Flovi

Design thinking is a process that revolves around desirability, viability & feasibility. This project was a creation using the process that was desirable to the users, feasible to implement, & viable to produce. The project involved our team to disrupt the florist industry by coming up with a service/product.

Group: Alexander Luksep, Francesco Ducci, Fredrik Liljeqvist, Helen Broman, Jessica Ugander, Margarita Shchetinina, Yash Todar

Overview

The course offered by Stockholm School of Entreprenuership and was taught by Julien Mauroy & Ronald Jones, who both are from Stanford’s D.School. The project brief was to come up with a solution either for or against Florists, either helping them to sell more or entirely disrupting their industry using a service based or a product based approach.

Along with my team of other 6 people, we decided to take the “against“ route. The overall process followed the design principles of Design Thinking & User Centred Design.

Stages

About Journey

As getting data & understanding our users, stakeholders & non-users was a beginning step, we decided to go through the processes of shadowing, interviewing & jotting down the points on them. This helps us to empathize truly for whom we were designing.

This is also an important stage for DT process. One of the vital things to follow. 
After analysis of our gathered data, we wanted to understand the problem & define the solutions which were to be prototyped later on. Before we even prototyped, we had a pre-prototyping session where we even imagine how the prototype would be. We tested the prototypes twice in real-world settings.

As we were working in a very diverse team which had various backgrounds such as engineering, business, design, psychology & research, while coming from other countries like Russia, India, Sweden, Italy-it only added strengths to the brainstorming sessions & the entire journey to get new ideas.

Empathize

Empathizing is quite important in DT, as we discover certain insights that help us to shape the idea & solutions for their use. DT’s major insights & discoveries comes from observations, shadowing users & walking in their shoes while they experience or use a product/service.

We interviewed regular florists, some hotels who keep flowers for decoration purposes & also users, non-users who would either love to buy/gift flowers or be allergic/not like to buy/give flowers, across Stockholm

This was necessary to see the different answers & level of affection/hate for flowers/florists. This helped us to compare answers & other data points needed to proceed in the definition stage.

Two of our groupmates did shadowing, to gather more data on our users & the florists. We wanted to know specific usage & what were the motivations to purchase or not purchase flowers.

Collecting all the data helped us to come up with an experience curve that defined certain emotions & moods of the user when they go through the process of buying flowers/gifting flowers. This helped us to understand the different aspects of the emotions an user would go through, visually.

Experience Curve

Define

The aim in this stage was to identify meaningful patterns in the data that existed.
Once we found that we begain categorising them, clustering them & also gathering the most important insights/discoveries together. Based on this process, we created our Persona & the POV(Point of View Statement).

Story Share

We started with story­sharing our interview in order to form a joint understanding and to high­light the important take­aways from the interview. Two people wrote down important factors on post­its while one person was sharing the interview. We then discussed the most important factors in order to find duplicates. We went through the extreme users, stakeholders, a normal user and a non­user.

• Light green: Current user (Emmelie, 24 years old, student)
• Yellow: Non­user (Katarina, 26, event­ director)
• Blue: Extreme user (Companies: Vapiano and Fisk)
• Pink: Stakeholder (Company: Makalösa Blommor)
• Green: Stakeholder (Company: InterFlora)

Clustering

After the story­share we categorised the post­its into different clusters. The cluster we identified were: Delivery from florist, Customer­florist relationship, Operational tasks for florists, Decision process, Purpose of purchasing flowers, Freshness and quality

We then voted on three postits each and decided which of the post­its that were the most relevant problems and insights. In the end we decided upon three post­its in total.

Need, Problem, Insight Matrix

We then headed to do the needs, problems, and insight matrix to figure out dependence between people's’ needs & insights. We then analyzed the matrix & tried to identify the most important problem. We also did a Venn­diagram in order to view the identified problems from a different angle. We based the Venn­diagram on the biggest areas from the clustering.

The areas where: Quality/freshness, Human aspect, & Delivery/to bring home.

Final POV

The choice of the final POV:

• “Kim, a 28­year old business analyst at SEB, would like to decorate her home with flowers, but doesn’t have the time nor the knowledge of buying and taking care of them.”

Persona Creation

Background

­

She is the primary persona, who is ambitious & focused on her career. She is outgoing & is curious to try out different things in her daily life. ­Kim is strong­willed & organized, she is sociable & cares about her friends and family, which in combination with her organizational skills makes her appear as very reliable & dependable.­ She finds it difficult to relax and express her emotions, despite being an extrovert.

Personal Goals

She wants open a consulting business at a later stage in her life. She is also interested in art, she wants to open up an art gallery too. She has a need to be in a good social standing, which may sometimes lead to neglecting her own needs. She dreams about having a family­ life in the future.

Attributes

She admires the small things in her surroundings, as she is always surrounded by the stressful environment of her work. She thinks that life can be led as per one’s choices & she wants to be in total control of her life. Sometimes she become a bit depressed, & she therefore needs something that can help her get in a better mood.

Ideate

We started with the How Might We questions that helped us to come up with a lot of ideas. From these ideas, we chose the final 3 ideas & then built upon those, finally choosing 1.

How might we?

Ideation started from the previously designed Persona & its Point of View, & it's aim was to come up with several hypothetical products which may hopefully improve her user experience. The whole phase revolved around a very simple questions :

• How might we amp up the good part of our Persona's experience?
• How might we provide an quicker access to the knowledge of flower care?
• How might we make owners easier to take care of?

Prototype 1

Pre-totype

We learnt this technique called Pre-totyping where we prototype the prototype in a dirty manner to understand some basic concepts, context & how well we can move ahead without having an actual product/service to use but try & get behaviour patterns, thinking & ideas about the future versions of the prototype.

We had a plastic cut of the pyramid shape, that we used as the pretotype & enacted as if it was the first prototype to understand what all interactions can happen with it.

DT says that prototyping shall be as fast & cheap as possible to understand the value of the idea/service/product. As it also creates a feedback loop back to us, it was just a “role-play“ & aimed at the users to understand if they understood or knew what the product was & how would they perceive it.

Testing Part 1

We firstly did an informal pilot study within our group, after doing that we wanted to understand how would the users react to this & hence we wanted to test it with the real user, who here is non-flower person.

We also wanted to test the viability of the prototype, this helped us to catalyze the insights for the another user & use case.

The feedback we collected were on the positive side such as, it is intrinsic to see & it was “really cool” to have a device/product which projects hologram. “Its a bit faded, maybe the light has to adjusted”

Despite the feedback, we found ourselves stuck not knowing how to evaluate more deeply the desirability of our product. This was a great step to be stuck at cause, knowing this we enhanced the prototype & also the use case.

The next step came after a consultation with our professor and coach, Julien, who suggested us how the prototyping of the experience is more important than the prototyping of the product itself. This was a positive for us, cause we understood the process in a better manner.

Prototype 2

After gathering feedback & having a short presentation about the journey so far with our coach, we decided to improve the prototype for the final user testing & presentation.

We researched how we could make the prototype more functional & better performing. We did some research about which materials could be used to make the reflecting of lights brighter & found out that used CD-Cases would be an alternative to plastic transparent paper.

Once again, we decided to brainstorm & built a smaller version of the prototype 2 & pilot tested it within our group in different surroundings, lightings & use case.

Testing Part 2

This was the second prototypes test phase. We wanted to prototype the experience too this time & hence, we wanted to be in a real setting & environment that would help us to understand the desirability & feasibility of the prototype.

Comments about the prototype

• "Let me take a picture of it! - Emilio
• "Oooops ... someone is calling me, I need to take the phone !
• Francesco: "I can't see the ower anymore !- Nico
• "It's a bit small ... let me let me see it up close !- Riccardo

A desirability test is something quite unorthodox that went quite positive we felt.

Conclusion

This project taught me a lot regarding how to design & come up with products/services that would be useful or not be useful in the field of design.

The crucial things this taught me was to always refine & re-iterate the prototyping experiences not only for the product, user testing but also for the DT process & procedures itself. This has been a strong learning point for me & my group.

Teaching about how testing could also just not be about the product/service but it could also be about testing the testing experience too. As DT prototyping focuses on insights & learnings, while HCI testing is mostly about usability.

Since DT has less restrictions than HCI, it has been widely used in Innovation strategies & to come up with lot of ideas (Quantity wise as well as Quality wise), this has given me a strong point over the value of user research, testing at different angles & prototyping efficiently.

Learning outcomes: Design Thinking is a powerful tool to understand & gain insights about users perspective on products or services, Teamwork is important, Pre-totyping concept & different stages of testing (desirability, feasibility, viability)