Role: Student UX Researcher and Physical Product Designer Team: May Phan, Krishna Suresh, Z Ren, Lauren Harrington, Isabel Raz-Guzman Project Sponsor: Procter & Gamble, Spruce line Fall 2024 This project is under NDA. Details have been omitted.
Designing a more low-effort, accessible way to keep the hardscapes tidy.
My group was tasked with creating a new, low-effort outdoor solution to envision the future of the #1 most disliked outdoor chore. Over the course of a quarter, we collaboratively conducted user interviews, user testing, created prototypes, and delivered a proposal to Procter and Gamble for our final. My primary focuses were user research, research synthesis, usability testing, UI design, label design, and creating the proposal video.
User Research
In-home garden visits and consumer on-site visits to understand test early ideas.
Toward the beginning of the process, my team collaboratively conducted 8 in-home consumer visits in the Chicagoland area to learn more about consumers' product needs, current habits, and the job to be done. We created discussion guides to prepare and afterwards, synthesized the feedback into an interview map, user journey, personas, 2x2 maps, and more in order to better understand and frame the problem.
In-home visit interviews
Following the in-home visits, embarked on brainstorming and receiving design critiques on potential solutions. To test usability and receive consumer input, we conducted two rounds of consumer visits - 16 interviews total, to better understand what features would work best together to create a more low-effort, time-saving gardening device. After each round, we synthesized through various frameworks including 2x2s, journey maps, and empathy maps to provide a base for brainstorming.
A consumer-site visit
A few research deliverables
Presenting some of our research findings to P&G folks during the midterm. (Better photo coming soon!)
Product Design
Creating a futuristic solution from scratch.
Something unique about this project was the openness of the prompt. We were given the freedom to explore a futuristic outdoor solution with minimal restraints, which gave us many possibilities to explore.
After a particular design review, we found an opportunity to pivot in our working style: to focus less on addressing everything at once and instead focus on giving ourselves a more specific problem space that we could tackle well, which helped greatly to find clarity in the design space.
How might we allow for this outdoor chore to be completed with ease while minimizing mental load for a diverse set of user age groups?
For our final design, we landed on an idea that would help users complete a dreaded household chore in the garden with increased control and safety, ease of muscle pain, increased efficacy, and less product waste.
Our team synthesizing to work toward a design direction
An early prototype of the interface I created (details omitted due to NDA)
Learnings
Learning collaboratively on an open-ended project with a fast timeline.
As the first course in our grad program, this project was filled with firsts. I had the opportunity to learn how to better collaborate and communicate with folks from diverse backgrounds, conduct research to narrow down a wide product space to a focused solution, and pivot on-the-go while going through the product design process for a 0->1 design in 2.5 months. My areas of focus in the group included user research, digital prototyping, graphic/presentation design, branding, and video editing.
At our final presentation at P&G headquarters in Cincinnati, Ohio, we had practiced storytelling, presentation, and communication skills when making our design pitch to P&G stakeholders. This was a great wrap-up to a learning experience filled with many aha's, valuable pivots, and exciting collaboration.
Our team (front row) and a few other classmates (back row) in the presentation room at P&G headquarters!
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