Wharton Business School - Research Data Service

2016

Hypothesis

Students find it hard and expensive to get reliable market data meaning they often used incorrect or incomplete data sources for work. Designing an internal Wharton web-app using APIs to deliver data would create better experiences for students whilst making them more likely to purchase the data sources once in the corporate world.

Result

Success and has spun out to be Wharton Business School experiments

Process

With Wharton the focus was service design and discovery. I led the small design team that built the product to the point of understanding the problem and opportunity space. Delivery was a series of partially functional paper prototypes.

We started working on the product by accident. By chance I was working with the in-house team on a different project when it became clear they could use a series of facilitating and coaching workshops to turn an internal idea into something that could potentially be built out. It was a classic “intrapreneur” project where a small in-house team looked to create a hugely valuable piece of innovation work.

We ran a series of workshops and Lean sprints to quickly ideate, test and validate the very initial hypotheses the team had. I used a modified version of the week-long Sprint model that Jake Knapp popularised around that time. I built incubation time into the process of the product phase to avoid burnout and reduce the risk of first-solution thinking.

A quirk for our involvement was we knew almost nothing about finance and had limited knowledge of the structure of the APIs that give information about the many facets of the financial markets. This turned out to be an advantage. There was no risk as a design team to push for a specific solution. All we could do was provide a space for the experts on the Wharton side to start understanding their own market, users and business models.

9 months of activity. Workshops. Service design and discovery project.

Tools

Whiteboards, pen and paper, photocopier, Sketch and InVision

Technology

Not applicable