What is IDEAthon?
IDEAthon is a unique innovation session / Design Thinking Crash Course held by Verizon's Network System's LUXCE (Lean UX Center of Excellence). The purpose is to tackle a broadly defined challenge instead of a specific use case, and the outcomes are multiple ideas/prototypes. The participating teams are made up of developers, designers, and members from the business side, and the focus is brainstorming, defining, and ideation to come up with one finalized conceptual prototype per team. This was my first time participating in an IDEAthon, and I am proud to announce that I was on the winning team!
Our Mission
The first step was to gain empathy by conducting user Interviews with each other regarding one of Verizon's applications, as we were all users of the application. Taking on the role of both user and interviewer was a unique experience in which we not only learned of user pain points, but also learned how to better ask questions to users. After conducting initial interviews, we Dug Deeper with further interviews in order to gain a greater understanding of the issues that users were facing.
Reframing the Problem
The next step was to Capture our Findings from our interviews such as user needs and insights. With this, we were finally able to Define a Problem Statement: How can users effectively work on a large number of tasks per day? More specifically, how can their experience be more accessible and personalized?
Ideating to Generating Alternatives to Test
Then we had to Sketch at Least Five Radical Ways to Meet the User's Needs. We came up with some neat ideas here - behavior driven personalization, customized workspace based on user preferences, emotional design, enhanced support (live agent), and engaging feedbacks. After that, we Shared our Solutions and Captured Feedback, which is where even more solutions were noted.
Iterating Based on Feedback
It was finally time to Reflect and Generate a New Solution! We sketched our prototype, which you can see included the solutions that we previously came up with such as a live support agent, task reminders, personalized messages, etc.
Building and Testing
Next up, it was time to Build our Solution. This was a more finalized version of the concept we created in the previous step. You can see this solution presented in the video below. Finally, we Shared our Solutions and Got Feedback. It was here we learned what worked and what could be improved on. In the end, our project impressed the judges enough to win us the competition!