IPP Assessment 2 PDF

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Part 1: Aim (34 words) The aim of this proposal is to implement design thinking methods to develop an innovative way for vUWS to more efficiently meet the desires and needs of their clients, the students.

Part 2: Problem Statement (186 words) The first step in the design thinking process we took in order to address the problems clients had with vUWs was to identify and empathise with our own group members through their experiences with vUWs. Appendix 1 demonstrates our group’s responses through an empathy map which identifies the key issues we had with vuws. After conducting primary research through open questions on Facebook, we discovered that the key issues identified amongst respondents were like ours (Appendix 2), and as such our group decided to define difficulty with navigation as our primary problem statement. Students found it incredibly difficult to navigate through the vuws site, including difficulties trying to login and having many gates of entry, too many irrelevant and unused tabs and boxes, too many affiliate links that are not needed, repeated boxes such as having two sets of Announcements links, important information placed at the bottom of the page, and links that lead to nothing.

Part 3: Design thinking Models and Theories Design Thinking is an iterative process which focuses on a human centred approach within innovation. It uses data collection methods to generate innovative ideas that are prototyped and tested to provide a new solution to an existing social problem (Liedtka 2018). Whilst we have identified our problem as navigation of the vUWS page, we have comprehensively decided that the five stages of creative thinking model will help us to analyse the iterative process of design thinking and the ‘What is, what if, what wows and what works’ model by Liedtka (2018) will help us empathise with vUWS users (Appendix 4.0).

In conjunction with these models we aim to meet the three lenses of innovation: desirability, feasibility and viability (Jefferies 2016). For our innovation to be successful we know that we must create something which people want (desire), something that we can implement (feasible) and an innovation that can be converted into customer value (viability).

The use of these three theories and models will enable us as design thinkers to incorporate creative elements in line with analytic approaches in order to make the user experience of the vUWS site a successful implementation of the re-design innovation.

Part 4: Solution to the Problem Statement Taking into consideration the numerous models and theories of design thinking, we decided to implement Liedtka’s ‘what is, what if, what wows and what works?’ model (Appendix 3.0) to help us come up with a solution to our problem statement. Using Liedtka’s model, when we looked at the ‘What is’ stage, we looked at the present situation of the vUWS site and empathised with fellow students that they were frustrated with the navigation of the site. The “What if?” stage allowed us to envision the new reality of the student’s experience exchange with vUWS by questioning “What if we changed the vUWS site so that navigation was simple”. Following that, we determined “What wows?”. Changing the VUWS site to make navigation more user-friendly is only part of the solution, we had to try and focus on a solution that stands out and ultimately “wows” the users. An element that we thought would “wow” the users would be to create a standard, simplified navigation vUWS site that also allows the users to customise the home screen so that they can have any other important widgets that they personally would like. In the next stage of our design thinking proposal, the “What works” stage, we will create a mock website and test our prototype with users in order to gauge whether our design thinking innovation has met our project objectives. It will incorporate the new changes we have made including having one gate of entry at login, removing unnecessary boxes and links and reorganising the most important boxes on top....