Innovation Drives Business >
Ideation
Usually at the beginning of a new project there are no well-defined problems, but a bunch of messy concepts that you have to grapple in order to understand what the real problem is, so that you can design a solution for it. For me this discovery phase is all about building a deep empathy with the people I’m designing for; generating tons of ideas; building a bunch of prototypes; sharing what I’ve made with all the stakeholders; and finally putting my innovative new solution out in the world.
When I worked on the “Cirrus” project , a revolution was under way in the security space, spearheaded by employees who invested their own resources to buy, learn, and use a broad range of consumer technologies to get things done in the workplace. Businesses were not adequately prepared for this “consumerization” of IT and needed to modernize their policies, procedures, and IT systems to harness the new trend and don’t miss out on opportunities to reduce costs, increase productivity, and appeal to a new generation of consumers and employees.
In this landscape, I was tasked to lead a group of designers to understand the user experience implications to innovate how companies embrace BYOD. After an initial brief and overview of the current landscape with few guests and stakeholders, we used brainstorming techniques to imagine the space and its main actors. We came up with five primary personas; we divided the personas across the team and used the journey metaphor to illustrate the story of our characters.
Pablo is the primary actor of our story. Working closely with the design team, we came up with multiple scenarios that show Pablo starting as a student, getting his first job as a Financial Analyst at Symantec, and after few years taking on a more senior position at Barclays Capital in New York, where he spends another year of his career before deciding to take a more exciting opportunity in Europe.
Few screens of Pablo’s story presentation:
