Overview

IIT Institute of Design partners with the Innovation Strategy Center of Far Eastern Group, the biggest retail group in Taiwan, to create future shopping concepts for Millennials and showcase the application of user-centered design methodology in business context for FEG management.

The Millennials' shopping behavior is changing rapidly. The current shopping space isn't designed for their needs. To address this issue, my team conducted user research, insights generation and created a journey map and scenarios which intersect user needs and FEG's business strategies by looking at the technology five years from now.

User research

After 2 weeks of 15 field observations and 14 user interviews, we clustered our findings and framed insights around the Millennials' shopping behaviors. Then we created personas based on the combination of insights, and used "how might we" statements to generate ideas that address the Millennials' needs. 

Who are the millennial shoppers?

Interview Participants

Define target audience

We identified two crucial factors in defining the Millennial shoppers, one is their attitude toward product price (low sensitivity to high sensitivity), and the other is their buying behaviors (directed to explorative). We found Far Eastern Group's stores are sitting in lower price sensitivity side, so we decided to target on the audience in the two quadrants circled by the green box. 

Persona

insights on How they shop

ideal Scenario for the millennial shoppers

My team established a framework by using user shopping journey to map out the critical elements including people, objects, environments, messages, and services(p.o.e.m.s). This framework allowed us to evaluate our ideas and integrated them into a set of meaningful shopping experiences.

Space prototype

Business criteria 

To effectively communicate our concept with FEG management team, the proposal must also align with business criteria. My team created design principles which intersect customer and business criteria and work as an evaluation guidance for distilling ideas. We also used activity system, and value web to map out the critical elements and pivot points to realize our final concept. 

demo day

Our team

This project would not have been completed without the instruction of professor Martin Thaler and Anijo Mathew, and the collaboration with my teammate Mai Saito and FEG's innovation team, Jeff Hsu and Monica Lee.