This week we started off by finalizing our prototype. We added all the main features that would go into the initial version of the app. Work was divided into 4 sections: Signup screens, Starting Trip, Planning Trip, and Collecting Payments. We decided to have slides of the prototype screens that loop around at our booth during the final event. We also took printouts for the poster-board.
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This week we continued finalizing our story and prototype for the last class. We rehearsed our story together and tried to bring in some of the key learings from David Riemer's presentation:
We also reflected on on our journey throughout the class. We generally felt pretty good throughout the class about our process. This was partly because we expected things would not always be clear.
We also discussed how we moved through the different quadrants of the innovation cycle journey. Throughout the semester we spent time in all 4 sections.
This week was the deadline for finalizing our team name. Because of our evolution from a ski/snowboard solution to a group planning platform, Haaskis was considered too narrow as a representation of our team. We instead decided to change our name to Orca, because we want everyone to travel together!
We also started work on our story-out and consulted David Riemer on certain elements that we were thinking of incorporating into our story. He provided excellent advice that helped formulate where we wanted our story-out to go. Finally, we worked on finalizing the workflow of our platform, starting with what we wanted users to see, the layout, and how each page would be designed. This week we discussed prototyping further and revised the application flow to add templates for different activities. So if you are skiing one list of things to do will become active while if you are camping a different template will become active. This helps to simplify the planning for the users, saves time and also broadens the scope of the app. We also discussed adding the voting function to aid in decision making. We also discussed several other scenarios where this planning app could be useful: Bachelor/ette parties, Reunions, Business schools (Vegas Trip), Camping, Destination Golf travel. We then discussed the value proposition canvas and populated it for our product. In the process, we further refined our value proposition. The key components are what we're calling ACDA:
We also started refining some of the details of our story. As is tradition, we ended the week with a group selfie!
This week we:
During our team meeting we discussed our interviews with the prototypes that we had developed. It's still early in this phase of our interviewing process, but we already see some things that need to be adjusted. One great sign we saw, was that our interviewees had pupil dilation and actively engaged in co-creating with us during the interviews. We worked on developing our business model into a story. We practiced presenting this story to the class. The key takeaways from the practice story were to:
We discussed threats to the travel industry over the next 3-5 years and 10 years out to see how our product could adapt to changes. We noticed that our product has a threats from cyber security, regulation of home sharing, regulation of online financial service, and events that may cause travel declines. To mitigate these, we would diversify our partnerships in travel lodging and financial services, along with making security of our users information a top priority.
Longer terms, things we might monitor are how technology may change peoples behaviors such as virtual reality., self driving cars, and if artificial intelligence could predict our dream vacation. This week we interviewed people on our three ideas:
After discussing the results of our interviews, we strongly favored the planning platform. We worked on developing our business canvas around this idea for the rest of our team meeting. Our interviews until our next meeting are to explore the viability of this idea.
This week we discussed the team assessment feedback. We looked at the metrics where we had slightly lower evaluations compared to the class average. We also talked about a few where our standard deviation was higher. Conflict resolution was identified as an area of discrepancy. This was not at a personal level but more on the direction of the project. Clear agreement on goals was another area we had some variation in responses. We discussed what we should start, stop and continue doing in terms of teaming and made these updates on our collaborative plan. We also discussed our learning styles and confirmed that we have a fairly diverse team. For some of us this was a bit surprising, but for others it made complete sense. We are still missing divergent, but we have most of the other quadrants represented on our team. For our next round of interviews we started building prototypes to share with people and get their feedback/gauge their interest. We discussed that there are multiple ways to approach the next round of interviews, including co-creation and A/B testing. We will try to do a little bit of each until we start to get a sense of which of our three ideas (if any of them) gets people the most excited.
1) Ski Valet. 2) Luxury Bus. 3) Trip Planning App. This week we continued building out frameworks to help us further understand our problem area and organize our thoughts on potential solutions. AEIOU This framework helps us organize our observations from our initial phase of interviews. A - Activities E - Environment I - Interactions O - Objects U - Users We focused on the three areas that we've identified as being the most problematic in our customer journey mapping: 1. Getting from the car to the lift 2. Planning the itinerary of a ski trip 3. Driving from City to Ski Town (i.e. SF-Tahoe) Here is what we put together: We also began discussing how our interviews need to shift now that we're beginning to focus on a few specific ideas. Initially our interviews were very broad and attempted to discover where pain points existed around this topic and now we are beginning to move into a more focused direction. We brainstormed some potential questions and also decided to meet with Sara to get her thoughts. She suggested that we do very rough sketches of the three ideas and start putting them in front of people. We need to look for pupil dilation, people getting excited about things and also be open to suggestions that people have about the ideas. Our next steps will include mocking up the three ideas before we launch into round 2 interviews. Before the week was over we had a few good laughs about the Silicon Valley "Pivot"
This week we met to discuss our list of How Might We questions based on the experiences and insights that we gained through our interviews: • How might we make testing and renting gear easier? • How might we improve the food efficiency at the ski lodge? • How might we increase visitorship to ski resorts? • How might we reduce the perception of injury/risk on the slopes? • How might we improve destination skiing? • How might we create all-inclusive ski trips? • How might we improve scheduling and coordination between groups of friends planning a ski trip together? We will use this to help decide on additional solutions where we can add value, beyond the ones we came up with last week when looking at the customer journey. We also wanted to see where we could provide the most incentive to stakeholders. This would be important because it would help us gauge how viable a potential solution was depending on how easily we could get a stakeholder or player to help. We did this by individually listing the players and stakeholders in the ski/snowboard ecosystem on separate post its and categorizing them based on their function in relation to the central figure, the customer. Once the ecosystem had been established, we tested out how our value-add solutions would fit into the ecosystem. We did this by color coding the three possible solutions we had come up with last week, and matching them with the appropriate stakeholder or player that we felt would benefit from it. Based on this, we could visibly see which stakeholders from both the player and customer side we could safely ignore and which ones we would potentially focus on. We also briefly discussed how our solutions would differentiate ourselves in this current ecosystem, ie a more upscale bus service with wifi, a planning app that provided minor discounts at every step (which would add up for the whole trip), or a gear pick up service that has not been established yet or tried before.
With the end of the meeting in sight, it was selfie time! This week we made major progress by mapping out the customer journey related to skiing. Together we identified the main stages in a ski trip where people may have logistical issues:
The areas with the most issues appear to be planning the trip, navigation and carrying gear at each of the different phases. This led us to brainstorm 3 potential places we could help (there could be many more!)
1. A trip planning app that integrated doodle poll to pick dates with your friends, airbnb/vrbo to reserve a place to stay, lift ticket purchasing, maps to direct you and see where your friend are, an alarm clock to wake everyone up and more! 2. A transportation service from SF to Tahoe that is better than the existing options - almost being the Southwest for ski trips. 3. A pickup service for gear - somehow we'd collect the gear from SF (your house, a locker, sports basement??) and have it at the mountain waiting for you. This would remove the gear from the customers hands through most of the journey. |
AuthorThe Orca team is a group of second year Haas MBAs dedicated to bringing fun back to the logistics of group travel Archives
November 2016
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