Step 1: Capture Your Learnings
  1. Set up workspace (table, seating, board/surface, pens, post-its)
  2. Download onto post-its
    1. Work through notes you have on each person you talked to. Jot down things you learned from them. Code these with categories:
      • Who
      • Story: top stories you remember
      • Motivations: what did this person care about?
      • Barriers: what frustrated this person
      • Interaction: what was interesting about how informant interacted with course schedule, with others about the course schedule, with the college in connection with the course schedule?
      • Questions: what would you like to go back and ask
    2. SHARE AND LISTEN
      • Rotate through team sharing these - one by one, fast clip.
      • Listen actively: What are you hearing over and over? What contradictions? Are you hearing diverse opinions? Write notes and observations
        • Don't be cryptic or elliptic. Full, declarative sentences you team will understand.
        • Capture great quotes.
  3. Post notes in your display area. Group by informant. By categories. Organization is based on source at this point.
Step 2: Search For Meaning
  1. Cluster Related Information. Switching to organization by idea.
    • Each team member chooses 3-5 post-its that seem most interesting/important
    • Move these to new surface.
    • Arrange in terms of how the things on the post-its relate. Patterns? Repetitions? Consistent problem? Opposites? What feels important/significant? Surprises? Contradictions?
    • Arrange and rearrange. Stopping point is when no one has urge to re-arrange.
  2. Identify Themes
    1. Come up with short names for each cluster.
    2. Iterate over naming and rearranging until group is satisfied that you have a handful of theme phrases that capture what you learned.
      • You might want to pull some of the post-its that did not make "top" group over if they fit these
  3. From Themes to Insights
    • Take themes and generate declarative "insight statements," for example, "No one is directly in charge of X."
  4. Revisit Challenge: How do your new insight statements relate to your challenge?
    • Sort insight statements from "most" to "least" related.
    • Do some statements subsume others?
    • Select top statements most related to challenge.
  5. Refine Insights
    • Reword, etc. to best communicate your insights.
    • Short, memorable sentences
    • Convey sense of a new perspective or possibility.
    • Use outside reader to assess resonance
Step 3: Create “How Might We” Questions
  1. From Insights to Questions. From each insight statement, generate multiple "how might we…" questions.
    • plain, simple, and concise
    • be sensitive to "scope."
      • Too narrow and you limit creative options. To broad and we don't know where to start or we will be all over the place.

make the cs a one stop shop
consider offering users a customizable experience around info they want to see (settings)
can be accessed along with other relevant info to enhance the experience of course seeking.
so that students have no remaining questions
a schedule system that was more fun and more helpful to use
make it not a chore, students see as a friend not boring time consuming bureaucracy
make things faster, automate the process to dissolve the paper trail and makes things easier and more effficent.
make the schedule less difficult to navigate
simply the experience of finding the information that students need.