This project started from a vague idea. An engineering team had found a new way to take pictures of particles in the air and asked us to come up with scenarios where this might be useful.
I led a quick 2 day workshop to get to ten ideas. These ideas were just meant as fire starters for further work.
We divided all ideas into Problem | Solution | Outcome, illustrated the idea, gave a quick outline of who would be the stakeholders, and what the business might be.
For the next three months, I worked a couple of hours a week with the business and technology leaders for the initiative to refine the business case. My main contribution was keeping the conversation user centered and would conduct interviews with potential customers to help us iterate through different ideas.
We eventually landed on indoor air quality.
When the project got full funding and went from an investigation to a full productization I got funding from the design team to put three people on the project. I put a user researcher on the project to lead and coordinate the design part as I wanted to make sure we kept asking whether we had the right focus. I also put a UX designer and an industrial designer and set them up to work together and develop the various digital pieces in conjunction with the hardware.
