Thompson Island Outward Bound Education Center | Strategy | UX
HOW DO YOU REFRAME THE PROBLEM?
Thompson Island Outward Bound Education Center provides hands-on, experiential learning to children and young adults in Boston. Their main source of funding is from events, like corporate retreats and weddings. Over time, they weren't sure whether their priority should be on the kids or the events.
I led the UX strategy and design. I facilitated creative sessions for the stakeholders to align on business goals and reframed the problem from an end-user perspective. The result was alignment across all client and internal teams and a clear project definition.
STRATEGY
Problem definition, personas, user journey
There was already lot of research done on Thompson Island but there was no focus or priority. To identify a focus, I led a creative session to identify opportunities and gaps along the awareness-consideration-decision-advocacy spectrum for the 10 personas. Participants from cross disciplines (strategy, UX, design, and development) identified activities and emotions associated with not knowing about the Island, ready to go to the Island, on the Island, and after the Island.
Using colored dots, the team identified areas where we can make the biggest impact.
10 personas is still a lot.
I then looked at commonalities among personas. The design problem then became much more easy to understand when boiled down to 3 main problems, common among different personas:
For each problem, I added context from the perspective of the personas:
Who has the problem?
What causes the problem?
What happens if nothing is done about it?
Armed with a more easy-to-understand and user-focused problem, I was now ready to go back to the client.
I led a co-creation session with clients and internal teams to discover how we can meet business objectives while answering our 3 main user problems. Grouping objectives into themes showed that increasing awareness would address the other business goals (e.g. increasing donations). The team then addressed why awareness was not happening and considered possible solutions. They then listed emotions that they would want their personas to feel given the possible solutions.
I then led the internal team to further elaborate on the design possibilities while considering other criteria like time and cost. I designed this session to be tactile, where cross-discipline participants used Play-Doh, Lego, paper, pipe cleaners, and other materials to describe their ideas.
Strategy results
By reframing the problem, the team was able to define the project scope: A digital tool to build awareness for large donors. The tool should highlight how their contributions will make a difference to the Boston community. The metric for success is the amount donated.
