Design for Applicability
Empathy & Needfinding for International Finance Executives
Challenge
Adapt a traditional four-part graduate-level lecture into a 2 hour, face-to-face workshop to be delivered to international finance executives.
Overview
Having adapted numerous curriculums for diverse groups of professionals, students, and teachers, I find great pleasure in reimagining information to benefit different audiences.
For this project, I partnered with a Stanford School of Engineering faculty to develop a version of their empathy and need-finding lectures to be delivered to executives from Visa. The group requested that the workshop have some relation to finance, but not be too focused. This type of request requires us to find a balance between the new content and the application for which it will be used.
Considerations
The content supplied from the faculty was over 8 hours in length, and designed for graduate lecture engineers as part of a product development course.
The client requested a mix of theory and application.
The group had traveled to Stanford to participate in a week-long product innovation executive education training.
Due to unforeseen changes, we had only 72 hours to complete the curriculum and content.
Design
Knowing the curriculum must be condensed, I began to cut content that was included specifically for product designers (the original audience), and I re-mapped the content.
Using the new map, I developed the workshop framework and added missing information and reinforcement to build out the curriculum.
Integrating finance in an organic way proved difficult. After several (not great) ideas, I finally landed on writing a mini-case study to demonstrate empathy/need-finding in the financial sector. (See sample in slides below)
Professional learners often express a desire to return to work with a deliverable or method that they can put to work right away. I decided to end the workshop with the development of a journey map as it is applicable to most professionals and provides them with something tangible to return to work with, and gives a useful tool/method to use in future projects.
Content mapping: Vertical labeled “original” represents content and reinforcement in the original graduate curriculum before removing ENG content. Vertical labeled “workshop” was the first iteration of the adapted workshop curriculum
Outcome
The workshop received excellent evaluations, with the exploration of case studies being particularly well-received. Initially skeptical about empathy and need-finding, participants found value in the case studies, validating their relevance to finance. Follow-up evaluations revealed that the workshop led Visa to pilot new processes for product and service improvements.
This is a sample of workshop content. To see the entire presentation please contact me.
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