Agora is being built by a French couple who received funding from the EU to create a social media app that solves the specific problem of computational bots on propaganda.
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They had built a prototype but needed some help defining the MVP of their product. I ran a 3 day design sprint with them to generate a number of ‘propositions’ that they could go ahead and test.

The founders of Agora were trying to tackle a huge problem, spanning a number of different people with a range of different issues. You can see this from the mission statement they provided me below.

To start with, I broke their mission statement down into separate problems for separate target users. Each one of these problem statements immediately brings to mind very different solutions with very different implementations. This is key to effectively prototype and test ideas for each problem.

Next, I showed them this map I had created and asked them to pinpoint exactly where they would like to be positioned. This really helped give me clarity about where their priorities lay. They wanted to prioritise social media at a societal level, quite a unique positioning.

This exercise is key 🔑 to understand what questions need to be answered first. This cuts down research and business risk massively by prioritising the most important, fundamental ideas about our product.

At the heart of what they wanted to do is to use a format called a wikisurvey, popularised by an open source piece of software called Pol.is.

One of the most important assumptions, we realised, was the assumption that wikisurveys would be an engaging format through which to interface with people. If people didn’t want to use them, then the whole product simply wouldn’t work.

We put together a core proposition for the product, boiling their idea down to it’s essence. The unmovable ideas they were pretty set on. This could be shown to people in research sessions before diving into the prototypes for different ideas, providing them key context.

Next we worked on 5 propositions that had come up in the workshop. Each of these attempted to differentiate the core reason of the product existing, so we could then understand which ideas most resonated with potential users.

Each of these propositions represented a unique product in their own right. They went on pursue the first proposition, which I designed from the ground up. You can find part 2 of this case study here.