Week 1 (02/02–02/04)
For this first week, our group met together on Zoom for the first time to introduce ourselves, as well as go over our initial research and research method plans for the upcoming weeks. My group’s target population are seniors utilizing curbside and at-your-door grocery shopping experiences, which have definitely heightened during the Covid-19 pandemic. We discussed research methods to work on starting this weekend, which included:
- Making a grocery delivery service account — going through the process of learning and ordering groceries
- Case study interviews of delivery and curbside service users
- Observations (both curbside and in-store) — observe behaviors, barriers, demographics, time to utilize service or shopping
- Secondary research — finding articles and prior research done online
This weekend, I will be driving to a local grocery store and parking near the curbside pickup location to observe these experiences. I am aiming to find any useful information in demographics, how long it takes for someone to park, receive their groceries, and drive off, and the general process of using this service. I will also go inside the store to make further observations of actual shoppers in the target population and note any behaviors I can pick up on.
Week 2 (02/08–02/12)
For the second week, our group met outside of class to create our stakeholder maps. We ideated our own rough drafts before we met in order to get different ideas out there. This is what my rough draft looked like:
Then, we assigned each member of the group a customer persona to create. We thought of 5 different personas:
- Independent Senior Customer (64, Female)
- Homebound Senior Customer (90, Male)
- Caregiver of Older Citizen (32, Male)
- Daughter of Senior Adult (56, Female)
- Shopper/Delivery Person
During class today (2/11), we started brainstorming problems and solutions. First, we set a timer of 5 minutes and jotted down pain points that senior citizens may face with grocery services.
After this initial phase, we went over our ideas and categorized them:
After that, we went to the next phase of drawing ideas for solutions that we could think of in a 5–7 minute time span. These were some of my ideas:
We will definitely meet up again this weekend to start structuring our slides and discussing more solutions and pain points further.
Week 3 (2/12–2/22)
This week, our group mainly worked on getting our report and presentation slides together. We had a lot of information and research that we had gathered from the previous weeks and now needed to condense it. On the 16th, we gave preliminary presentations to the class and received/gave feedback to our peers. Some of the feedback that our group received was that some of the slides were text-heavy or information-heavy at times. We also learned that we should use pictures of real people for our personas as not to generalize or make any assumptions about how our personas should look. We went back and implemented a lot of the feedback that we received. We added more images, got rid of unnecessary text, replaced the persona drawings with images, and tried to keep the most relevant information.
Week 4 (2/22–2/26)
This week, our group wrapped up Project 1. We worked on writing and finalizing our report and making finishing touches on the presentation slides. During this project, I learned how to understand the target population of my target. Our group worked well on splitting work between the five members and were able to assign a different grocery service platform to each member. This allowed us to learn more and conduct extensive primary research, as opposed to if we had not looked into so many.
I also learned how to effectively brainstorm ideas and think freely and creatively. By setting a timer for five minutes and writing down any ideas that came to mind, I felt like I was allowing myself to think without constraints.
I also appreciated that I was able to work with Figma. I have never worked with this software before, and enjoyed being able to work with my group members on it. We were able to iterate ideas and collaborate on our ideas in this space. I will definitely be using this in my future and can see myself using this in my professional career as well.
Finally, I learned a lot about user-centered design and how to empathize with the target population. Especially during the pandemic today, being able to understand what people are going through is extremely important. I hope that I will be able to implement this thinking process into the upcoming projects in this class and my everyday life as well.