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 product. Over the course of a quarter, we conducted user interviews, user testing, created prototypes, and delivered a proposal to Procter and Gamble for our final.
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 to learn more about consumers' product needs, see their current outdoor situations, and observe them tackling the job to be done. To prepare, we prepped discussion guides and afterwards, synthesized the feedback into an interview map, user journey, personas, 2x2 maps, and more in order to better understand the problem we were trying to solve in our design phase.
Following the in-home visits, we conducted two rounds of consumer visits - 16 interviews total, to better understand what features would work together to create a more low-effort, time-saving gardening device. After each round, we synthesized the information to help brainstorm design ideas.
In-home visit interviews
A consumer-site visit
Our team presenting 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 a lot to explore.
After a particular design review, we had an opportunity to pivot in our working style: to focus less on addressing everything 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.
We are currently in the process of deciding on a final solution that meets the project brief and makes the task easier for users. We are working collaboratively to create prototypes to present along with our product pitch at P&G headquarters in Cincinnati, Ohio in early December.
We're still working on the design, but here's a photo of our team! From left to right: myself, Krishna Suresh, Z Ren, Lauren Harrington, Isabel Raz Guzman
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, gain experience with physical product design and prototyping, conducting research to narrow down a wide product space to a focused solution, and pivoting on-the-go. Another challenge was going through the product design process for a 0->1 design in 2.5 months, but from this I was able to learn quickly and fix mistakes as I went.
At our final presentation, we had the opportunity to further practice our storytelling, presentation, and communication skills when presenting our design pitch. Overall, it was a learning experience filled with many aha's, valuable pivots, and excited collaboration.
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