I participated in multidisciplinary design jams where I worked with groups of students to respond to real world, user-centered design problems.

Overview

I was selected to participate in a design jam with 5 other students to work with the Great Lakes Water Safety Consortium on how to reduce shoreline drownings.

Design Challenge

Increase awareness and understanding of the dangers of the Great Lakes while encouraging the safe enjoyment of their beaches & shoreline.

Process

1. Stakeholder Presentation & Interview

Jamie Racklyeft, who was rescued from a Lake Michigan rip current and is now dedicated to raising awareness about dangerous rip currents, provided us with a brief presentation on the drowning complications throughout the Great Lakes. He mentioned the different ways his organization is attempting to educate more people about this issue, and also highlighted drowning statistics, noting that drowning is actually one of the leading causes of death for young children.  

After his presentation, my group developed a list of questions to ask Jamie, Michigan residents and parents, and emergency response members. Our goals were too:

1. Gauge a better understanding of visitors’ behaviors at the lakes among adults and children.

2. Elicit a more detailed objective of the water safety organization.

3. Uncover flaws within the current emergency response system at the Great Lakes.

We utilized divergent and convergent thinking throughout these interviews. We first individually took notes on post-its and then combined and organized our insights to better comprehend the source of these drownings.

We spotted trends within our observations, arranging them by problems related to:

Key findings:

1. There is a lack of drowning prevention education among adults and children.

2. Life jacket regulation is not enforced or followed as people believe they are invincible.

3. Rescuers often become victims.  

4. There is a lifeguard shortage throughout the great lakes.

2. Defining the challenge

After learning more about the dangers of the currents as well as common behaviors among parents and kids at the lakes, we deconstructed the original design challenge into more specific, actionable objectives through the How Might We framework. After a brainstorm and dot voting activity, our top “how might we‘s” were:

1. How might we encourage swimmers to wear life jackets?

2. How might we educate confident swimmers about self rescue?

3. How might we incorporate flip, float, and follow into basic swimming instruction?

4. How might we raise awareness about self rescue?

5. How might we improve tracking at the Great Lakes?

After some discussion and rephrasing, we decided on…

How might we expose more people going to the lakes about self-rescue and safety measures?

…because this “how might we” distinguished a particular audience and context for our potential solutions but did not limit our flexibility when devising design ideas.

3. Ideation

We proceeded to conduct a rapid idea brainstorm and generate different approaches, products, and methods to satisfy our “how might we”. Again, we clustered our ideas to analyze any overlap or common themes and utilized dot voting to choose our top four compelling ideas.

We employed an evaluation matrix to pick an idea based on its “how might we” alignment, novelty, and technology constraints.  

4. Prototyping

The evaluation matrix enabled our group to combine ideas and chose a final option that was feasible, scalable, realistic, and effective. We decided to create signs that would be hung in high traffic locations (parking lots, concession stands, bathrooms, etc.) The top of the sign would display basic water safety information intended for adults and children. On these signs, we included a “swimming swag” pocket, where children could choose from water proof tattoos, stickers, and bracelets that contained safety designs and messages on them. Our goal was to generate a fun, kid friendly, interactive design that was simultaneously informational for adults.

We built out a prototype using different materials:

5. Feedback

After “testing” our sign by presenting the concept to our stakeholders, we found two common concerns, which were:

6. Refinement & Presentation

Based on these suggestions, we iterated on our design by adding a QR component. Parents and kids are encouraged to scan the QR code on the sign if the pocket is empty, which would send an alert to a volunteer, lifeguard, or Great Lakes staff and notify them that the pocket is empty. Once a user scans the QR code, we also wanted to navigate a user to the organizations website or display water safety facts on a person’s phone, which would further increase exposure about the topic. Check out our final prototype:

Reflection

Key Takeaways

1. Don’t jump to ideas and conclusions. With a broad design challenge, it was crucial to first analyze and learn more about the Great Lakes drowning state before brainstorming ideas in order to effectively develop an identifiable and actionable problem that would guide our design.  

2. Active listening is essential. I was able to improve my active listening skills by building off of responses to questions during stakeholder interviews, which helped us really gather insightful details about behavior at the Great Lakes.

3. Hone in on the problem statement. During our brainstorm, our group started to generate solutions that did not address our “how might we” statement. Thus, we had to remind ourselves of the proposed objective in order to ensure our solutions were actually centered around our proposed problem.

4. Understand environmental and contextual constraints. When generating ideas, we realized that we lacked crucial information about the organization and Great Lakes environment, including the Wi-Fi capabilities, lake layout, technology restrictions, budget, etc. This information was important to know earlier on in the process as it determined how realistic an idea could be executed.

Simulation Case

Deloitte Insight Studio has been contacted to analyze college football viewership and ticket sales. How can we increase college football viewership (in-person and on tv/internet)?

Objective

Develop a data driven solution that will engage new users and viewers.

Process

Discovery

As a group, we knew it was critical to dive into the various potential reasons that have led to a decrease in football game viewership. We jotted down different theories based on our own experiences at Michigan, and also searched online to find concrete statistics and data regarding viewership.

Define

During our discovery session, we organized our ideas based on general problems, online setbacks, as well as in-person conditions that may discourage people from watching or attending the games. With such a broad objective, we narrowed down our design challenge before we developed a solution; we chose to focus on improving the in-person experience after learning how the change in attendance has significantly decreased within the past years. We analyzed the main reasons for not attending games in-person, honing in on these perceptions:

Based on these notions, we asked ourselves:

1. How might we improve the in-person experience?

2. How might we incentivize people to attend the games?

3. How might we spark interest in football among non-viewers?

Develop

We decided to make an app where users have the ability to engage in quizzes that will take place leading up to each football game and also at each game. The NCAA already has established trivia questions for each team, and we will ask four of these questions each “quarter” before and during the games. If users answer the question correctly and are in a certain percentage of people who respond the fastest, they will receive discounts on food or drink items at the concession stands in the stadium. Additionally, we will also have a live update screen feature that will provide relevant information about the game, including player bios, live score updates and play reviews, and football terminology explanations. We also want to include a “predict” feature where users at any school can choose a team to win and estimate the score of that game to receive additional discounts or swag.

Deliver

Check out our paper prototype that we presented to members of the Deloitte Insights Studio team: