Ogunte CIC, the organisation for Women in Social Enterprise organised a think-do session in collaboration with Digital Science with an audience of women activists, social and tech-for-good entrepreneurs, to explore the ways we could put humans back into tech and create services that people really want and love to use.
To do so, we learned from a fab social tech entrepreneur and used a few tasters from the Design Sprint methodology.
Discover 6 learning insights from the session:
Participants organised themselves in small groups of up to 5 people. They first introduced themselves briefly by introducing the impact they were making or intended to make. They also identified the key hurdle they were facing, moving away from “power introductions” and creating a space of trust and empathy. It can prove difficult at time to provide exquisite listening to our peers. We think we know the topics. We’ve heard it all before. We filter event the quickest introductions.
To mitigate this, we encouraged people to sit with people outside their industry or at the fringe of their network, and be ready to challenge their perception.
Our guest Zoe Peden is someone who has always thought of business as being designed around humans rather than around technology.
She has won over 10 awards nationally and internationally for her work growing a speech and language product, MyChoicePad over the last 7 years. MyChoicePad uses Makaton symbols and signs to help people develop their communication skills, express themselves and make independent choices. Her current business, Iris Speaks, is in digital speech and language therapy, and is moving the delivery of certain areas of speech and language therapy towards utilising machine learning to make interventions more effective, shorter, but also cheaper to deliver, and therefore focusing on a bigger social impact.
When Zoe first launched her previous business MyChoicePad, she took a suitcase of iPads around schools in 2011. There were not many iPads around at the time! So she ended up selling the iPads and provided training to get people comfortable using touch screens. And they hadn’t even started using the product itself. Zoe says: “I had to become a service to sell my product.”
“When we’d go out to sell MyChoicePad, we were able to talk about the number of downloads and active users to demonstrate to our stakeholders we were doing well,” says Zoe, “but it felt empty - we were not demonstrating how much change we were creating. So we went back to the drawing board and our Chief Speech and Language Therapist designed a way initially manually that enabled us to measure, from a baseline, the increase in language development we could make over a period of time. After gathering enough data we then baked this into the technology in order to measure the impact we were having. This was really valuable when it came to selling the service as we could actually explain the difference we would make to people, and how our customers could tell if it was working. We were able to measure our social impact digitally.
“Early on with MyChoicePad I was filming at a special college for a case study and I saw one of the students taking ownership of the iPad and showing one of the teaching assistants how it worked. When we designed the app we generally thought it was going to be the other way around. But then I saw a student teaching a teaching assistant how to do certain signs using MyChoicePad. This was brilliant and so empowering to see but we had not designed the trigger for someone with dexterity issues. So after seeing such a great thing, we went back to the drawing board and changed the trigger so it would be easier for other students to teach people?
Back to their drawing board, participants delved into a quick “time machine” exercise around their “hurdles”, discussing how people in and outside organisations dealt with them, in the past, present and the future. The exercises forced them to look at systems bigger than they own, and move away from looking at just people and behaviours, but also keeping track of social, cultural, even religious trends, habits and beliefs, policies, environment, etc. The shift from silo to system was palpable.
Our final experiment focused on role playing and the teams got to interview one particular “user” on each table. We had moaners, risk-averse, politically abject and heavily stereotyped characters! The exercise challenged the participants to expect the unexpected and see their own projects in a totally new light. We never get enough of negative feedback in real life from kind-hearted users, do we?
Finally Zoe Peden gave us her top 3 tips related to creating a minimum valuable service.
Now, how do YOU create a minimum valuable service?
Discover more #ImpactWomen Interviews on our platform Ogunte.com