Mentor + — A new service for MATTER
USER RESEARCH + SERVICE DESIGN
CLIENT: MATTER Healthcare Incubator, Chicago
GUIDED BY: Professor Mark Jones
MY ROLE: Service Designer
PROJECT PERIOD: Fall 2018
MATTER is a healthcare incubator located in the Merchandise Mart, Chicago. They provide community based support to health-tech entrepreneurs working on the startups designing next generation of healthcare. As a part of the Service Systems Workshop, I investigated the existing services and proposed new services to improve MATTER’s engagement in the community and their programming for their incubator members. During this class, I focused on the relationship between the Mentors and Members with the entire MATTER ecosystem.
The project took place over Fall 2018, over the course of 14 weeks. In the first part, I focused on secondary research about the healthcare incubator and healthcare startup landscape in the US. Followed by interviews with the member companies, mentors, and the MATTER staff itself, I presented findings and then pivoted to rapid prototyping and testing the hypotheses. Based on the research insights, I created the service blueprint and UX mock-ups to form a final presentation at the client’s office in December 2018.
MY RESPONSIBILITIES:
Led the entire end-to-end research+design process with my team.
Created initial project plan. Mapped out Matter’s Value Web and Ecosystem map from initial conversations.
Conducted 8h in observation sessions at Matter’s office and 4 interviews with Matter Members and Mentors.
Analyzed and synthesized research data to derive actionable insights. Created visualizations for the insights.
Designed one of the three prototype experiments and tested it out with the stakeholders.
Created the service blueprint and final high fidelity solution prototypes using Invision.
Mentor +
A platform that facilitates flexible scheduling and accessible help to mentors, helping members to also learn what they might not know that they don’t know.
The members are the primary customers of the MATTER community. Through interviews, we learnt that the most important resource to them, the mentors, were not timely available to their benefit.
The MATTER ecosystem is such that all the resources that flow towards the members always go through the staff, which results in a barrier to the members and hinders them moving forward in their startups quickly.
““I wish I had more opportunities to feel gratification by helping members in the mentor program.””
““I want you (mentors) right now!” ”
““Most of the time, entrepreneurs don’t know what they don’t know.””
How might we provide a service that can help harness mentors’ knowledge to guide the members JUST IN TIME?
RESEARCH STRATEGY: EXPERIMENTS
To answer the above HMW question, I needed further answers about the user needs and pain points. I started forming hypotheses and wanted to understand if they were true in order to inform the next step of the design process. So, I designed 3 experiments to perform with the Matter members and Mentors.
Experiments are very efficient modes of research and testing hypotheses, especially when the target group of users need to be engaged in a low-effort way. In this case, I needed to reach Matter Members who were working day and night to bring their healthcare startup to life. Hence, I decided to design the low-fidelity experiments with appropriate artifacts to test my hypotheses.
Experiment 1: Will members like using a digital platform instead of reaching out to Matter staff?
assessing members’ mindset about entering the service
member experiment in action at the MATTER’s office
Experiment 2: Will mentors like to be reached out directly by members?
a mentor responding to an online experiment conducted via email
assessing the mindset of mentors around eliminating the Matter staff as middleman
Experiment 3: Will the content on the platform help the members know what they don’t know?
assessing platform’s ability to show members what they might not know
a member engaging with the online email and giving us feedback
The Service Blueprint mapping what needs to happen and by whom, in order to make this platform come alive.
After the learnings through our experiments, we pivoted and created a platform facilitating smoother communication and connection between the mentors and members so that they can benefit from receiving feedback just as when they need it.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS:
Team Members: Yenwen (Ariel) Chen, Yuhao (Mike) Liu. Special thanks to this wonderful team where work didn’t seem like work, and there were always donuts! Our team received a lot of positive feedback and generated healthy discussion with the clients at the final presentation.
Mentor: Mark Jones for being an extremely supportive faculty teaching us nuances of service design through interesting service stories in every class!
Mid semester check-in and Final Presentation at MATTER’s office
Some process images through the semester