DISCOVER

OVERVIEW

For our project, we targeted the problems millions of Australians are experiencing whilst living in shared housing during the COVID-19 outbreak. Due to poor communication between housemates’ daily movements, there is a lack of trust, fear, and even resentment that has been fostering in Australian share-houses all over the country. Housemates are afraid to visit their parents or extended family and friends because they do not know how well their housemates have been following the social distancing guidelines. This holds a serious potential to create a negative environment between housemates.  Through my user research, I wanted to understand people’s attitudes, motivations and knowledge of social distancing in order to gain a better insight into how I can develop a product which reduces the stress and miscommunication our users where having within their environments. This project focused on the value, market and cost of a product.

DESIGN

OVERVIEW

We began to research and ideating a number of concepts that reflect our target market. Market and user segmentation was established allowing for initial brainstorming ideas to be explored than refined. We felt that each person within our group will make eight ideas both physical and interface products as a basic level of ideation. We then narrowed in on a selected few creating storyboards, competitor analysis, personas and decision matrices highlighting the strongest design choice.

Initial Research

Our initial research into the problem area centralised around several topic areas that would provide a holistic view of the current situation and how our business idea could successfully launch. By collating broad research into the problem area of COVID-19, we have been able to understand how different countries have responded to the virus through policymaking and innovation. This provided a strong overview of how our product and business will need to be able to adapt rapidly, as COVID-19 evolves. We also conducted research into existing stakeholders, user disruptors, organization disruptors, existing products and future predictions of the outbreak. Through this provided information, a broad target market was able to be identified.

Stakeholder Mapping

Due to the nature of this viral disease, CORE stakeholders include everyone. Meaning that all human stakeholders are responsible for mitigating the contagious behaviours and collectively bear the consequences. However, out of these stakeholders, specific roles may differ in the efforts to reduce the effects of COVID-19. People in lockdown, self-quarantine and remote workers are the largest portion of the population and people who are most affected and therefore listed as a CORE stakeholder. Whereas, authorities like public health professionals, police, and the government are DIRECT stakeholders as their decisions have strong influence on the actions that the CORE stakeholders need to take. Plus, retail workers and neighbours also serve as people that allow the community for CORE stakeholders to continue their livelihood. First indirect stakeholders include healthcare workers as the healthcare system depends on their capacity. Their decisions do not directly affect CORE stakeholders unless they have been related to the COVID infections.