The Challenge

Innovation is a rather challenging concept to bring to light in schools and workplaces. Many a time, ideation or brainstorming sessions are usually dominated by those who have the more outspoken personality and is rather disadvantageous to people who have social anxiety in large group settings. This often brings about a misfit amongst groups and does not allow for equal participation.

In the light of the recent COVID-19 pandemic that has taken the world by surprise, remote working and learning has become the new normal. Face to face workshops, hackathons and physical meetings have all moved online.

Online tools like Kahoot and Quizlet have done a great job at curving this by providing participants in the education and corporate sector, however we wanted to take innovation to the next level by designing and developing a more open-ended platform to allow participants to be creative and innovative in a safe space. We wanted to create a platform where they would be open and comfortable with sharing their ideas, regardless of the size of the group or setting. From there, Rolljak was born.

My Contribution

The Process

The motivation for Rolljak came about when my team was conducting numerous Design Thinking (DT) workshops and hackathons only to realise that there was no easy way to introduce the DT framework to participants. This was made even more apparent to us when COVID-19 hit, and we were forced to find a way to conduct our workshops online. The content for physical workshops can be rather tough to replicate online, especially so for a complex framework like DT. The workshop will simply lose its physical touch to it and participants will experience something really different.

Design Thinking is a human-centered approach to innovation—anchored in understanding customer’s needs, rapid prototyping, and generating creative ideas—that will transform the way you develop products, services, processes, and organisations. By using Design Thinking, you make decisions based on what customers really want instead of relying only on historical data or making risky bets based on instinct instead of evidence.

We turned to an online tool called Miro to start facilitating our workshops over Zoom. This was a good solution however we felt the platform had more room for innovation, creativity, as well as open-ness. As such, we started prototyping our first version of Rolljak.

Our Findings

Through conducting these workshops online, we found the following:

1. Text does not communicate ideas as well as drawings do.

Majority of the time when we think of an idea, the first thing we do is write in down. We should be taking advantage of our innate ability to see — both with our eyes and with our mind’s eye—in order to discover ideas that are otherwise invisible, develop those ideas quickly and intuitively, and then share those ideas with other people in a way they simply ‘get’.

2. It is difficult to achieve equal participation.

As mentioned previously, it is usually the more outspoken person who is more confident with sharing their ideas. This brings about some misfit as not everyone is given an equal change to participate and voice out their ideas.

3. Most of the Design Thinking platforms are too formal.

Tools such as Invision App, Sprintbase and BrightIdea do a great job at providing companies with a structured template to follow when running sprints but we wanted to create a platform that was fun and quirky, all while introducing Design Thinking principles seamlessly.

Defining Our Target Users

We then proceeded on to defining our target audience groups. This included the two extreme end of users and a typical user. When considering the user's needs in design, it is very easy for a designer to fall into the trap of just designing for the first and average user. This may not be the best possible solution as it may result in designing a product or service just for "yourself". 

By taking into consideration the latent needs of extreme users, it gives us a different perspective and a fresh outlook on things. Through speaking to the extreme users and identifying their amplified needs, it can help pull out more meaningful insights and thus gives the potential to push ideas in different directions that you wouldn’t have previously explored. 

Here are the 3 groups of users we identified:

Defining The
Problem Statement

Once we had identified our key user groups, we then defined our problem statement. Based on the user needs we had identified, we generated several How Might We (HMW) statements and grouped them according to their similarities to create different categories.

HMW statements are often practiced as a collaborative exercise by teams at the beginning of a project or strategic initiative. The How Might We Method is a (proven) design thinking activity which has participants simply rephrase known challenges as a question beginning with “How Might We”.

We then narrowed it down to the following problem statement: How Might We make creativity more accessible to teams?

From our personas identified, we further researched on their key insights and needs. We then summarised that our product should have elements of the following:

1. Collaborative Sketching

2. Evaluation of Ideas

3. An Idea Repository

4. Quick, Time-Boxed exercises based on design principles such as SCAMPER, etc.

Prototyping, Testing
& User Research

After we designed and developed our first few prototypes of the product, we decided it was time to bring it to the market for some validation and feedback. We tested it across various events, such as DT workshops, in schools and even with companies who engaged us to run in-house sprints. We tested it with groups as small as 5 to an entire school cohort of 500.

This gave us great opportunities to see how people were interacting with our platform and the user-friendliness and effectiveness of it. From these events, we gathered a sufficient amount of data that we brought back to further iterate and develop on before testing once again.

We also reached out to a variety of users who we taught might be interested for a demo of the product. We managed to conduct user interviews and research with over a 100 prospects in just a month, who were a mixture of Educators, DT practitioners as well as Innovation Managers.

They were all very open to trying out Rolljak with their own teams or students and based off of that feedback, we brought it back to the development team to make further improvements to the platform.