Inclusive beverages
As part of the capstone course of the MMM program, we were placed on a team to conduct a design consulting project for a client company. I was lucky and honored to be placed on a team, working with an alcohol beverage company designing for those who have a disability.
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Biggest indicators of success: they want to use our learnings as a design checklist in their stage gate process across all brands.
I've included inclusive design as one of my core design principles.
Skills demonstrated/practiced
*product design
*inclusive design
*design thinking evangelization
Starting out
I was incredibly lucky to be placed on a team to work with ABinBev, focusing on their ready to drink and malt beverage brands, making them more inclusive for those with a physical disability.
This was our capstone project as part of the MMM program, given very little direction from the client and faculty, we were empowered to manage our project, manage our own budget and conduct project. While definitely scary to have the "training wheels' completely off, it had forced me and my team to follow our instincts and to just get started!
Empathizing
For such an important group of consumers my team went beyond using DScout and virtual interviews to source in person and diverse interview experiences.
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Our team started with some basic personal immersions to build our own empathy. We then created discussion guides and started conducting interviews.
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I really wanted to conduct in person interviews and led the charge with posting in slack groups, Instagram and even bravely approaching those in stores. We were even able to conduct a shop-along and drink-along- in context interviews helped beyond the standard interviews to understand consumers' unique experiences.
Working in a diverse team
With such diverse personal and professional backgrounds our group had great working tension. While we debated A LOT I always felt good that my team members were comfortable enough to push back and also offer their different ideas. Sometimes we would spend time working on our divergent ideas or using different methods, before arriving at the same conclusion. This enabled our team to have greater confidence in the diretction we moved forward in and allowed us all to understand each other better, by showing each other how we worked.
Articulating insights
We used our discovered journey map as a unifying framework for our insights and jobs to be done. The experience gaps, insights, and ideas all rested in the same two steps of the consumer journey map.
Attribute testing
With product innovation attribute testing is a key step before full on prototyping.
Key learning: We had too many variables that overwhelmed our interviewees, we needed to prioritize which attributes to narrow the field and cognitive load.
Prototyping
We were lucky to engage a visual designer to bring our combined attribute testing into 3 different prototype visuals. This helped bring our research, insights, attributes, and ideas into unifying visuals that helped our client see the possibilities of this work.