Design for Innovation - A Case Study

 The Challenge

The Medical Student Outreach Program (MSOP) is a peer-to-peer recruitment program that promotes AMA membership to first year medical students. Second and third year medical students called Student Ambassadors market membership to first year students. One of the tools they use to convince other students to sign up for membership is incentive products. These products are a range of items from textbooks to heavy decks of flash cards. After the student fills out a paper application they are given their choice of incentives to choose from.

The business shipped pallets of the products to the Student Ambassador at the beginning of the recruitment season so that they would have the products on hand. The business and the Student Ambassadors had no way of knowing what incentives the students would want before they signed up, so the product inventory was decided by the Student Ambassador’s guessing which products would be popular with potential signees divided by an estimate of last year’s recruitment numbers.

The Problems

• Space - Student Ambassadors were complaining about not having space for all the incentives. These are college students who are forced to store hundreds of incentive products – including heavy textbooks, huge deck of flash cards and other physical products – in their apartment. They had to carry these products to the students who were signing up for this membership.

• No oversight on incentive inventory and distribution – once the business shipped these incentives they had no idea if the Student Ambassadors received the incentives, who they were being given to and under what circumstances. All control was in the hands of these medical students. If a Student Ambassador claimed they had never received a shipment of product there would be no way to verify this. Student Ambassadors could be selling these incentives for their own profit. Finally, when recruitment was all said and done there was no process for the Ambassadors to send the incentives back. These restrictions cost the business several thousand dollars a year.

• Limited choice - the perspective members’ choices were completely limited to the Student Ambassadors estimates. If the Ambassador was out of a particular incentive, or didn’t think it would be popular so did not order it at all the options became either hope the Ambassador would order another shipment (more money for the business) or the student would have to choose a less valuable incentive… or potentially walk away altogether.

Process

We eliminated paper applications, and created an online form for students, which:

• Decreased the time it took to process students applications

• Provided oversight to the business on who was applying at point of sale

• Alleviated a lot of time Student Ambassadors spent passing out, collecting, and processing applications.

The online form included a step for the student to select their incentive, directly from the business. This helped with the lack of oversight and limited inventory - two of the main problems with the current system. It also guaranteed a selection from all available incentives regardless of inventory, and the business could ensure that the right amount of product was being delivered. Additionally, the client could change the incentive selection mid-season, or offer more digital redemption options.

If the students were filling out the forms online, the chances of being around a Student Ambassador at POS decreased, removing the reason the Student Ambassador received the incentives beforehand. With the information being collected the business could directly ship the incentives to the student, removing the need for Student Ambassadors to handle product. However, this process change was an adjustment to the business model, not the software. At the time the business had contracts with 3rd parties to distribute the incentive in bulk fulfillments, not individual shipments. These contracts would have to be rewritten and signed to reflect the new user experience, something the client wouldn’t be able to accomplish until the next recruitment year. The full solution could not be implemented immediately.

Even though the full system could not be implemented immediately, the strategy was still the right solution in the long term. The business agreed that individual shipments would help save money in the long term because they had direct control over the inventory, as well as help the Student Ambassadors, and wanted to move forward with all the changes necessary to make it happen. While they adjusted their business model we created a twofold design - one that moved toward the long term ideal while also supporting the business transition.

The Solution

We moved forward with the new design for the student application, including selection of their preferred incentive. There were a few adjustments:

• Because we could not guarantee the Student Ambassadors would have the incentive the student wanted, we did include a warning telling the student that while the Student Ambassadors would do their best to fulfill their preferences, it would depend on their inventory.

• We kept track of trends in incentive selection, saved by school for more accurate bulk shipments in the upcoming years as the contracts were migrated over. This way the lack of oversight about incentives could be limited and more closely monitored.

• We also included a portal for Student Ambassadors to view what students requested which incentives. This way they could adjust their inventory accordingly, and distribute incentives quicker.

• Finally, we saved the incentive the student chose as part of their membership record. This created opportunity for individual incentive fulfillment once the contracts were changed and finalized, even if the process would not be completed immediately.

  With these tweaks we set up the groundwork for the ideal user experience, while still supporting the current business model of bulk shipments.

Takeaways

Many times when designing there will be limitations that stand in the way of an ideal user experience. Some of these limitations are permanent and cannot be changed, and the user experience needs to be adapted to fit them. Sometimes, however, these limitations are simply a process that can be changed. This makes them an adaptation more than a limitation, and can be built into the design. The long term vision can continue forward, as long as we support these adaptations during their transition period. This can be done by setting up infrastructure that might not be fully utilized right away, but can easily be used in the future, as well as designing functionality that might not be needed in the long term, but provide support in the meantime. In this way we are designing for every step of the process, and ultimately leaving our clients and our users with a better experience, that will have room to grow as time goes on.