Project 1: Understanding design opportunities
and creating concepts

Week 1

How can we help senior citizens better utilize curbside pickup and grocery delivery services in the age of the pandemic?

Our project started out by understanding the current context and situation that senior citizens are currently facing. In our discussions, we listed out some of the existing services such as Instacart or Amazon Whole Foods, and began researching their user’s experience. Our research methods included case studies, interviews, observing the processes of delivery and curbside pickup, as well as making accounts for each of the services and placing orders for delivery/pickup.

Week 2

For the second week, we started mapping out the different stakeholders involved in for our problem. We included family and caretakers of senior adults, delivery people and personal shoppers, as well as the corporate retailers that people generally shop from.

We also talked through some of the major pain points of our problem that senior adults could encounter throughout the process. We then mapped the problems out and grouped them into categories that we could address with our solutions.

Finally, we sketched out some possible solutions. Here are some of mine:

Week 3

As our final presentation approaches, our group started to compile our research and solutions into a single report as well as develop more refined solutions and frameworks using the ideas we brainstormed in the previous week. Here are some screenshots of our updates and preliminary presentation:

There’s definitely a lot more work to be done to refine our presentation, but I’m excited to see where it goes!

Week 4

Based on the comments we got from our preliminary presentation, we updated our presentation and presented for our final. Looking back on the project, I greatly appreciate the human centered approach of designing a new grocery shopping experience. Despite the struggles of being in a pandemic, and not being able to actually interview or talk to many senior adults, I felt that we were able to dig deep into a lot of the problems that they could encounter. Even though some of our solutions weren’t completely feasible, it was fun to ideate and come up with things that were out of the box.

Ultimately, I think this project was great for me to re-evaluate my own design process and how I approach problems in general. Understanding the problem has to be centered on the audience. Without seriously taking their perspective into account, it’d be impossible to design something meaningful.