On April 12th, the DC team gathered together with the Latino Economic Development Center (LEDC) at their WeWork office in DC to complete our first design thinking centered session! In this session we focused on actively mapping out each step of their loan approval process. This was an exciting and engaging process that started off with Amy (one of our beloved CXOs) facilitating a discussion on inclusivity and partnership with everyone. This jump started the meeting as ideas began to flow around what LEDC and DSO envisioned as the goals for the project, as well as how the relationship would unfold (right side of the board).
Now that everyone was warmed up, we began to distribute post-it notes to each actor in the process. Our goal here was to capture each layer of the process:
- Job to be completed
- Data supporting the job
- Systems supporting the data
Originally, each of the layers were to be color-coded. However, due to the our inexperience we mixed up a few colors! No problem, as we always plan to iterate on our processes to improve this for future sessions with clients!
Once we finally mapped out the entire process we walked through each step of the process with LEDC, asking detailed questions and confirming assumptions to ensure we had an accurate understanding from a human perspective of each step in the process and the pain points associated.
This was a deeply engaging sessions as back-and-forth discussions flowed between LEDC and DSO. Ultimately, we reached a mutual understanding of the process; leading to a clear understanding of the problem from a user perspective. This allowed us to move on to our next steps of solutioning, where we plan on experimenting with new design tools around ideation and prototyping. Stay tuned!