REFLECTION / STORYTELLING through CUSTOMER JOURNEY

Challenge and Selection

I am a graduated Product Designer and after viewing this course, I use story-telling tool in my daily design

activities nowadays. Such tool gives me the ability to communicate and visualize problems with the people

that also take part in projects by enabling them to understand a much bigger picture of the challenges

involved of which we strive to solve. Story telling has therefore the ability to create relevance and raise

engagement among projects’ participants. By illustrating an insightful and richer view of the problems end-

users face in their own perspective, stakeholders become then much keener to engage with the contextual

issues of which are often hidden and deeply embedded in the challenges we want to tackle. As a result, they

start to understand that the single definition of a problem has much more curiosity and will to explore a given  challenge.

Application

The story telling that I am about to describe helped me to develop the product idea of my Master Degree

thesis. The challenge taken was focused around the lack of interest towards cooking among single

households. As the project got started, I set some ground objectives by trying to understanding why cooking

is generally seen as time consuming and why it is often a discouraging activity by this group of people.

Only then, a product idea could start to be envisioned based on real insights, which could then result into

ideas and alternatives to encourage the target audience to enjoy cook though applications that would ease

such activity on their daily basis.

To start tackling such objectives, I started the project by using the Customer Journey tool to really dig into

the peoples’ lives to understand the real causes of what I wanted to find out. Therefore, I first conducted

interviews and collected statements through questionnaires. However, I felt that I had to go much deeper

and observe them throughout their daily activities, from food shopping until they get home and approach

the kitchen whenever they feel for cooking. I had to understand their motivation, their behaviors and needs

if I wanted to create something that would make an impact in their lives.

Insights & Approach

As the lecture shows, the opportunities around this challenge turned to be much greater as we dug in the

lives of the focused group and start to understand - it turned out to be a real revelation! Often what the

interviewers first said, didn’t quite match with what they actually did.  By observing them and analyzing their

behaviors in every important touch-points around the entire journey, I only then start to understand what lies

behind their frustrations, latent needs as well as what moves and motivates them.

During observations throughout the customer journey, users start to demonstrate signals that what actually

demotivate them was not directly linked to the cooking activity itself, but having a mess created while

cooking to be cleaned after it was done. At this point, patterns around user mindset started to surface, which

became a game change and real opportunity for the project. Although they enjoyed the food itself, the

cleaning and maintaining part of the cooking journey was demotivating after all. As a result, ideas around this

fact started to emerge of which were never really considered at the beginning of the project in order to tackle

this new relevant insight. The final product idea was then further developed by creating unique -new solution

of which were able to motivate and engage people cooking by having a worktop space with smart integrative

solutions to tackle the cleaning and maintaining part of the cleaning issue.

Conclusion

This course gave me the ability not only to explore topics and challenges in much more meaningful ways, but

also to be able to communicate such challenge in a profound manner. Aligning information with partners and

stakeholders is the key to product success as previously mentioned before. By using such Story Telling tool

supported by Customer Journey, we are definitely able to explore topics and challenges in ways that would

never be considered though conventional methods. It engages people to exceed and create meaningful

solutions which are able to create value for both people and ultimately for businesses!

