IDEATE
EXPLORING THE OPPORTUNITIES
Now that we had presented our research findings and identified the opportunities, we now needed to explore these opportunities and generate ideas on how we might execute them in the app.
At the end of this phase, we needed to establish which of the five opportunities would become the foundation for our product vision, and a concept for how we would accomplish that.
COMPARATIVE ANALYSIS
As I began the process of finding solutions to these opportunities, I wanted to first look at analogous situations that might provide similar tools. For example, where might I find another industry that needed to evaluate hard and soft skills online? I found Care.com, a site where families could find caretakers for their children, and took a look at how they approached evaluating potential candidates.
COMPETITIVE AUDIT
I conducted a competitive audit to examine what the competition is already doing, but more importantly, what they’re not doing. This was a chance for us to identify opportunities that weren’t yet being addressed by our competitors, and to fill those needs for our users.
INSIGHT
One of the ideas that the stakeholders had been buzzing about was making it easy for construction workers to build a digital resume. But from our audit, we found that a digital resume builder was the most common feature that all the competitor’s shared, so the opportunity might not be as “revolutionary” as it appeared to be.
USER STORIES
At this point, we wanted to bring back a host of concepts to answer the question of how we might solve our opportunity areas. So rather than bringing back a specific set of features, we crafted user stories that described the activities that our app might accomplish, while keeping the user’s goals in mind.
HOW I REMOVED A ROADBLOCK
We reached a roadblock when we realized in a meeting that different stakeholders still weren’t aligned on a clear direction on what the product was going to accomplish, so I proposed that we all meet together to align ourselves on a product vision to guide our user stories.
VISION WORKSHOP
Defining the value proposition of the the new app was the key task of this phase. After presenting our concepts, we worked alongside the stakeholders to identify the strongest ideas.
PIVOT
When we first began the project, the stakeholders were convinced that the answer would be to create a better job listing platform that would match qualified workers with employers.
But what we found was that most workers and employers relied on word-of-mouth to find work. So rather than create another job board, we came together with the stakeholders to define a new path forward.
THE VISION
Create an online community that connects the construction industry, and efficiently facilitates word-of-mouth.
THE CONCEPT
The biggest challenge was deciding how we would attract users to the app to build the community. One insight we had gained from research is that the employers often relied on photos of past work to judge someone’s skills.
In the end, the stakeholders chose the concept I developed, which encouraged users to upload content, and then other users would be asked to vote on whether they liked it or not. At the end of each voting period, winners would be able to earn prizes.
While gamification can easily come across as a gimmick, the goal was to gradually build up a digital portfolio of work for people in construction, rather than relying on the standard text-based resume that so many workers didn’t have (illiteracy is a common problem in this industry). The game also served as an incentive for workers who weren’t currently job hunting.