt, I also used the Margaret Atwood quote “A word after a word after a word is power”, as I want language and the way words are tailored to user needs to be a key focus within this project (and, let’s face it, in every project I do, ‘cos words are my fave).
I found myself much more drawn to things that were more about celebrating life (‘making the most of life’, bucket lists) than directly linked to death itself. Interestingly, a lot of my thinking veered in the direction of providing support for older people in some way. I used dot stickers to call out the ideas that appealed to me the most, including ‘emotional support’, ‘care’, ‘older people’, and ‘making the most of life’.
‘Digital skills gap’ also came to me, partly because I’d recently had a conversation with a colleague about this very topic, partly because of a conversation I’d had a while ago with my Age UK telephone friend, who I call once a week for a chat. She’d told me how she used to order milk to be delivered to her door in a glass bottle. Previously, it’d all cash-in-hand and she’d given her order to the delivery person in-person, but during COVID, the company had shifted operations online. My friend is a self-confessed technophobe and she didn’t know where to start with the online system. She asked if she could carry on handing over the money in person, or perhaps leaving it in an envelope to avoid having to touch hands (man COVID has been a weird time). But she was told she couldn’t – everything had to be done online. So she cancelled the service.
It made me really sad that she’d had to give up a thing she enjoyed all because technology had been a barrier for her, particularly given that the milk service was something she and her husband had enjoyed together for many years before he died. I wondered if I might be able to design something to help people like my friend bridge the digital skills gap so she wouldn’t have to miss out on the things that brought her joy, or could perhaps find new things through the internet that she could get involved with in a positive way.
So, for my ‘big challenge’, as a starting point, I decided on the following:
Help older people feel more comfortable and confident using apps / the internet.
Between Wednesday and Saturday, I spent some time gathering initial research around the topic of digital exclusion. Sprint doesn’t say that user research is necessary before the actual sprint takes place, but that makes me feel quite uneasy – how can you make sure your ideas are user-centred if you’ve not taken at least some time to understand your users and their needs? So, I factored in my own ‘empathise’ stage, borrowed from the design thinking model, and gathered as much info as I could, including quotes from real older people that I took from videos and testimonials. I’ve also set up a couple of interviews with some colleagues at work who ran a ‘digital drop-in session’ at a local library a few months ago before I joined the company, to get an idea of what kinds of things people needed support with, demographics, how far people had travelled, how the event was advertised, and what kind of feedback they received. I’ll use all this to feed into how my product – whatever it may be – develops as I work towards the prototype stage.
I knew that on ‘Monday’ (i.e. Day 1 – a Saturday in my case) one of my tasks would be to engage in an ‘Ask the experts’ session, which normally involves interviewing people from the sprint team and around the company. In lieu of these things, I sourced a bunch of research papers, articles, YouTube videos, and podcasts and made some initial notes in advance, so I knew I had a solid, research-driven foundation upon which I could start building out potential solutions.
The desk research really brought home how prevalent and serious the divide is when it comes to older people and their digital skills. Research from Age UK suggests that nearly four million people in the UK over the age of 65 have never used the internet (2020), and 2 out of 5 over 75s in England don't use the internet at all (2022). This means that older people are often missing out on vital services that are increasingly only or predominantly available online, such as online shopping, booking a GP appointment, and online banking.
The stats are shocking, but they do also highlight the huge power and potential of the internet and digital skills to improve older people’s lives for the better. For instance, Age UK found that people who do not use the internet are more likely to feel isolated from others, suggesting that the internet could (and arguably should) be harnessed as a tool to reduce social isolation and foster positive connections (2020).
A recent report from the Centre for Ageing Better also highlights the benefits of remote support via digital channels for users of certain services, “allowing them to overcome the difficulties of travel and costs, as well as enabling them to join sessions at more convenient times” (2021).
My initial research provided a solid basis for Day 1 of the design sprint, which I carried out this afternoon. I’d planned to start at around 10am and finish by around 5pm, but (somewhat ironically) technical difficulties stymied those plans, so I didn’t start until around 2pm and didn’t finish until around 9pm. Still, I’m really happy with the progress I managed to make today.
I started quite literally at the end by setting out a long term goal for the project, as well as considering what obstacles I might come up against and how I might overcome them.
My chosen long term goal (which is subject to change as the sprint progresses) is:
Older people in the local community feel confident, comfortable, and empowered to use the internet to make positive changes to their own lives.
I then watched a couple of additional YouTube videos around the subject of digital exclusion among older people (this one from the ProAgingNetwork was particularly excellent – Roy and Jacqueline have been a kind of ‘mental persona’ for me throughout the day, thinking about their different relationships and experiences with technology and the impact their knowledge of digital has had on their lives) and reviewed my initial desk research, creating ‘How Might We?’ statements wherever I thought there might be a gap to effect some positive change.
I ended up with the very yellow cupboard door above, before using the ‘affinity mapping’ technique to group the ideas into related themes:
This exercise was especially helpful. I recruited some help from my boyfriend as an honorary/temporary sprint team member to soundboard some of the groupings, and we both used dot stickers to vote for the ideas that stood out to us the most. I was quite amazed at how quickly this approach allowed me to distil all my ideas into the areas where I thought I might have “the biggest opportunity to do something great” (Knapp 2016: 56):
Part of Day 1 should also have involved creating a map of the key user journey I wanted to focus on, followed by choosing a target customer and a target event to develop for my prototype. However, I couldn’t see a sensible/productive way of doing this before I know what my journey will actually involve – i.e. what product I’ll actually develop. So, I jumped ahead a bit to Tuesday’s activity of sketching out potential solutions. These actually turned into map/sketch hybrids, which I think is quite an efficient way of doing things when you’re still coming up with ideas for both your product and the steps your user journey will involve:
These are definitely not fully scoped out yet, but I’m happy with them as a starting point. Once I’ve decided on the type of product I’d like to prototype, I’ll add my nine ‘big opportunity' areas to the map/sketch and decide which part of the journey I’m going to focus on. Given that we only have a couple of weeks, it might be that I start with just an onboarding flow, but I’ve got some quite ambitious plans for creating some kind of fake marketing collateral to use as part of the user testing phase too…I’m trying not to get too attached to that idea though in case I don’t have time to do it the justice I think it deserves. ;)
I’d like to do a little more work on this tomorrow, namely looking at a couple of other existing products (just one or two) to use as ‘Lightning demos’ - quick overviews of other products within and outside of your domain that can provide inspiration for your solutions. I’d also like to settle on a product/journey, so I can then build out a more detailed storyboard for what the prototype will look like.
However, in the spirit of ‘having a nice time and not getting burned out because literally it’s really just not worth it thanks’, I want to limit my time on this tomorrow to 2 hrs max, then spend some ‘proper, quality, actually awake, not stressed, no Post It notes in sight’-time with my boyfriend. Maybe we’ll go to the sea. Maybe we’ll go for a walk. Maybe there will be some kind of dessert involved. …
(NB: There will definitely be some kind of dessert involved.)
References
AGE UK. 2020. ‘Loneliness and digital inclusion’. Available at: https://www.ageuk.org.uk/our-impact/policy-research/loneliness-research-and-resources/loneliness-and-digital-inclusion/ [accessed 1 July 2022].
AGE UK. 2022. ‘Helping older people get online’. Available at: https://www.ageuk.org.uk/our-impact/programmes/digital-skills/ [accessed 1 July 2022].
CENTRE FOR AGEING BETTER. 2021. ‘COVID-19 and the digital divide: Supporting digital inclusion and skills during the pandemic and beyond’. Available at: https://ageing-better.org.uk/sites/default/files/2021-07/COVID-19-and-the-digital-divide.pdf [accessed 1 July 2022].
GURNEY, Steve. 2022. ‘Technology and Older Adults - Closing the Digital Divide’ [webinar]. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cTXUQJPol3o&t=3s [accessed 30 June 2022].
KNAPP, Jake, John Zeratsky and Braden Kowitz. 2016. Sprint: How to solve big problems and test new ideas in just five days. Simon & Schuster.
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