Creating a New Design Language for Digital Transformation

OVERVIEW

As a service provider to the mass market, our client faced the challenge of innovating based on broadly-defined consumer segments – Young People, Young Families and Older Families. It was imperative that our client profiled its customer segments in greater detail in order to create products and services that better address the unique needs of each segment.

With this intent in mind, they approached Heist to research and develop comprehensive user personas from these consumer segments, highlighting the lifestyle, motivations, aspirations, values and stressors of each segment. The research would help our client gain fresh perspectives and insights into a market that they were familiar with to inspire new design directions for future product innovation and development.

Heist first presented these user personas to the client’s design team. The personas were brought to life again during a large scale Customer Immersion Festival that was open to teams from several functions across the company. During this festival, participants were immersed in the stories of the 3 user personas, supported by multimedia content and physical artefacts that were meaningful in the lives of these personas.

PROCESS

The Heist team recruited and spoke to a total of 22 people for this project, with approximately 7-8 respondents representing each of the 3 consumer segments. The respondents were carefully selected to represent the ethnic diversity in Singapore and well-distributed across the age spectrum. We also made sure there was a good mix of Singaporeans with interesting profiles, on top of the regular Singaporean, to curate a holistic view on the life and needs of an average Singaporean while being inspired by those who are less conventional.

Interviews were held in a conversational style, assisted by design probes to help us delve deep into their ambitions, pain points, dreams and core values, in order to better understand the motivations that drive their decision-making process.

At the end of the research phase, we ran a one-week intensive synthesis where we created 3 User Personas to be shared with the client’s design team as well as cross-functional teams from the client’s organisation during the Customer Immersion Festival. In addition to a detailed presentation, artefacts collected alongside ethnography were showcased in an exhibition-style layout and provided a physical representation of the storytelling. A short film was also created to showcase impactful quotes from various respondents to enhance our client’s immersion in the lives of the 3 key Singaporean segments.