Reward Yourself
Summary:
This case study is a project organized by IDEO and +Acumen. I worked with a team of 5 people to understand the eating habits of young professionals by using the IDEO design thinking method.
About my role:
I did the research part of the project with the team and my role was interviewing experts and observing the context where people eat and shop. I did the design part of the project individually and my role was designing and testing.
The app: The user will shop for fresh food and gain reward points immediately that can be used as a discount via the barcode created in the app.
The Situation:
Eating healthy is a complex challenge that involves lack of infrastructure in the neighbourhoods, distribution inefficiencies, lack of knowledge about what is healthy, myths and prejudges etc.
With my team, we discovered the pain point of young professionals who want to eat healthy but don’t do so for several reasons. We tried to understand the root causes and see if we can come up with a possible solution to help them.
The Method:
We used the design thinking method created by IDEO. This helped us to profoundly understand our users via interviews and observation. Later on, I used rapid prototyping and iteration methods to create a design to help these users.
The Goal:
Designing a tool to help the users in their wish to eat healthy. The KPIs are being easy to use and intuitive, addressing to young professionals, creating a small but sustainable effect for the user.
Inspiration:
Before the ideation phase, we dived into an inspiration phase where we learnt from our users by listening and observing them. We also looked into an analogous example to get more incentives. We interviewed 8 people and observed 4 different places where people eat and shop.
Ideation:
Once the team completed the observation and interviews, all the team members came together to share insights. We first noted down all the insights that we have without any judgement and then we cluttered them into themes. From there we did the “how might we” exercise to guide our brainstorming session.
We had 3 main insights and we cluttered all our notes under these 4 group
-There is a minimal awareness about healthy food. There is a lack of clarity about what healthy food is
-There needs to be readily available info, also community matters
People have the motivation to eat healthy: guilt, fitness, taste etc.
The sum up of our research analysis:
In the how might we session we asked:
-How might we create more awareness and make “healthy food” concept clearer?
-How might we create more available info that will be accessible to a community?
-How might we rotate people’s motivation for a more sustainable healthy eating habit?
Implementation:
The team concluded the project with this idea. I continued to the project individually and created the design.
First, I created a persona and a storyboard according to our research findings.
Persona:
Storyboard:
Journey Map:
The idea:
As seen in the user research, one of the main pain points is that the fresh food and organic food are more expensive.
To mitigate this, I designed the app with which the user will earn reward points by buying fresh or organic food.
The partner market will decide to give how many rewards to which items and the user will be able to choose that in the app and then take the photo of the shopping receipt to prove the buying. The user will automatically gain a discount with the reward point and will be able to use it as a discount immediately by the barcode created in the app.
Low Fidelity Prototype & First Iteration:
I choose to make a paper prototype before starting designing the high fidelity. Paper prototypes are a good way to find out the violations of the basic design heuristics.
Here are the functions that I decided to include in the app:
-> The user chooses the store
-> The user chooses the rewarded products in the store and add them in the virtual shopping cart
-> The user takes a picture of the shopping receipt to be able to use the reward
-> The user uses the reward
Here are the 4 main violations of the design heuristics
1) Violation of freedom heuristic: The user should have more choices on the home page
2) Violation of recognition over recall heuristic: The user found remembering the products challenging. Layout should change
3) Violation of familiar language heuristic: There are some buttons that aren’t comprehensible
4) Violation of showing status heuristic: There is no clear indication of how many points are equal to how many rewards.
The importance of storyboards and context:
After the consideration of design heuristics, I prepared a storyboard to see if the app works well in its own context which is shopping in a grocery store. I realized that this flow had a problem. The shopper has to take a pic of the receipt and therefore when the reward will be ready to use, the shopper already wants to leave. Therefore I thought about providing an option to the user for not spending the reward right away and use it later.
Mid-Fidelity Prototype & Second Iteration
I went to a shopping mall and tested this design with users. I did the testing via an interactive prototype that I created on XD. I got so many good feedback and insights.
The flow was not intuitive. There were too many clicks before coming to the main point.
I decided to:
1) Use pop-ups in some places instead for feedback.
2) Decrease the number of pages — too many features
3) Make important buttons stand out
4) Change the background picture
Final Prototype:
