STUDY PROJECT

Hello Halo

A virtual hub dedicated to social enterprise

Hello Halo is a proposal to facilitate knowledge sharing, mentorship and skills development, giving social entrepreneurs the best chance for success.

View the Marvel prototype

This project was the output of the IDEO +Acumen course Introduction to Human-centered Design

Remote collaboration

I learned about the IDEO course via a Meetup Slack channel. The final team came together through the course forum.

A warm-up exercise introduced us to the Design Kit methodology, and to each other.

Two Skype meetings per week helped me to maintain momentum and balance personal commitments.

Meetings began with a ‘stand up’, where I reflected and shared learnings, moved through a structured schedule of work and agreed next steps.

The sessions were great way to get energised and re-focus the project.

Sharing research goals, methods, insights and questions and listening back helped me to reflect on practice and productivity.

The problem

‘How might we enable more young people to become social entrepreneurs?’

INSPIRATION PHASE

Understanding the problem space

First steps: identify and learn about the people involved, their motivations, backgrounds, needs, frustrations, successes and failures.

I mapped assumptions and unknowns to IDEO’s four research strands: People; Experts; Contextual Locations and Analagous Inspiration.

With surveys and interview guides prepped I made purposeful contact with research participants.

Initial findings

Responses to initial surveys highlighted the importance of general business know-how.

It was slightly awkward for us to follow-up on this as we neglected to capture contact details.

On the upside this really pushed us to connect directly with people for interviews, where we gained a much deeper level of engagement with people at the heart of the problem.

Participants were generous with their time and open about their experiences.

Surprisingly, people did not necessarily identify as social entrepreneurs or understand the definition and variety of business models.

It was useful to learn about different enterprise journeys – joining communities and peer groups had transformed people’s progress to enterprise by highlighting and providing access to soft skills and expert knowledge.

Building a picture

It was clear from preliminary interviews that entrepreneurs could benefit from support for specific behaviours and emotions.

Interview guides were adapted to maximise insights as research progressed.

It proved difficult to reach people at the younger end of the spectrum within the project time frame.

I was able to gain second-degree insights on younger people’s needs and behaviours from experts and a business studies tutor.

From interview I evidenced a need to support people excluded from the ‘young’ target group and to incorporate success stories.

IDEATION PHASE

Resolving themes and insights

The team was able to meet physically for a workshop to resolve insights into themes of Business know-how; Support networks; Social Ideas

The momentum of the workshop helped to understand each these as a distinct design challenge and summarise them as insight statements.

By paying close attention to the stories behind these our problem was broken down into three key insights:

Potential entrepreneurs struggle to identify and validate needs
Potential young social entrepreneurs need to be part of a supportive community to access suitable support at the right stage of their social venture
There is a lack of understanding of social enterprise and how to fund it

How Might We…

…facilitate potential entrepreneurs to invest in valid social needs

…introduce aspiring social entrepreneurs to peers and supportive communities, at the right time?

…enable potential entrepreneurs to explore social enterprise and find a model that suits them?

2-hour Design Sprint

A brainstorming session followed, with research participants ideating, evaluating and voting according to intuitive interest, innovation and achievability.

Problems

The agenda did not match well with the time allocated and it proved challenging to facilitate. Although familiar environment for participants a cafe was an awkward space to work in.

Time-boxing helped to maintain people’s focus but the pace frustrated ‘the fun bit’ and affected confidence in the process.

During ideation we found that some ideas were already in use and noted that a competitive analysis (absent from the IDEO process) would be of benefit to future iteration.

Outcomes

The group saw most value in some form of socialised knowledge hub.
A mobile website or app help the service to cross-reference data and personal circumstances.
Gamified matching had potential to engage younger and more speculative users and link them to validated needs and advice.

Personas and user journeys

I used the narratives from the combined research to draft a persona and map their experience of the product for sample objectives e.g. onboarding, Finding a Mentor, Skilling up. User flows for these objectives provided the structure and basic features of our first prototype.

Prototyping and testing

Our first prototype would be used to test onboarding since this required a broad introduction to the features designed during brainstorming.

Again it was useful to prioritise questions to test our assumptions, user expectations and reactions.

Visual fidelity was too high and testers were distracted from commenting on the features by an expectation of higher functionality.

We’d pitched a video introduction as an opportunity to develop pitching skills. Testers saw value in this but felt intimidated, preferring it as an option or learning module for later.

Once testers understood the proposal they felt it would be a useful and appropriate product to take forward.

“Something like this would be useful to connect with likeminded people. I think it’s good to share what you know. Openness and generosity go with this territory.”

IMPLEMENTATION PHASE

Next steps

The final phase was a matter of summarising the research journey and product, considering next steps to making it a reality - who to pitch to, what would be required to get it off the ground.

The final submission was a summary slideshow presentation.

After the course I used Marvel to produce a low-fidelity prototype to show more of the features to support users.

View Marvel prototype

“I think it would be suitable [for young people]. This generation are more likely to reach for an app. They're very “What can I use to make my life easier?”

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