One of the suggested way for designing a service is the Double Diamond Method. The ‘Double Diamond’ process maps the divergent and convergent stages of a design process. Created by The British Design Council, it describes modes of thinking that designers use. The Council’s origin is Industrial Design – which is about creating tangible objects. As such, the model seems like a linear process. It describes significant up-front design, before going on to produce a final solution. Working this way means that solutions are generally perfected before public release. That’s because it’s expensive to change a physical product after it has shipped. Another effect is that a lot of time passes before knowing it’s efficacy in a real market.
This method divides the design path into four different phases: the first, Discover, is the part of conception and research, which lays the foundations for the project; the second, Define, is the phase in which the working group recapitulates the information and transforms it into project opportunities; in the third phase, Develop, designers put ideas into practice: the errors resulting from the prototyping are fundamental for the success of the final result; the fourth and last one, Deliver, is the finalization of the work. The feedback given by users is fundamental in this phase for the implementation and/or improvement of the product-service.
At the moment, we are in the middle of the first diamond, where data, user analysis and research are important to understand the service and identify gaps and project opportunities to improve the service.
SWOT
For understanding the advantages and disadvantages of Udemy is useful to analyze the platform from the inside but not only: it is also interesting to examine the context in which the service goes to work. This is because there is no service without context, stakeholders or customers who try to improve or simply use it. The best tool for this type of analysis is the S.W.O.T. analysis.
SWOT is an acronym that brings together four words from four different analyses:
- Streghts, i.e. the company’s strengths;
- Weaknesses, i.e. the weak points of the company;
- Opportunities, i.e. the chances that the context or users offer to the company to improve its output;
- Threats, i.e. threats that play against the company. These three factors are included in a table where the first column represents the internal environment of the company and the second column represents the external environment.
Going to analyze the service of Udemy through this tool and taking into account the research carried out can be summarized as follows
Ecosystem map
Another interesting tool is the ecosystem map: it is useful to observe and search for design gaps in an existing company and to be informed on what could be the opportunities to implement the service. The ecosystem map describes the users, thoughts, activities and relationships that characterize the service and everything around it.
These two tools can be used together or one after the other to analyze the company and lay the foundations for the new design step of the concept, offering ideas and opportunities and making the starting situation clearer and more visible.
To understand in a more profound way how the service can be implemented, we will follow the human-centred design perspective. For perceiving the aim to build a user journey map we will use interviews trough user diary (quantitative research), surveys and observations trough user shadowing (qualitative research) on the users who already use the service.
The User-Journey map will be useful later in the service design phase.