Reflection- Visualization

Challenge and selection

The use of visualization in today’s world is of extreme value as it forms a core tool through the means  we communicate to one and other whether were aware of it or not. It is an extremely useful design  thinking tool when it comes to matters of complex problem solving as it helps unlock a different part of  our brain in order to enhance our creativity and help streamline the design thinking process. During my  time at Hyper Island a design thinking firm I was tasked with dealing with multiple tech firms but this  time for the first time my team and I was given responsibility to work with one of Singapore’s largest  grocery store franchises where they came to us with a problem of wanting to improve customer  shopping experience while in the store as they felt that sales hadn’t improved in over years for the  reason being that customers don’t spend as much time shopping as they did in the past.

As a customer and Singaporean myself I have known for a fact that the country’s population has always  been on the rise and Singaporean’s in general love to shop and spend most of their time in malls. So why  aren’t shoppers spending more time at the stores browsing than just buying what’s needed and paying  for it? Hence to solve this problem and really get into the mind of the user, my team and I decided to  use Visualization tools such as ethnographic interviews and user experience journey mapping.

Application

We interviewed 20 candidates from different social backgrounds with the sole purpose of finding the  grocery store’s functional, social and emotional need in these individuals’ lives and what we found was  quite surprising. We found that over 70% of the interviewees would either shop with their entire family  over the weekends or go individually during the week as most parents, elderly couples and individuals,  still prefer to touch and feel their products before buying them. While the remaining 30% were  millennials who were either students or newly employed individuals who would rather spend their time  shopping for groceries online than having to actually go to the store as observing the products before  purchase wasn’t a priority. We futher carried on our research by mapping out the journey of families as  to why they shop only on weekends. During this process we found out that parents find it hard to  convince their children to go grocery shopping as it is seen as a boring and mundane activity. Children  would rather spend their time sitting at home and playing on their mobile devices than having to go out  and shop with parents as the children from past experience know that all their shopping desires and  wants at the store will be turned down by the parents for purposes of health and saving money.

Through journey mapping we found that families spend the most time at grocery stores but over the  years have stopped spending as much time mainly because it is extremely tedious to convince the  children the importance of spending family time and once they are in the store the children are  extremely difficult to deal with. Hence most families are starting to resort to online grocery shopping  over the years. With this day and age technology has improved a great deal to the extent children do not  want to do anything but look at their devices. So based on the data collected, we wondered what the

best solution could be, whereby parents and children can once again have a pleasurable and educational  shopping experience without the cause of any behavioral changes to either one of them.  Thus the  solution we can up with was that of a nationwide grocery store treasure hunt app for the franchise.  Through this app one could choose the store of choice and pre pay for their groceries whereby on their  digital devices and upon doing so an interactive and easy to use treasure map would open up on the  devices thus allowing children to use the map to help navigate the parents to the groceries in the store.  The app allows the children to scan the grocery items to obtain points which can later on be used to  either redeem a gift for the children or a discount for the parents. To educate the children through this  shopping experience, a nutritional pop up box appears for every item that is scanned on the device.

Approach and Insights

During my time research I realized that grocery stores fulfilled a similar functional but completely  different social and emotional needs for every individuals. While older individuals enjoyed and relied on  the feel and touch of the products at the store to determine quality and need of purchasing, the  younger shoppers preferred the convenience of online shopping. Visualization as a tool brings great  value to design thinkers as it helps them perceive user journey of a product or service and thus enabling  clients to create the perfect user experience. Through this app my team and I not only developed it for  the sole purpose of enhancing sales but also as a means of giving the franchise the appeal of bringing  families closer to each other. Journey mapping and ethnographic interviews were our core means of  collecting data and thus understand user experience in the process. To best see the viability of the app  would be to track the total number active users every week and measure satisfaction rates through the  app.

One of the main insights I gained during this project is that as a designer one must not focus on the  unique selling point of the product and assume the solution that the user needs but focus on the unique  buyer rate instead which can best be understood by creating a problem question that best captures the  essence of what the user is trying to convey.

