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34 QRCA VIEWS SPRING 2 0 15 www.qrca.org JOURNEY LINES C O N T I N U E D minute birthday gift and urgently replacing a dying laptop, helped the team expand their view of how ISPU might help consumers. Seeing ISPU through interviewees' eyes allowed us to be surprised and identify unantici- pated areas of opportunity. The journey lines served two important purposes. First, having the journey mapped out on paper helped the researcher and interviewee develop a shared understanding of the story (both what happened and how the interviewee felt about it). The researcher could then point to peaks and valleys on the journey line in order to probe further. The visual map made it easy to navigate from one part of the story to another and to zoom in and out as the conversation evolved. Second, the journey lines enabled the team to effectively disseminate the stories internally. It can be a challenge for quali- tative researchers to convey to others the rich learnings from in-depth interviews. With the visual aid of the journey line, however, team members could refresh their memories and easily communicate the highs and lows of a story with others. Stories were thus no longer locked in the researchers' brains, but could be easily and accurately distributed. Rewriting Stories After collecting people's stories, we decided that a brainstorming activity could help the team further digest the insights and generate ideas for how to act on them. We were inspired by a brain- storming technique called Brainsketching (http://uxpamagazine.org/brainsketch- ing/), due to its use of rapid sketching and the fact that brainstorming partici- pants build on each other's ideas. Because ISPU is a service that transpires both online and offline, we modified the meth- od so team members wouldn't focus on just the design of the website and app. We also wanted to ground the brainstorm in the real-life stories we'd collected. We returned to the stories we'd collect- ed as the catalyst for the brainstorm activity. Brainstorm participants were grouped into pairs and given a paper copy of a completed journey line and its key themes. We then challenged each pair to rewrite that story. How might the story of the single mom or the grad student unfold with fewer lows and higher highs if eBay were the service provider? Using blank journey line templates, participants created new versions of the stories using sketches, words, or diagrams. An unfor- tunate reality of brainstorming is that people often allow their creativity to be hampered by concerns (e.g., financial, technical, or operational) associated with specific ideas. We attempted to mitigate this by encouraging participants to focus on what the consumer would experience (i.e. the high-level plot of the story), rath- er than specifically what eBay would build to make it a reality. To maintain the collaborative nature of Brainsketching, we had each pair swap stories with another pair. In Round 1, pairs were instructed to build stories based on capabilities available to eBay "Having the journey mapped out helped the researcher and interviewee develop a shared understanding of the story." "We witnessed the power of stories in helping people understand a problem, conceive solutions, and communicate those solutions."

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