Gone Bananas: Healthy eating in the hood

Our final prototyping session and our learnings

Sergio Marrero
Sergio Marrero’s  Portfolio

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Our team was participating in the Human-Centered Design for Social Innovation course and over five weeks went through the innovation process with the guidance of IDEO.org and Acumen. We started with the discovery and ideation phase. In the last post we began the prototyping phase.

Our original idea was to show people a hologram of what they would look like if they ate healthy or unhealthy food. Simplifying the idea, we decided we wanted to let people know visually or through audio the immediate health impact of certain foods at the moment they pick-up the food in the store.

In prototyping a million things went wrong… but that is exactly why we prototyped.

For our test we thought of using a laptop and photobooth to act as a warped mirror (like the ones they have at a carnival) that makes people look skinnier next to healthy food items and see if that impacts user behavior. This did not work as we imagined because of the image and difficulty in where to place the item as people shopped. Since we had one evening and had to make something work we put our heads together.

An image of the phone hidden behind the bananas that played when people approached the phone.

We made a recording on the health benefits of bananas to inform shoppers as they passed by the banana section. How did we do that? I will tell you.

We made a recording on the phone that stated the health benefits of bananas. We then set the recording as the ringer. Once people came close to approaching the bananas we called the phone and it would loop the recording talking about the health benefits as they walked passed.

We then walked away, observed several people passing as they heard the recording, and conducted some interviews after people left the section. Over all we did not think the ‘health benefits’ recording idea would be great to implement in the end, we left with key observations to understand the real work constraints and practical implications.

A few observations

People came up to the section, took bananas, and left …

A supermarket is a noisy place …

Younger shoppers usually wear headphones …

Alison and Latasha observing shopper behavior in the supermarket during our session

What were our insights?

One of our most important: People already had intentions of what to purchase when they wanted to purchase when they got to the item.

After the test we started to think about how we could influence individuals before getting to the items. We started to go to the cereal aisle to run the same test.

We were limited on time and the recording could not easily be heard there, but it gave us great insight. Knowing people need to be influenced before purchase would help us go back to our list of ideas and see if there are more appropriate ideas or new concepts that would better help drive people to purchase healthier food.

Prototyping helped save time and effort. Instead of falling in love with creating the perfect hologram technology to show you 10 lbs. lighter if you ate apples everyday as snacks, we did not develop anything! We learned that we need to reach people before they get to the food to make the impact we wanted. Great learning — move to prototype and learn as quickly as possible.

Thanks to Alison Jarrett, Hardik Amin, and Latasha Sukhu for being amazing teammates, I had a blast doing the course!

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