As a part of the onboarding process for Communitech, all the new interns took part in a 4-day innovation basecamp focused on ideating a solution to a problem. The basecamp was introduced with the means of practicing design thinking through spending each day focusing on a different stage of the design thinking process. Our team was our co-workers at RCAF, so we entered this challenge with 2 product managers and 2 software developers.
<aside> 💡 The challenge we were presented with was to design a solution which would improve the retail self checkout process at Trader Joe’s. The process we followed was to first prepare for and conduct user interviews, create user personas and stories, and creating the prototype.
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Understanding the Current Self-Checkout System
To better understand the problem space of our design challenge we started by going through self-checkout at a local grocery store to experience the system first-hand.
We also conducted 2 virtual user interviews with adults from the Kitchener-Waterloo area who had recently gone through a self-checkout to learn about their experiences and decision-making factors for using one as well as any pain points.
From these interviews, we gathered everyone’s experiences and mapped them out on an affinity map. Then on this map, we grouped together similar insights to clearly identify identical clusters of information.
We also created personas to empathize with our users and better understand for whom we are making this app.
With these insights into the experiences of our users and a better understanding of the problem space we defined and refined our problem statement:
<aside> ⚠️ How might we create a faster self-checkout experience by making purchasing produce more intuitive?
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When it came to ideating solutions, we did a crazy 8’s activity which consists of drawing out 8 different possible solutions in 8 minutes. This activity was done to get us to think innovatively and push us to think of creative possibilities. With 4 people doing this activity, we actually got 32 ideas! We then all presented our best ideas and then combined them into a final solution.