Get into the customer’s brain

By Tabea Estermann March 19, 2017 Discover ShuQi project

In the last weeks the interaction design (Julia) and business (Tabea) tried to get into our future consumer’s brain to understand what they think and feel. This is of great relevance since we need to design the user journey as well as the Value Proposition that responds to real jobs and pains/gains related to the completion of these.

We found out that the initial idea to target students, who don’t want to forget their school material, wasn’t the perfect fit. Instead we will focus much more on packing items and being stressed about forgetting something.

One of the key findings is that most people do not have a fixed schedule and therefore would not need different packing lists for different days. Our initial idea to connect the application to the calendar would not only technically be very difficult, but also of little use to our customers.

From the interviews we learned further that people are not only concerned about taking everything with them if they go somewhere, but even more that they take everything back home, when they return. We didn’t think about this before. For this reason we will consider a function in the application that does not only provides lists to pack but also can provide you on one click with a screenshot of all items in your bag. This “screenshot” can be used when returning back home to check if all is packed again.

Another insight we got, is to open up the application as well for items, which are not market with a particular tag, but are useful to be on the list. There could be three kind of different items in a list:

  • Items that are tagged and can be measured by the central device
  • Items that are not tagged, but can be checked off, when packed
  • Things to do before leaving (turn off heating, unplug computer)

Another insight was the fact, that there are not only things we should take with us, when we go somewhere, but also things we should NOT take, such as cigarettes or documents from another meeting.

Having designed the idea at this point, it becomes relevant to talk about the Business Model which could be around the product. One additional option we could consider is to put a lot of emphasis on the application, which helps you to organize your life better and more efficient with different lists and offer the product in the application as an quasi “in-APP purchase”. This would completely change the channels, since there would be no brick and mortar stores, but only the application. Most of the marketing expenditures in this model would therefore go into the app and app store optimization, as well as targeted adds in other apps and in app stores, as well as app blogs.

The more we talk to people, the more ideas we get on how to shape our product and the services around it.