Firestarters
During my time at Matchstick Creative, I was responsible for redesigning a key aspect of one of their core service, Firestarters.
Firestarters is an ethical networking community that aims to unite purpose-driven organisations for collaboration and drive positive change. Despite the popularity of these events, the lack of a structured behind-the-scenes process placed a significant burden on the team. My objective was to enhance this process. Throughout this project, I demonstrated collaboration and communication skills and proficiency in user research and service design.
Emphasise
My first goal was to understand the perspectives of the Matchstick Creative team and Firestarters attendees. To achieve this, I held a workshop with key team members, where we conducted several exercises:
Sailboat exercise: Identified factors driving and hindering Firestarters events.
Impact vs Effort: What tasks are needed? How much impact will they have? How much effort do they require?
Stakeholder Mapping: Plotted Firestarters participants on an Influence vs. Interest matrix.
Empathy Mapping: Created Empathy Maps for key players to understand their perspectives.
Storyboarding: Plotted out how each type of user may interact with the service
After that, I performed guerrilla user interviews with participants. When conducting Vox Pop-style interviews for event promotion, I would also ask participants a few quick questions to learn more about them and what they wanted from an event like this one.
Using all of the information gathered about participants was then able to create a set of personas and customer journey maps which helped to get inside of the minds of the participants.
Define
During the Define phase, I used the affinity diagramming technique to review the data gathered from the discovery workshop, group similar ideas together, and identify key themes. This process helped me identify several key pain points:
Lack of a well-defined and efficient process
Unclear team roles and responsibilities
Overwhelming workload for the team members
Poor engagement from participants
This helped me conclude that implementing a new process and template was essential to improve the overall quality of events, reduce the burden on the team and improve overall engagement.
Ideation
During this stage, I led an ideation workshop with the Matchstick Creative team. The goal was to brainstorm and create innovative ideas to streamline our processes, alleviate pressure on the team, and improve interaction with participants. One of the exercises we used was "How might we?" to foster creative thinking.
Prototype
Using the information about participants and their participation in the Firestarters events, as well as any team issues, I was able to create a service blueprint. This blueprint outlines all the steps participants would take when using our service, along with the corresponding actions the Firestarters team would need to take. With the blueprint in place, it became clearer what needed to happen to make these events happen.
I created a list of tasks and a project template in our project management software, Asana. This template assigned specific tasks to individuals with corresponding deadlines, serving as a prototype for the new process. The goal was to test this prototype internally to ensure it addressed the identified issues effectively.
Test
In the Test phase, the new process was implemented during subsequent Firestarters events. This involved continuous monitoring and gathering feedback from both team members and participants. The testing phase allowed us to refine the process further, ensuring it significantly reduced the team's workload and improved the overall efficiency of event organization. The streamlined process enabled the team to focus more on delivering their work and less on administrative burdens.
Client
Firestarters
Timeline
Four months
Team
Completed while working for Matchstick Creative.
Services
Service Design
