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Week 8: Research I
Date: October 25, 2023
Working towards: Milestone 4
Summary: Kicked off the Research process with Secondary research (books, articles, presentations, studies)
1. What did you accomplish last week?
My idea was accepted for the DesignPreneur Hackathon! I was selected as part of a cohort of 25 total teams to take part in the challenge from Nov 3rd - 5th.
2. What obstacles, questions, or surprises did you encounter, if any?
I feel that my target group needs to be more specified. I was under the impression that I was solving a single problem that just happened to help two user groups, but the more I think on it, the more I'm coming to realize the incentives for these two groups are not exactly aligned even if the solution is attempting to bring them together. In this case, I think I must make a clear decision on which group's needs will supercede the others.
3. What do you plan to accomplish for next week?
I will have a lot of preparations to make in anticipation of the hackathon, but the goods news is that they align with my original research plans anyway. I thought about approaching my professors again for their input on my questions for this week, but I realized that this is something that I will need to learn from my end users instead.
With my Research Plan in place, I kicked off the Research process with Secondary (Desk) research first. It takes time for participants to respond or agree to be interviewed or surveyed, so I used this week to focus on gathering literature while the responses trickled in.
In the meantime, I'm happy to share the good news that my idea, which I am tentatively calling SkillTree, has qualified for the DesignPreneurs challenge.
I received the welcome news on Friday, Oct 20th, which was just in time for me to gather enough participants for the user research portion of the competition.
As can be seen from the email in section 4, the hackathon will actually have us complete a lot of the research steps that I have to do anyway, so this coincides quite nicely with my timeline.
As far as the schedule goes, the hackathon will start (in-person) on Friday evening and go until Sunday afternoon when each team presents their findings and end results. Although the exact nature of their involvement is still not explicitly clear, one of the organizers of this event is BCG:X, the design consulting arm of the Boston Consulting Group. On their website, their mission statement reads:
BCG X unites tech builders, designers, and entrepreneurs with the world's leading talent in AI, deep tech, digital growth, sustainability, and more. We enter comprehensive partnerships that rapidly launch new solutions that are ready to run from day one.
I think they could potentially factor into my design process in Semester 2. But for now, I'll focus on getting through the hackathon.
One of the areas I still need to get some clarification on is who, exactly, my target users are going to be.
Why? Job seekers experience huge pain points at all levels of the job finding process:
Why? Hiring managers also experience huge pain points at different stages of the process:
While the ideal is to design a solution that addresses what I believe to be a common issue for both, what do I prioritize as the more important need if push comes to shove?
From my perspective, it would seem to be the Job Seekers. But the market would probably prefer a solution that helps the hiring managers instead. After all, if we are talking about a commercialized solution, which of the two is more likely to pay?
I should get some clarification by talking to BOTH user groups.
As such, I will begin my interviews with them next week so I hope that it will be able to help me decide whether:
In addition, I will need to kickstart my ideation process earlier than expected in advance of the DesignPreneur hackathon. Although I would prefer not to solutionize this early, I also don't want to miss this excellent opportunity to get a lot of feedback as early as possible, not just from the challenge organizers but from the audience that is expected to tune in and vote that Sunday.