Citizen Experience

IBM Design Hackathon

Judge Panel

My Role

🧑‍🎨

IBM Senior Designer

Tools

Project Background

IBM Design Hackathon is a Q1 2024 Asia Pacific (APAC) competition where individual IBM designers are provided a one sentence brief and tasked with utilising the Garage methodologies in identifying customer targets, validating market gaps, designing a prototype and create a product plan for the first MVP. The winner will be awarded award sponsorships and a regional designer role in an APAC level project.

The brief is directed to each competitors' local government and focused on the theme of "Citizen Experience".

My Achievements

I emerged the winner after two rounds of judge panel and IBM Design board reviews.
Nominated by IBM regional executives for various awards after completion of the competition.
Had the opportunity to work with an APAC client on projects that had impact on a regional level.
Brought visibility for my local practice to IBM APAC practices in Singapore and Australia
Received sponsorship by IBM design board members for the Enterprise Design Thinking Coach award where this recognition can only be achieved via referral by executive design officers at regional level.

Defining the Problem

Brief: Your government has communicated a view that small businesses are a strategic engine for the sustainability of our economy. The government doesn’t have enough insight about how to service this segment.

Problem Statement: How might we design a new service for small businesses that increases their impact to our country’s economy?

Small Businesses and The Thai Economy

To qualify as a small business, income revenue must be above 1,800,000 THB but not over 100,000,000 THB where your business must employ fewer than 50 people.

32%

In 2024, there are over 5,000,000 MSMEs where Small Businesses account for 32% (approximately 1,600,000).

Small business’s total economic revenue at least
2.88 Trillion THB where Thailand’s latest GDP figure is
18.02 Trillion THB.

62%

Number of small businesses in Thailand has grown from 990,000 in 2022 to 1,600,000 in 2024 which accounts for 62% growth.

16%

Small businesses are a strategic engine for the sustainability of the Thai economy where its economic value accounts for at least 16% of the country's GDP.

Discovery

To gain a wholesome view of the government's initiatives and services, I decided to conduct semi-structured interviews with shop owners and local government officials. Clear patterns emerged from both group's insights where issues mainly arise from lack of centralized government channel that assembles all available services and latest news.

My Users

I created personas that depicts three large user groups based on interviews conducted. The economic drivers are successful small business owners who are profit driven and want to take their business to the next level. The social drivers are small business owners who are impact driven and seek to drive societal and economic empowerment with help from local government. Lastly, the kickstart driver who are startup owners who lack fundamental business knowledge and capital to start their own businesses. A common theme amongst them all is the lack of awareness of government initiatives that can help them succeed in their goals.

Pain Points & Problem Hypotheses

After qualitative data analysis, I clustered the data from the interviews into themes to identify four large problem areas to validate with users.

I formed 3 problem hypotheses and research questions to validate pain points and market gap with larger pool of users to gain quantitative data on the problem's validity.