2. Little Choices
Human Computer Interaction Institute, Service Design Course / Spring 2019
My team made up of Kevin Seelaus, Ashwin Rao, and Han Shi focused on the role of political consumerism can be tied to a grocery shopping experience. My role was pushing the concept development, wire framing, working out kinks in the prototype clickthrough order, and a high focus on the delivery and narrative of the pitch to the investors.
The Digital Service Innovation course taught us much about the history and origin stories of digital services along the likes of Twitter, Airbnb, Uber, etc. In talking about products vs. services and the difference between S-D Logic and G-D Logic (from behavioral economics), we learned about the drivers for product management shifts and how ecosystems of users/actors can participate in "co-creating value".
The final product is Little Choices, an app we pitched to real life investors who came in to play the role for an end of semester demo. Little Choices is a huge conversation starter, question raiser, and a beacon of hope for people who struggle with the paradox of having too many choices and options. Our concept gives a first look at how consumer behavior can add up to helping with the climate change. Let's say you're in a grocery store, you need items and you have a list on your phone but the list in in our app and you get rewarded when you pick brands that are leaders in CPG sustainability, CSR, and participating in ethical production such as fair trade.
You have an index at the tip of your fingers that helps you decide what to buy and what will work for your lifestyle. Is reducing your plastic use or slowing your meat consumption a goal?
Great, you can get rewarded for those choices.
The team I worked with held the fundamental belief that our industries and economics need to change in order to accommodate more sustainable growth and more health for people.
Our target market was folks who may already have access to resources and disposable income but were looking for an app to help them with conscious capitalism. We created a conceptual app that allows you to edit the algorithm directly, for what you care about and the scope of products in the database are there to empower consumers and producers/creators. In the flowchart below, there are suspicious pieces of unresolved questions, marked in gray dots in the map. For example, "Trust Data?" — "Verify?" — "Cupon Club?" — "Publicize Activity" these are all product decisions that would have to be expanded upon later on.
We pitched to 8 real investors who were allotted $1M (of fake money) each. Our app reached in the top 2 of apps presented.