AFFINITY CLUSTERING

After multiple interviews and meetings, we decided to do an affinity clustering activity. We wrote down our observations and notes from our many research sources. We then identified broad themes such as “support, meeting behavior, individual habits, low-tech” among others.

Some concepts we identified from our affinity clustering and synthesizing our research:

1. Different kinds of support systems (positive, negative, and professional relationships)
2. Barriers to access to resources and information (lack of transportation, no access to clean needles, difficulty finding a job)
3. Developing and maintaining good habits learned from communities/meetings to their individual lives (therapy, self-care, self-help strategies)

JOURNEY MAPPING

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Based on our research, we’ve also mapped the challenges someone with a SUD may face, along with current Oasis & Biomotivate solutions.

By identifying these stages, we’ll be able to further focus our scope to select pain points in the next phase of our research.

CRAZY 8s

Next, we did Crazy8s, a design ideation exercise in which we spend 8 minutes creating 8 ideas for new technologies. The time constraint forces us to think quickly, creatively, and without judgment, relying on our foundations in research and intuition. These qualities translate to future, higher fidelity prototypes.

After making our Crazy8s, we had nearly 80 sketches to evaluate. We gave quick explanations and a preliminary vote to find our most interesting ideas. Afterwards, the team did a modified Crazy 8’s exercise that we called  “Crazy3s”, in which we made three versions of the most-voted-for original idea. Generating 15 ideas allowed for more in-depth discussion of each, resulting in better alignment on the direction and goals of the prototype.

REVERSE ASSUMPTIONS

In order to rapidly ideate new directions, we co-designed with our clients with a reverse assumptions exercise. This was primarily meant to reframe our problem space, but also helped create alignment due to the new virtual settings, and its impact on recovery.

We synthesized these ideas by looking across our new ideas for each assumption. More often than not, we found similar themes for the same assumption; this had the added effect of providing validation that our team was aligned. From these larger themes, some broad directions started to form. The three overall directions that we discovered were:

1. Create a unification/automation of network and resources that’s distributed and accessible
2. Establish a platform for a community with accessible means to network and find appropriate resources  
3. Develop tools to teach proactive coping skills, daily habits, and strategies

STORYBOARDING

Once these three directions emerged, we sought to move forward with creating new solutions that would address these opportunities. We decided to only move ahead with the first two, as several stakeholders mentioned that they had the most potential for innovation.

Using our independent ideation strategy, we each brainstormed 6 storyboards each, 3 for each of the pursued directions aforementioned. This allowed us to have a total of 30 storyboards to focus on.

Each set of three storyboards followed a theme; they were designed to test various angles or perceived “comfortability” in order to elicit a broad spectrum of responses from a future validation study.
In order to prepare us for this, we did want to reduce the amount that we had in order to speed-date effectively.

To do so, we all voted on our favorites, while also giving preference to ones we liked best out of our favorites. After doing so, we consolidated our 18 final storyboards to be prepped for speed-dating.

SPEED-DATING

With our final storyboards and experience recruiting participants online, our next step was conducting a speed dating study. We decided to conduct the study via Zoom due to it being free, web-based, and equipped with screen-share functionality.

However, this did constrain our recruitment pool to people that had web-based technology available. In order to test out our protocol and any logistical shortcomings, we conducted two speed-dating sessions, one with each of our clients. With 18 storyboards, we wanted to keep it brief, so that we were gathering quick, instinctual reactions, rather than more in-depth thoughts which trickle to feasibility, implementation, and other focuses that aren’t the intended outcomes of  this design method.

SYNTHESIZING OUR FINDINGS

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To synthesize our speed-dating results, we wanted to use some form of affinity clustering. Affinity clustering is an exercise where similar sentiment observations are placed in the same proximity, allowing larger, overarching themes to emerge. However, we approached it with a few tweaks to better customize it to our needs.

First, we decided to cluster the notes around their respective storyboard. While some observations were general to the entire domain, our goal with speed-dating was to find what worked, and what didn’t. To do so effectively, we needed to see which storyboard elicited the most responses.

Secondly, we clustered around each storyboard by valence. What this meant was putting positive, or favorable agreements on one side, and negative, or disagreements with the storyboard on the other side. Neutral, and irrelevant information was placed in the middle.

Using this technique, we found certain commonalities. These commonalities uncovered insights that spanned across our research that revealed critical needs would be used to inform our direction.

With our needs identified, we were able to use that to generate an opportunity that we will pursue in the summer. Listed below are the critical needs we identified, the opportunity we uncovered, and a visualization of our direction in the form of a pyramid.

We chose to represent it as a pyramid to show our priority; getting the right resources at the right time being the most fundamental and necessary, before the others can be achieved. We've selected a "slice" as our initial summer work will be identifying which "slice" (form, target demographic, etc.) our design will serve.