This is part 1 in my 3-part series on using the techniques of human-centered design to solve a pressing problem.
Remember when you were a child and you got excited by anything new? In the Discovery phase, we embrace this ‘fresh eyes’ perspective. We observe people's lives, hear their hopes & desires and explore new possibilities for design. Insights arising out of this phase are core to the HCD process as they are grounded in human needs.
The most fundamental mindset here is Empathy. By putting ourselves in the feet of those we are designing for we see the world through their eyes, understand their pain points & motivations. We use a range of research techniques like in-depth interviews, card sorting, photo journals, observations supported by targeted questions to uncover the human truth and the unmet need underlying that truth.
To illustrate this process, let me give an example of a project my teammates and I worked on. Our challenge was to come up with a solution to reduce food wastage in our local community (i.e. Sydney). To kick off the ‘Discovery phase’ we conducted initial desktop research and spoke to our own communities, family, friends and co-workers to get a deeper understanding of their daily routine, shopping habits and likelihood of wasting food.
Industry experts like the CEO & Founder of OzHarvest, Ronnie Kahn, enlightened us with attitudes underlying the issue of food wastage in Australia and the magnitude of the issue. We realised there were several organisations tackling what we called ‘organisational’ food wastage (e.g. food waste produced by restaurants, hotels & offices). But what about household food wastage?
We learnt that households in Australia throw a staggering $8 billion worth of edible food as waste every year. Moreover, in greater Sydney alone, households spent around $1,036 a year on food that is consequently wasted. This means for every 4 shopping bags bought by each shopper, 1 perfectly good shopping bag gets tossed out to the trash.
To dig deeper, we conducted observations and in-depth interviews with people across a wide spectrum (Young professionals, students, couples, families with kids). We visited the 3 major supermarkets in Sydney (Coles, Woolworths and ALDI) to observe shopper behaviour and spoke to them about their shopping habits.
These shopper intercepts were followed by a telephone interview and in-home ethnographies where people showed us how they stock their groceries and spoke about their meal planning attitudes.
Armed with heaps of qualitative findings, we built an empathy map to bring life to our learnings from consumer research. An empathy map is typically split into 4 quadrants: (What people are Saying, Thinking, Doing & most importantly how they are Feeling)
We uncovered key human insights contributing to the issue of food wastage:
1. Lack of accurate food planning: People tend to shop for groceries quite sporadically and weren’t making shopping lists before going shopping. This led them to purchase more than what they would realistically consume.
2. Over-estimating how much you will eat: As the popular saying goes, ‘your eyes are bigger than your stomach.’ In a social occasion (e.g. house parties, Chinese New Year celebrations) the ‘social price’ of not having ‘enough’ food was so high that people wanted to avoid that scenario at all costs. Not having enough food was tantamount to not being a good host/hostess.
3. Leftovers are unappealing: People start out with good intentions, but then become too busy to make use of all the fresh food they buy. There is a general cavalier attitude to fresh food, combined with a voracious appetite for takeaway food and eating out. The plethora of choices Sydney-Siders have at hand further motivates this behaviour.
4. Supermarkets don’t cater to the needs of young adult single-person households: Many staple products (e.g. bread, milk) are sold in large packs which are sometimes too much for 1-2 adults.
4. Different perceptions of ‘food freshness’: People had different ways of estimating how long fresh food lasts and their estimates were not always accurate. As a result, select items that were perfectly safe to eat were being trashed. There were several online resources addressing this problem of ‘lack of knowledge’ on food storage (e.g. Foodwise)
We then synthesised our findings using affinity mapping to highlight what people’s key pain points (fears, frustrations, obstacles) and gain points were (wants, needs, measures of success).
Going through this process helped us cluster common themes & prioritise insights that reflected the true reality of a grocery shopper in Sydney which consequently led to food wastage:
1. Social & Work commitments takes precedence over grocery shopping/meal planning.
2. People overestimate how much they can eat at one point in time.
3. It is convenient to freeze leftovers but unappealing to re-use them.
These insights led us to craft opportunities for design in a format that IDEO popularised called ‘How-might-we….’.
More on that in Part 2: Ideation
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