Digital Service Innovation: Robin

05470 Digital Service Innovation | Spring 2021

Individual Reflection

Being part of Robin had been a great learning experience as it was the first time I got to work on a project outside the School of Design. Engaging in a cross-functional team, I was able to contribute my design skills in creating an impactful and thoughtful solution while developing better communication and teamwork skills.
Since the beginning, I had played a crucial role in shaping the direction of our digital service. My idea got the 3rd most votes out of all the pitches during class. It was then chosen as one of the projects for other people to join. Reflecting on this earliest stage, I had learned many things from the pitch. Given only 2 minutes to present, I had to write an articulate and concise speech while also using engaging visuals to tell a convincing story. Mastering these skills became essential to the success of the team later on as we had to present the progress of our project frequently.
Having our team formed, we then worked on the pre-mortem and team contract. This process was new to me as I had never worked on a group project where we have to make a team contract before. During this process, I followed the lead of my more senior team members (master’s students) who had gone through a similar process in their professional careers or other classes. It went smoothly, and through an open-minded discussion, we were able to come up with a list of agreed-upon values and expectations that the team members would uphold.
With the initial idea being presented by me, I naturally took a more involved position, leading our group in the next step as we moved from creating the team contract to the opportunity framing and consumer insights modules. I wanted to make sure that the project felt like a collective responsibility. I did not want others to feel like they were just on the team to work on “my” project. I expressed this concern to my teammates as we agreed that keeping transparency was the best way to work with each other. To ensure this, we split responsibilities evenly and gave agency over the tasks each person wanted to do.
Everything was going smoothly until we started the MVP and the rough cut of the explainer video. With more due dates and tests for other classes on the horizon, many team members became unmotivated; some started to miss our weekly meetings, and others didn’t participate as much in our discussions. Our team didn’t communicate as much as we used to, and we were not keeping each other accountable. As the initiator of our service idea, I felt the need to step up and take responsibility for the parts that were missing. I ended up making UI mockups, drawing storyboards, and completing all the visuals for the group’s presentation by myself. Luckily, one other teammate offered to help, and he took care of the animating we needed to do for the explainer video.
Overall, I enjoyed being part of this class and had learned a lot. In regards to the design of our digital service, I was really happy to finally get a chance to deploy my design knowledge and contribute to a team to create a solution that is impactful and tangible. However, our service could still be even more thought out. The main feedback we got from the guest investors was that having more interface mockups, especially in the video could make the service idea even more appealing. I wish I could have developed a more complete brand identity for Robin. For the teamwork aspect of the project, there are also many things that I can improve upon. As I continue to work in teams with people from different backgrounds and expertise in the future, I hope to keep developing my leadership and communication skills. Being able to be direct and hold people accountable while maintaining good professional relationships is crucial for any leadership position. I strive to find the balance between being assertive and open-minded. One way to make sure that everyone is completing their tasks is to use a Kanban board. For this project, we didn’t utilize that, which resulted in unclear responsibilities at times. Moving forward, I would leverage tools such as Trello or Notion to keep track of my team progress and hold team members accountable. Having the ability to do so will not only serve me well in classes next semester but also down the road after graduating from CMU. As a designer, I will always find myself working on a cross-functional team; thus, being able not only to communicate effectively visually but also verbally and directly will contribute to the success of my career and personal growth.

Robin Process Documentation

I. Initial Pitch

For the initial pitch, I began by doing research on the general social, economic, and technological trends for the next couple of years. There were many interesting trends in regards to climate change, working remotely, and stakeholder capitalism; however, I was most drawn to travel trends. Upon doing the PESTLE and SET analyses and drawing information from the reading on disruptive innovation, I identified a group of underserved customers within the market: solo female travelers. From there, I created a slide deck for the pitch, starting with telling a personal anecdote in relation to the problem at hand then moving to introduce the proposed solution.

Here are the 3 slides I used for the 2-minute pitch:

II. Pre-Mortem & Team Contract

Having alignment is essential for any team’s success. In order to create alignment within our team, we started by sharing our needs, goals, and expectations through creating personal user guides, completing the pre-mortem, and filling out the team contract. Participating in these activities allowed us to learn more about each other as well as help us identify any possible conflicts and ways of mitigating them. For example, in regards to communication problems, we decided to create a group Slack and always include everyone in when voting.

III. Opportunity Framing

After establishing a common understanding of how our team should operate, we moved to focus on the service idea itself. During this initial stage, we used the SET, POG, and Value flow modeling to understand our problem space. Ultimately, going through these frameworks and using abductive reasoning allowed us to come up with a hypothesis about our target customers and their needs, which would later be validated during the customer research phase.

IV. Customer Research

To validate our solution and identify the problem-market fit, we interviewed 11 female travelers between the ages of 20–34. Mainly using the method of directed storytelling, we created a research protocol as a general guideline for all our interviews.

Included in the protocol, the focus statements served to establish goals, objectives, and key sets of hypotheses that are used within generative research. These focus statements will then be used to build out the full detailed discussion guides, worksheets, outlines, and shot lists.

Here were our focus statements:

Get a better understanding of how solo female travelers are…

1. Finding security
2. Fostering connection if desired
3. Approaching travel as a whole
4. Reacting to vulnerable situations

Identify unmet needs, pain points, motivations, challenges, and opportunities…

1. Around safety
2. Around logistics
3. Around communicating with others

Hypotheses to validate or disprove…

1. Women traveling solo may want to seek out the connection at different points.
2. Women will feel confident traveling after the pandemic.
3. Are our current personas accurate to reality?

Framing our questions around these statements, we were able to better understand the women traveling experience. To further consolidate and synthesize our ideas, we created an affinity diagram, arranging key takeaways into different categories in regards to the different aspects of traveling.

As seen on this Figma board, we created our first affinity map, grouping takeaways into planning, wants, motivation, and concerns. After finishing this first map and reflecting on it, we then created a second map with subcategories such as housing, network, safety, activities, and logistics. By further synthesizing, we were able to summarize concerns regarding female solo traveling into 6 categories: safety, housing, social, planning, travel barriers, and activities.

Here are the main insights we deduced from our primary research:

V. MPV Pitch & Business Model Canvas

Using the insights from our customer research to guide the creation of our MVP, we came up with a list of key features that must be included in our service. We also decided to scope our focus to New York City, according to research, it is one of the most traveled to destinations. Focusing our service on one location would allow us to obtain our first group of customers and start building our community. We created a storyboard to accompany this idea and worked on our Business Model Canvas.

VI. Rough Cut of Concept Video

For our concept video, we wanted to create a concise, yet compelling narrative for Robin. We decided that it would be best to make a simple animation as this would allow us to create engaging visuals and get our point across in less than a minute and 30 seconds. We started by writing a script and making frames for animation.

VII. MVP Pitch 2

From the last pitch, we received feedback that our MVP could have been more specific and that our presentation lacked a clear problem statement. Therefore, we came up with a new, more concrete MVP. To create the MVP, we would first join solo women travel groups on Facebook. We then will create a poll asking group members for safe solo travel locations in NYC. By gathering this information, we will then post it on our Robin blog before putting out targeted advertisements on Facebook, targeting solo female travelers interested in going to New York. From the advertisement, they could choose to join our community, where they would be kept in the loop with more updated information.

VIII. Final Pitch Presentation

For the final pitch of our presentation, we decided to make mockups to make our service even more tangible for the guest investors. We also fleshed the 3 main features, we wanted to focus on from our interviews. The first feature is the matching feature for solo women travelers to find companions on the fly according to interests and location. The second feature includes a map that shows where other travelers are located. The feature also allows users to mark safe spots where other users can see. This function was derived from the insight that some travelers want to know if other travelers are around for safety but don’t want to connect unless necessary. The last feature is in regards to the monetization of our application. We will partner with other local restaurants and events to provide discounts for our solo travelers if they would go in pairs.

Here is our final slide deck for the presentation: