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AMI JHARNA
AMI JHARNA
MIZBAH PATLA
Project Type: Ethnographic Research I UI I UX
Project Timeline: 10 Weeks
Team: Mizbah Patla, HaYoung Ra, Akshay Kumbhar
My Involvement: User Research, Strategy & Planning, Conceptualization, Prototyping and User Interaction.
Brief Overview
Traveling excites many but the pain planning and packing luggage brings is inevitable. It even causes stress amongst individuals and subsides the excitement of traveling. Hence, the goal of this project was to identify the pain points associated with luggage and eventually reinstate the joy of traveling. This project also helped drive the adoption of WSGN's 2020 trend of 'Luggage Free Travel'.
Market Analysis
In the initial period of research, we as a team were looking at market areas that can provide an opportunity for us to establish a blue ocean strategy which essentially means identifying the white spaces in the current market and developing a successful business model.
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We started exploring 3 areas of the market we were interested in and began our secondary research in order to identify our strongest potential for a business opportunity eventually selecting Luggage Free Travel over others.
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Since ​the travel industry is already saturated with applications, products and services, we wanted to explore the untapped potential spaces within this market. We started with a basic mind-map and zeroed down on luggage since it had a fresh appeal and held higher potential compared to others.
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Mind Map
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This is a method of understanding and assessing the competitors of the industry better. This method essentially aids in analyzing the profitability of a market and helps adjust the potential strategy accordingly.
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Porter's Five Factors
Stakeholder's Map
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In order to understand what we are designing, it was imperative for us to understand those we are designing for. We streamlined our thoughts and categorized our audience into primary, secondary, and tertiary groups.
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Design Creative Brief
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On selecting the Luggage Free Travel industry, it was imperative for us to organize our thoughts and detail out our design brief which would further serve as a handbook for our following research. We categorized our creative brief into 5 sub-topics.
The Research Process
Defining Network Users:
Research Plan Overview
Online Survey
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To get started on our primary research, we drafted a simple yet direct survey to gauge what our audience thinks and feels about travel and its related issues. Along with sending a link to the survey, we made a flyer with a barcode and pinned them everywhere we could to get maximum responses. 97 people took our survey and here are some of the highlights.
In-Person Interviews
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This was an important segment for our primary research, of which the findings proved crucial for our project. We drafted an agenda and interviewed our stakeholders over a course of 10 days.
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To highlight a few of the insights from our personal interviews, here are some of the quotes from every segment of our target stakeholders.
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On conclusion of our primary research, we had generated an ample amount of data for the next steps of the project. We started our affinitization within each group and categorized them into various maps and matrices.
Data Synthesis
Empathy Maps & User Personas
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Empathy maps help with having a deeper understanding of one customer segment. It helped us jot down what our users were saying, thinking, feeling, hearing, and seeing. We could also identify their pains and gains and bucketed them for each group accordingly. These maps helped with building our user personas as well.
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The Umbrella Question
Sub-Questions
Value Proposition
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The empathy maps and user personas helped us realize and focus better on one customer segment that showed the most potential which is the Fashion Enthusiasts and Millennial community. We could then draft and refine our value proposition statement as follows:
Business Model Generation
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In order to generate our own business model, we engaged in a number of creative workshops as given below. These helped in streamlining our insights and creating solutions that were tangible and coherent with our value proposition model stated earlier.
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Five E's: The Five E's of user experience was a great way of building our business model canvas and understanding how a customer would interact with the product solution. It helped us brainstorm on our solution at every step of customer engagement and captured our thoughts in a more systematic fashion.
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Good & Different Matrix: Another tool we used to brainstorm and select innovative ideas was to bucket them all in 4 categories in a matrix. Our goal was to create something that is not only good but also is different and has a brand new approach.
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17 Steps of Zag: To create an airtight business model, it was imperative for us to answer the 17 steps of zag - created by the author Marty Neumeier - to reiterate the company's goals and objectives under 4 elements which are difference, focus, trends, and communication.
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Blue Ocean Strategy: While the business model canvas consists of a right-hand value and customer-focused side, and a left-hand cost and infrastructure side, the Blue Ocean Strategy is about simultaneously increasing value while reducing costs.
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Concept & Prototype Development
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Product Vision Board
In order to create a substantial product that was described earlier through our value proposition, we further defined the main touchpoints of who are target group is, what are their needs, how is the product designed and what are its business goals in our product vision board..
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To breakdown and prototype the final product, the user scenarios that are given below helped us define the probable interactions, having into account the specific goals of each defined user and the context and condition in which they would use the product.
User Scenarios
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Prototyping & Application Development
This was an important phase of product development and the findings from this segment helped us refine and evolve our system into a sound product.
Information Architecture
Lo-fidelity Prototype
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It was important for us to gauge what works and what doesn't and so we started off with basic paper prototypes and detailed out the function of every page. We asked our participants to comment on the structure, design, and service of the application and give us their feedback on notes attached to the frame they wanted to comment on.
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Brand Development
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The product development was now complete which further helped us venture into brand development. This entailed detailing out the brand essence, attributes, functional benefits, values as well as the branding guideline amongst others.
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Final Solution
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Introducing WearAbout
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Once the lo-fidelity mockups were tested, we improvised on the feedback given by our participants and designed a hi-fidelity prototype with all the necessary changes in accordance with the set brand language.
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