Our students, the task force of future changemakers and innovative thinkers will tackle your company’s actual problems. We help you adjust your point of view, to try a different approach or to get out of your comfort zone.
WHY JOIN?
Visibility
We provide you more visibility among our students and the design thinking community in Tartu.
Validation
We help you validate the problem statement and work towards a solution as part of the project course.
New Skills
We provide an opportunity for the partner company’s employees to advance their own knowledge and skills.
New Talent
Together we can create an environment to foster future product managers.
HOW TO JOIN?
We accept new partner companies twice a year, in August-September and December-January.
In order to become a partner for the Sandbox programme, a fee applies. This financial support from the partner companies allows the
Sandbox team to further develop and refine the programme to improve design thinking and digital product
management education at the University of Tartu. If your company is interested in joining the programme,
contact us through the form below or write an email to sandbox@ut.ee.
We are also always open to guest lecturers who wish to give a talk on topics related to digital product management
and design thinking. If you are
interested in joining Sandbox programme as a guest lecturer, write an email to
sandbox@ut.ee.
DESIGN THINKING PROCESS
COMPLETED PROJECTS SHOWCASE
Course: Digital Product Management Industry Project
Team Ethics: Aro Kivisild (Conversion Master in IT), Ojus Virendra Tudavekar (Master's in Software Engineering), Deepika Uttam Sambrekar (Master's in Software Engineering)
Semester: Autumn 2022
The challenge
The Centre for Ethics of the University of Tartu presented the challenge of digitizing the board game “Estonians 100 choices”. This game was created under a nationwide initiative, “Value Development in Estonian Society”. The game focuses on helping the players reflect on the causes of moral disagreements and the foundations of their own ethical positions. The development of four dilemma-based values games has resulted in board game versions of the game.
However, the high cost of a printed game has proved to be a constraint on development. Moreover, the printing involves a large amount of environmentally unsustainable material, and the printed version is too heavy. Therefore, the main challenge for Team Ethics was to digitize the game in order to avoid the high cost of printing and to reach a wider audience, keeping in mind the importance of game values.
Process and solution
During the process, team Ethics conducted Stakeholder mapping, filled in a Value Proposition Canvas, developed Persona and User Journey, and identified Design Aspects and Design Opportunities for the challenge. The team came up with four How Might We questions and, after the research, highlighted a key HMW: HMW make the game more engaging to play in a digital environment?
Using various ideation techniques, such as Crazy 8 and Mash Up, the team came up with multiple solutions for the key design opportunity. Their final product prototype includes several scenarios, two main rounds and one bonus round of the game, a leaderboard, and the player's moral compass. Team Ethics hopes their work is one of the stepping stones for building a strong community of "Estonians 100 choices" players.
Course: Digital Product Management Industry Project
Team Foxway: Abhishek Giri (Master’s in Quantitative Economics), Siritorn Ploychareon (Master’s in Innovation & Technology), Marc Sahuguet (Master’s in Computer Science)
Semester: Autumn 2022
The challenge
Foxway Recommerce has sustainability and a circular economy at the core of its business model. The company takes care of the 2nd, 3rd, and 4th lifecycles of electronic devices. To make the buyback of devices as easy as possible for the customers, Foxway is developing an online buyback channel.
As any ambitious endeavour usually does, the development of the online buyback channel presents several challenges. Customers have to provide functional information and grade the cosmetic conditions of the devices.
How to make sure that customers provide accurate information about devices? How to eliminate the subjectivity of the assessment? Especially when it comes to the cosmetic conditions of the device.
How to ensure the whole process is as smooth as possible for the customer?
Process and solution
During the course, team Foxway applied various techniques and tools from Design Thinking and Digital Product Management in order to discover problems, conduct user research, brainstorm ideas, develop prototypes, and conduct user testing.
After thorough research, the team highlighted several design opportunities and decided to focus on the following question: How Might We build trust and value for end users?
The final Foxway team's prototype is designed to facilitate semi-automated devices' price evaluation. To complete the evaluation process, users must follow four simple instructions: opening settings, pressing buttons, taking photos, and testing the touchscreen. Considering user research findings, the final application provides information about the amount of potentially saved CO2 emissions alongside the estimated quote price. Moreover, the final prototype offers a user the option to get paid and instructs how to send mobile devices to Foxway.
Course: Digital Product Management Industry Project
Team Emotional Payment: Kaisa, Birgitt, Tejas, Peeter
Semester: Spring 2022
The challenge
Making payments from your account to someone else’s account is a rather technical thing. However the intentions are not always technical. SEB assumes that people sometimes use money as a gift, as a bonus for a well-done job, as a help or support, as a donation etc. However, the bank’s existing payment forms in Internetbank or Mobile App do not support people to fully convey the emotion when making the payment, and people look for alternative channels to deliver it (SMS, call, Messenger, WhatsApp, cash).
Process and solution
Team Emotional Payment analyzed stakeholders, built a persona and an user journey map, and identified six stages, from initiating a bank transfer to communicating with the receiver about it. After user research, the team came up with three different design opportunities. The one they decided to focus on was: How might we add an emotional personal touch to the bank transaction?
The ideation phase proved to be very productive for team Emotional Payment, as they brainstormed a lot of exciting and innovative ideas. The team presented a product prototype that allows enriching the regular money transfer with a wide variety of features, from poems to interactive images of birthday cakes.
Course: Digital Product Management Industry Project
Team Finbest: Monica, Karl, Asso, Binghua
Semester: Spring 2022
The challenge
SEB presented the challenge that a large proportion of the society is facing financial stress on a daily basis. Some people are able to manage their finances well but some are struggling. Different customer groups have different approaches to managing financial stress and therefore also need different solutions. In addition, financial stress can create not only financial problems but also impact health. The challenge of this project was to find out the customers' financial stress and lead them to solve it with our product.
Process and solution
During the course, team Finbest analyzed four different personas, conducted seven interviews, built a journey map, and tested various assumptions. After thorough user research, they came up with ten design opportunities. The team decided to focus on the following opportunity: How might we support customers to reach their financial goals based on their life priorities?
After the ideation and testing phases, team Finbest presented a product prototype that would help users assess their financial situation, make and follow a budget, increase financial literacy, and, most importantly, release financial stress.
Course: Digital Product Management Industry Project
Team vME (Virtual ME): Helena, Joonas, Joy, Yashar
Semester: Spring 2022
The challenge
Our modern everyday digital environment has created many problems for both users and providers of digital services to deal with. Two most significant problems are:
1. Increasing disconnectedness from real life
2. Poor human-computer interaction
When applied to the field of Metaverse and the onboarding processes, these problems lead to one big question. How to build up the onboarding and retention so that the app gets as much information about the user as possible with as little input as possible?
Process and solution
Team vME identified its primary goal as follows: build trustful relationships between a virtual creature and its owner via the mobile interface. During user research, they focused on testing the assumption that people leave onboarding when the app asks too many questions. To test this assumption, vME team conducted ten interviews with ten potential users at age 16-53. The team was able to pinpoint primary users’ concerns, weaknesses of virtual assistants, and identify what onboarding should include.
Taking findings into consideration, the team decided to focus on two How Might We questions:
1. HMW build trust between the user and app so that the user feels secure.
2. HMW create a visual onboarding algorithm that studies the user thoroughly.
After a few cycles of user tests and improvement, team vME presented a prototype of an onboarding application that focuses on building a complete virtual version of the user while rewarding the user with a unique abstract piece of art.
Our commitment to working with the industry has been well established since the beginning of the Sandbox program. With every passing semester, we are filling up our partner wall.
To the end of working more closely with the industry, one of our course offerings is Digital Product Management Industry Project (DPMIP). The course is designed to provide a real-world setting for the students to practice their Design Thinking and Product Management skills.
As a quick summary here is a timeline of how the course works.
- The Sandbox partners with companies
- Problem statements for students are created
- Students are onboarded, teamed up and given context
- Checkpoints for solving different aspects of the problem are laid out
- The teams conduct user research, build personas and user journeys
- The teams then agree upon a product vision, strategy, and metrics to measure success
- Possible solutions are ideated upon and sketched
- Prototypes are built using industry-standard tools such as Figma
- The prototypes are used for user testing and iterating
- The course concludes with final presentations and reports that add value to the partner's attempts to solve the problem
This semester (Autumn 2021/22) we had a fruitful collaboration with the Estonian National Museum (ENM) or Eesti Rahva Muuseum (ERM) in Estonian. A total of 15 students with various backgrounds in IT worked as teams on two different problems of interest to the museum. By the end of the course, the students delivered and tested four prototypes (two per problem). These prototypes can now be further developed by the museum, and can be used to build the final solutions.
The problems ranged from making museum visits more engaging to different demographics to coming up with different ways in which the digital assets of the museum can be used by visitors. At the Sandbox, we are firm believers in Design Thinking and the students get to use the tools that they’ve learnt about in practical settings. The process starts with empathy and building personas of the people for whom the solution is to be designed. For example, the teams Estonian National Museum and The New Wave came up with the following personas for the problems that they were solving.
Other teams too created personas based on their problem statements and target audience. Once these steps are validated, teams moved on to the next steps of validating their assumptions and picking the right "How might we.." questions to answer.
With the questions picked, the teams then come up with multiple solutions that can answer the questions. With many options on the table, the teams then work with the mentors and the partners to pick a solution that might be best suited.
This entire process of diverging over questions to answer, converging on a few important ones, then coming up with multiple solutions to those questions and picking the most suited ones is called the Double Diamond Design Process.
The next step that the teams went on to was to create prototypes of the solutions that can be tested. Some of the solutions that were proposed for the museum were: A digital tool that helped create treasure hunts to engage students and building intuitive interfaces that could help artisans make handicrafts.
The course ends with final presentations and reports which capture the entire journey of students and give them practice in designing digital products. The partners also benefit immensely from the course since the students are a great source of fresh ideas, and come up with multiple points of view. The final reports from the course provide valuable insight into the problems faced by the company. The prototypes built by the students can be iterated upon by the partners to build final working solutions. Additionally, in working with the students over an extended period of time the partners can easily hire new talent directly.
Working with ERM this semester has been a great pleasure. The organization has been approachable and open to new ideas. We hope that this collaboration exceeded the expectations and gave actionable insights to the challenges that the museum faces.
