Blog

 

Every designer I have met so far has a unique story to tell about how they grew from a young designer just out of college to their current role. I believe my story is also different and this article is my way of sharing it with the world.  

 

In college, we learn that the UCD process is one where our users should be in the center of all our design decisions. As human being, we experience so many things in our daily lives. Our daily routine blinds us from the various issues we see around us as it becomes our new normal. But as a designer, we should be more conscious of our surrounding and we should try and understand our environment in depth and attempt to find a solution as it won't just help us, but also others around us who are facing a similar problem. Since my college years, I have been attempting to work on issues faced by normal beings like myself in their daily life and hope to ease the lives of everyone facing similar issues. Here are some instances I can recall where I worked on projects related to my personal life.  

 

• I was a day-boarder, so I needed to travel to & from my college days. And as I was living in a metropolitan city like Bangalore, bus transport is very convenient for students. Most of the commuters used to use the BMTC app which is managed by the local government agency that is responsible for the intercity public transport bus service. So I drafted the idea based on my experience of my daily commute and spoke to a few fellow commuters to understand their issues. Based on this research, I tried to come up with a mobile application for easy & simplified route search for planning inter-city travel with the added advantage of having access to all other information about the local bus transport in Bangalore.  

 

• I often found myself bored during my daily commute as it would usually be on the same bus with the same people. So, I wondered how I could make it more fun and add some real personal interaction too amongst strangers. One of the keen observations was that a lot of the people spend their time listening to music. And each person is restricted by the songs or genre or artists known to them, so it's common for them to get bored. So, I got an idea to let the commuters to share their songs/playlists with people in their vicinity. In this way, you have the option to tune in to new playlists created by people traveling along with you, making the service fun and sociable for everyone involved. 

 

• In another instance, I decided to focus on the kitchen experience especially when one is cooking. A common scenario is having to juggle between multiple tasks while cooking and things get burnt or spilled when you don't do the right thing at the right moment. For example, a regular task of boiling milk in a pan requires around 5-10 minutes to be perfectly boiled so it can last longer in the fridge. But in those 10 minutes, I would also have to feed my kid or take an unexpected call from a friend and my focus is shifted from the pan. And it could lead to a mini-disaster. Hence after brainstorming, I thought of conceptualizing a "Smart Handle" that could be our assistant and help avoid such incidents.  

 

• Similarly, one such idea was to improve the experience of the kitchen by creating a smart refrigerator with a dashboard to help you track its contents and create a personalized shopping list.  

 

• During my pregnancy, my doctor advised me to eat nutrition rich, healthy and preferably organic food. These are not easily available and the ones I found very scared and very costly. So, I had to constantly research new services, but those were not focused on delivering to my locality. Hence as a service design project, I targeted on creating a new service focused on planning and ordering fresh organic food as per the meal chart shared by a nutritionist for a pregnant woman. 

 

Process Followed

 

• Explore 

• Brainstorming 

• User research 

• Concept  

• Scenario  

• Persona 

• Brand Identity: Name, Logo, Tagline 

• Service tools: Ecology map, Service blueprint, Customer journey, storyboard, Evidence 

• Video prototype 

 

The Approach

Research  

My goal was to understand and map the user journey through ought the pregnancy. From the moment from the first month of pregnancy till moment last nine month of pregnancy, I wanted to see what was happening in the nine months of pregnancy.  

 

During the research phase: 

8 Pregnant women were interviewed through Telephonic Interview, Personal Interview, and Online Survey.  

As well as interviewed consumer and shopkeepers those have organic shops. 

 

Major Customer Insights: 

 

• Scope to Popularize 

• Few middlemen so the cost is reduced drastically. 

• Word of mouth is the only way used currently to propagate about any organic businesses. 

• Customers tend to buy organic food if there is 2.5% to 20 – 30% increase in price as compared to their non- organic equivalents 

• Very few regular Organic food consumers. 

 

The following four guidelines formed the foundation of my approach, which would eventually become the basis of the solution I designed: 

 

BE SENSITIVE 

• Being sensitive to all the things that they are going through at various stages is important in being able to design and deliver an experience that they would appreciate. 

 

 2. BE RELEVANT 

• There’s a lot of information that surrounds the birthing process. There’s so much that one needs to know about conceiving, the changes their body will go through, the types of nutrition that are good for a baby growing in the womb, the kind of care one needs, etc. 

    

 3. BE A LIFELINE TO ALL 

• One hopes for there to be no complications during birth, but life can take another course altogether. This weighs heavily on mothers and even more so on first-time mothers when their inexperience leaves them more worried than they should be.