An important part of the design thinking process is the defining phase. In this stage, you are explicitly expressing the problem that you are taking on and that you aim to address. For our semester long project, my teammates Kaylee, George, John, and I are focusing on beauty products sold by Johnson & Johnson. We took a look at the pains and gains of our target customer named Sheila Bentley, a Cali mom that doesn’t spend enough time on herself and wants to purchase from a trusted yet sustainable brand. We noticed some problem areas for the brand. First, Johnson & Johnson is mainly sold in brick and mortar retail locations. The problem that they are facing here is that they are not maximizing outreach to customers. Our team wants to know how might we increase customer loyalty to Johnson & Johnson through a subscription based option. The second problem area was desirability, the degree to which Johnson & Johnson products are desired and wanted by new and existing consumers. However, with some of the company’s subsidiary brands such as Aveeno selling lotions in large bottles, the packaging is not entirely convenient. How might Johnson & Johnson adapt their products in a sustainable way to meet the needs of an on the go consumer? Third and very importantly is transparency and how accurately and clearly Johnson & Johnson discloses the process, ingredients, use, and materials used from start to finish. The company itself does a good job discussing the safety of their ingredients used, however they face a problem with packaging. How might we design a packaging that provides effective sustainability insights?
This class activity was an interactive one and a fun one that I really enjoyed. It got my team up and moving and made us think creatively. I like that we used sticky notes which really helped us organize our ideas into categories so we weren’t overwhelmed with various random thoughts all across our wipe off board. Coming up with how might we statements for areas we saw had room for improvement was the easier part of the assignment for us. What we really struggled with and found to be challenging is when we tried to narrow it down for over 35 HMW statements to just 3 or 4. Everyone thought their ideas were important and we didn’t want to just simply overlook any sticky notes. We grouped similar sticky notes and tried to choose one that best represented the group so we didn’t have sticky notes with repeat HMW statements on them. But even this seemed to be a challenge for my group. We also wanted to keep our target customer Sheila in mind throughout the whole process. We kept wondering well does this statement apply to Sheila or someone else? Our group even stayed after class to continue narrowing down the sticky notes. I found the exercise to be really useful. I began to see a lot of potential Johnson & Johnson has to fix these problems through the design thinking process which will allow them to expand as a sustainable company.