Experience Design (XD)

"...the practice of designing products, processes, services, events, omnichannel journeys, and environments with a focus placed on the quality of the user experience and culturally relevant solutions." 

CASE STUDY: Applesauce

What experience were we challenged to improve?

The MBA student experience for students hailing from 80+ countries and balancing rigorous and consuming academic and professional demands.

Potential Impact: Contribute to INSEAD's relevance and connection to its MBAs. 

Limits: No budget; no blueprint; no stage; transportation to city difficult; over-scheduled student schedules; weak extracurricular culture; limited bandwidth among organizers (also students).

Assets: Enthusiastic organizers; strong interest in having more activities on campus; students congregate on campus due to rural location; amphitheaters available after hours; helpful IT staff; creative team with expertise in PowerPoint; shared experience of sitting through (too many) painful PowerPoint presentations. 

Actual Outcome: MBA students accepted Applesauce into INSEAD's unique fabric of traditions; it has expanded to the Singapore campus and is one of (if not the) largest student-led challenge. 

So what is Applesauce?

MBA students present ridiculous, nonsensical PowerPoint presentations, which they (and the audience) have not seen before. Contestants speak for 5min over 8 slides and are judged for their creativity, humor, and presence. 

so what did we learn? 

  1. Understanding our typical audience member's experience was the lynchpin to maximizing the experience for all stakeholders. Making fun of the MBA resonates with MBAs. Adjustments to the competition's speed, sequencing, marketing, and surprise twists/turns all needed to stem from the typical MBA's point perspective. 
  2. Humor is powerful; keeping it ridiculous 1) created a safe but challenging path to learning improvisation in public speaking and 2) kept it from becoming another CV-lining competition for MBAs to stress over.
  3. Designing for a way to reward Applesauce organizers made it sustainable; our organizers appreciated the delight we helped them experience by 1) strategically siloing members to keep some of the competition's elements of surprise a secret and 2) introducing some improvisation into the actual running of the (finely tuned) competition. 

Deeper dive on what applesauce taught us: 

The below is the result of four iterations of Applesauce, including 1 pilot, 2 competitions, and a grand finale (described below) on INSEAD's campus in France: 

  • Audience Experience: How can enthusiastic audience members connect better to Applesauce? For us, lack of audience interest and engagement during PowerPoints creates a big barrier to receiving the message and enjoying the experience. Our audience appreciated that they could show up to Applesauce, beers in hand, and just sit back and laugh. Capitalizing on this easy access to Applesauce and connection was important to our goals in the project. During our earlier iterations, more enthusiastic audience members interrupted the presentation with comments, however we observed that it broke the flow and caused our contestants to loose some momentum (and sometimes confidence). So, we settled on having space for two audience questions at the end of each presentation, helping create a space for audience members to be funny and ensuring that the focus would return to the contestants via their responses to the questions. 

  • Contestant Experience: How do we find the best contestants and make sure they become our advocates? We discovered that self-nomination was key. It's pretty daunting to present something you don't know much about in front of an audience of top business school students from all over the world---even more so when English is your second or third language, in some cases. The Applesauce Leadership Team experimented with 1) recruiting classmates who we had observed as funny and comfortable speaking up in class and with 2) asking for and accepting self-nominations. We discovered between Applesauce iterations that self-nominated contestants seemed to enjoy the experience more, and often were more comfortable making the presentations funny. To support our contestants being in positions to be most relaxed and funny, we wanted to ensure that they would feel free to say outlandish things; so, we imposed a "no filming or recording" policy. Finally, we also learned that contestants who were buzzed, as opposed to sober and drunk, did the best; at Applesauce, the audience should have more booz than the contestants. 

  • PowerPoint Design:  How should the presentations be structured and put together? Do we want to create something with a clear topic and/or story in mind? Yes and no; we found that the best presenters used the slides, leaning on their humor and letting the audience share in the disbelief of how to connect the ideas. Over four iterations of Applesauce, we settled on 1) selecting the topic of the presentation and 2) creating an often disjointed series of slides that related to this topic. Selected examples of past presentations: "If Yammer was a Person," "Are Goats the Next Big Thing in Beauty?," and "Twerking for a Brighter Future." With non-native English speaking presenters, we observed that having a clear topic helped even the field among native speakers and ensured that topics covered would prime the audience to laugh --- boosting the confidence of the presenter and the ridiculousness of the overall experience. 

  • Scoring and Judges' Role: How does judging affect the experience of the event? A lot; we discovered that some of the best laughs came from comments on the presentations from our judges, selected from past winners. Judges set the tone of the event, as the moderator remained neutral in order to help move the evening along. We also discovered that judges wanted to create personalities to help carry the humor to a new level and to allow the contestants a chance to laugh as well at the end of their presentations. 

  • Marketing to Busy MBAs: How do we create momentum in a program that is accelerated, rigorous, and intense? INSEAD is a small community, so we determined that recruiting through classes, and highlighting the contestants was the best way to build interest. This turned out to be true in the beginning. However, perhaps the best proof of concept was that Applesauce's reputation spread quickly. Fortunately, the idea of the competition resonated with MBAs, who have seen MANY PowerPoints and who will be expected to build and present MANY PowerPoints in their future careers. 

Related Project: The Grand Finale

Interest in Applesauce was growing on campus after a couple months; classmates would ask when the next competition would be. So we decided to have a final competition, where our past winners would compete for a top prize.

This Grand Finale took place on 14 June 2017. To build awareness among the new MBA class, we framed it as a battle between the classes (July Class vs. December Class); our organizing committee was comprised of diverse members from both classes to enhance our creativity, get needed bandwidth, transfer knowledge, and ensure the longevity of Applesauce past my class's graduation in July 2017. 

Details at a Glance:

  • Approx. 300 MBA attendees 
  • Six MBAs competed (3 against 3) + one wild card self-nominated from the audience
  • New efforts to build the event around the audience experience --- resulting in adjustments to speed, sequencing, planning, and surprise twists/turns, etc.  (e.g. last minute contestant picked from the audience, online voting via menti.com, and hidden prize under an audience desk)
  • New trimmings: humorous introductory film on the origins of Applesauce and papier maché awards
  • Larger organizing team working on various work streams 

SUB WORKSTREAM: applesauce Film

This film opened the event. 

We decided to include a seating announcement, recorded with different INSEAD MBA voices (in different languages); a past Applesauce contestant reprised a a Scottish character during the announcement. The curtains of the amphitheater closed and lights dimmed as this played. 

Skip to 01:02 to see the film. 

At the end of the film, we brought the apple into the amphitheater from behind the audience to kick off the event. 

As is probably evident, the story is heavily inspired by Lord of the Rings and Chariots of Fire. My role was to set the story board, co-wri tethe script, make the illustrations, and recruit the acting and producing talent. (See below for how to Apple was made)

Many thanks to everyone who contributed their talent and time!