To the rhythm of history
Step 1 of 2: Discovering the dancers inside us
What’s dance for you? Fun, joy, art, calmness…
In my case it has been always my way to escape, whenever I need to disconnect, I simply dance.
I was only two when my brother was doing psychomotor activity, as every little sibling, I wanted to do the same as him. I told my mother several times that I wanted to go to class with him, in fact I asked the school director and she once said to me “when you drop the pacifier then I’ll let you in”.
She posed me one of the great challenges we have to deal with when we’re little, but as I had clear what I wanted, one day I got up the courage, went to the kitchen and in front of my mother I threw the pacifier in the trash. After many cries of regret, I proudly told everything to the director, and so she had to keep her word.
My parents had it easy to identify me at festivals, they just had to find the smallest girl who was ahead of the rhythm of the music, trying to do the wheel and the somersault. But after two years learning to develop the body movement, I no longer followed in the footsteps of my brother, who opted for karate, I went for dance.
I was 5 years and you could see an exuberant girl every time she went to dance classes, showing the teacher her tip of the foot every day so that she would tell her that she was a dancer. As I grew older, I enjoyed every single choreography they taught me. On weekends, I played the cassettes and CDs that I found at home on my music player and simply danced in my bedroom. Something that I continue to do now, when I am happy, sad, angry, I put on my headphones to lose myself completely with the music, and disconnect. There are people that doing sport is what make them disconnect, for others ares books, but for me, and I know that for many other people, it is dance.
I have this special connection with dance, but I’m aware that other people will feel different things, I was very curious to know their point of view while discovering the answer to the question: Why do we dance?
Briefing
This time I didn’t have a briefing that was given to me, I was the one who had to wrote it and handed in to myself. How privileged I felt to have the opportunity to choose my own challenge!
With no doubt one of the first things that came into my mind was dance, specially when learning. In that way, the aim I defined for this project was:
I thought addressing my project in that way was my chance to quench my curiosity, as it would have a wide range of targeting; from the people who don’t know how to dance, to those dancers that have so much technique.
At the same time I found interesting to highlight how the current pandemic situation have affected dance schools. In this scenario, they were forced to close; some of them had the resources to keep their classes remotely, but digitalized learning is as effective as the physical one?
I left hanging those questions when start digging into the subject matter.
Design Research Plan
To find a solution for this challenge I used the Design Thinking technique with the Double Diamond methodology. I first got close with users to empathize with them, so that after I could define the problem, devise new solutions, prototype the most accurate one and, afterwards, test it.
As I said before, the first barrier that had to be jumped was getting a deep understanding of the users and the dance schools’ market. To deal with it I needed a plan, which started from the Internet with netnography and benchmarking, to after move on a survey and in-depth interviews.
Once I knew the steps I had to take, I started the journey for my personal project. Let’s get started with the new adventure!
Research Questions
Before getting my hands dirty, I wrote down several questions that I had from the users, the competition and dancing. As there are so many things you can investigate about, this technique helped me to figure out exactly what could my research be about. From 53 questions there were 6 that were ever present during the whole investigation phase.
Netnography
Internet is a magnificent tool! Whatever you want to know you just google it and then you got it, very easy! But a researcher has to take a forward step to find not only general information, but also the thoughts of our users.
When I looked through the Internet I found out several issues that people have to deal with when starting dancing, but there was one that kept my attention: the fear of dancing in front of other people because of what they might say.
Benchmark
After having a general idea of what users think and feel about dancing, it was the time to see what the competition was doing. Resolving the research question “What channels other than schools can you learn to dance?” I thought it was necessary to do two charts of benchmarks. My competition could be either physical dance schools as digital ones, so I made a comparison focused in each one.
Through the benchmark I realized that any dance schools haven’t reinvented itself yet! In response to the pandemic, lots of them who are based on couple dances have been forced to close, but the ones which were able to keep up with their classes, most of them have opted for the live streaming class through channels as Zoom.
However, when it’s about the online competition, most of them have opted for the recorded classes. Although, this choice harms their users as they don’t have a teacher figure who could help them to improve, making them realize when they are not doing it well and telling them how to do it better.
Survey
As the netnography and benchmarks aren’t enough for the investigation, I decided to make a survey to get more information, but this time from the very primary source, the users themselves.
The results demonstrated that the main reason people like to dance is because of fun. They have a great time when they listen to music while following their rhythm through their movements.
An other input that the survey has provided me is the other side of the coin, the main reason people don’t like to dance is because they are too afraid of ridicule; as what the netnography findings had already demonstrated.
On the other hand, the survey helped me to confirm the conclusions from the benchmarking. Most of the users that have been affected by the pandemic situation, their dance schools provided them with live streaming classes. However, this solution isn’t the best as some of them expressed on the survey.
In-depth Interviews
Through the quantitative information that I had already gathered, it was the time to move closer to the users. I wanted to hear everything they wanted to say about dancing: their personal experience, what they feel and think about it. Just to take a deeper point of view of 4 people who live dance differently.
“I always say that dance was my first love”
“Never in my life will I love anyone or anything as I love dance”
Those are the answers of two interviewees when asking what is dance for them. Both started their dancing path when they were just kids, incredibly they coincided in most feelings and experiences they have lived through it. The one that caught my attention is when they started dancing, they thought they were having a good education, but instead of that when they went out of that school they realized they didn’t know anything, for them was a big frustration because they had to unlearn to relearn again; “It was a hard blow”. There are lots of dance schools, but actually, the minority teach correctly the technique, which they find it really important as to not harm yourself. However, dance is more than learning how to do some steps, in fact from their teacher’s point of view, when a student is blocked it is because they think that if they don’t take the steps as they have been told, they’re not dancing; yet for them the most important thing is what you feel when doing it.
One of the professional dancers told me that what really helps when learning to dance is to know where those movements come from. The key to understand things is asking ourselves, why is it like this? Knowing the dance history makes you feel as “you are not doing strange moves anymore, now I can imagine its history while dancing”. In this way, dancing makes more sense which makes it easier to learn while feeling confident.
On the other hand, I had the opportunity to interview a couple who went together to dance classes, funnily they both differ on how they see dancing.
The woman dance just to have fun, she is not afraid to make a fool of herself: “I have to tell you that I’m a total arrhythmic, I don’t keep up when singing and dancing, but I ignore everyone because I like doing it”. She doesn’t care what other people could say about her as “dancing conveys joy to me, you let go, you forget everything, you’re just there to have fun”.
However, her husband has a total opposite opinion. He likes to dance, but his believe is that you only do it if you have a great technique, if not it is like you are playing fool. That is the reason why he doesn’t like to show his dancing abilities in front of other people, because of what they might say. In fact, even when they went to dance classes for him was a challenging and tough moment.
“In class we had a mirror in front of us, I would stand behind everything and everyone so that no one would see me. At first I was doing very badly, I was very ashamed of it so I tried to do it secretly”.
What he also finds important when learning to dance is the presence of a teacher. As for him it is really important to learn the technique, a teacher must be with him every time he dances, otherwise it would be counterproductive, as he probably would do it wrongly.
Personas & Scenarios
At this point of the investigation I already gathered all the information that I needed, it was the time to use it and depict it as a two possible user profiles.
Archetypes
Before jumping into the creation of personas, I though it was necessary to have a general view of all the possible user personalities that my project could have. I captured the twelve archetypes, most of them from their negative side, in order to understand their point of view when learning to dance, as depending on our personality we face the situations differently.
Personas
Having the archetype map in front of me, I was ready to choose two of them in order to create two possible users. With those profiles it makes it easier to start the in-depth investigation based on them. I chose the innocent and the explorer as they were the ones that have appeared most of the times during the first phase of the research. In this sense, the innocent Christopher helped me to have a deep understanding of people who suffer from sense of ridiculous, whereas Emma, the explorer, helped me to comprehend those people who just want to have fun while trying new experiences.
Scenarios
I have my personas defined, next step is to create their own story. Scenarios were a helping hand to have a clear comprehension of these profiles, I already knew their personality, what they like and don’t, which are their motivations, etc. However, it is interesting to analyze them in a situation that they might have to face, as new feelings and pain points can flourish.
I took the opportunity of creating two stories to use two different settings, Christopher has to go on a face-to-face class, instead of Emma who has a live streaming class. Let’s see what they have to deal with!
User Journey
After understanding two types of users, I imagined the experience they could have in a dance class based on the results of the investigation. I analyzed which are the different phases of their journey, their touchpoints, emotions and pain points.
The pain points are opportunities of improvement, it is important to depict the most accurate ones. When creating Christopher’s journey I wanted to highlight his laziness before class, his difficulties and nervousness during the class and his feeling of embarrassment after it.
In contrast, Emma doesn’t feel embarrassed, her feelings in a live streaming class are frustration and annoyance because of her low Internet connection.
Insights
After compiling all the pain points I found out during the investigation, several insights were generated but there were three I got the focus on, and it were its How Might We (HMW) questions that really helped me out to generate the final idea, which it’s getting closer to find out…
Ideation
Finally! The day when you can move back and be again that child that has a non stoppable imagination arrived. It was a whole morning doing technique after technique, filling lots of paper with all types of ideas! From the traditional to the impossible ones; a day with no rules!
From the bunch of techniques such as itinerant brainstorming, brainwriting, hybridization, technological trends, smart cities, impossible scenarios, crazy 8’s and SCAMPER; there were two that gave me the solution: the brainwriting and digitalization techniques.
As I said on the last post, sharing ideas with others helps to come up with bigger ones, that’s what brainwriting is about. Getting others’points of view makes you widen your sight to produce better ideas. Something similar happens with the digitalization technique, which you think how would a specific brand solve the problem you have.
Unique Selling Proposition (USP)
After a morning plenty of imagination, I had the idea right in front of me. From that moment I couldn’t stop thinking all the functionalities that it could have; however, as it is impossible to prototype all them I used the MoSCoW technique to prioritize those which are the important ones.
After it, I was able to perfectly define my digital solution proposal:
Storyboard
Once the idea was written down, it was the time to draw it. Through the storyboard I demonstrate how Step Back benefits those people who are insecure when dancing and would love to learn comfortably without feeling embarrassed. A digital solution that provides users a quality class with no interruptions, while having fun making them feel free to imagine their historical surrounding.
Canvas
In order to have a business point of view I used the canvas template. Addressed for the great dance academies, this is a promising project that provides an opportunity to transfer their knowledge in people’s homes. A high investment it is needed in order to produce its own high-quality content that assures a great dance education.
We arrived at the end of this post, but not the end of the journey! I still have to tell you how I created Step Back, turning the idea into a high fidelity prototype. You can read it in the following post, the step 2 of 2.
Thank you for reading me!
