Service and Concept Design

Boks: Designing a service to facilitate circular economy and waste reduction

How might we facilitate the circular economy by providing an easy-to-access waste collection system?
Challenge / Brief

Zero waste is difficult, how might we encourage the adoption of zero waste?
Young consumers have awareness of zero waste but need in-time nudges and reminders to do so, and there is a large opportunities in the adoption of composting with negative perception towards the effort needed, and the underutilized facilities

Outcome

We created a vertical integration with meal kits to facilitate sustainable cycle of food waste and packaging waste in meal kits. A box, bag, and progress dashboard that encourages and reminds users to store the food waste and send them back for rewards

I owned and led
  • Generative research through in-depth interviews, contextual inquiries, and diary studies
  • Evaluative research through quasi-empirical evaluation, heuristics analysis, and expert review
  • Project management with the team
  • Creating artifacts such as personas, user journey, service blueprint, and evaluative research data to externalise knowledge and insights
  • Product visualisation (the box and the bags) with graphics assets created by teammates
I supported
  • Graphic design of the UI, boxes, and more
  • Presentation design
Methods, tools, and artifacts used
In-Depth Interviews
Contextual inquiries
diary studies
quasi-empirical evaluation
storyboard walkthrough
heuristic analysis
expert review
Figma
Miro
Maya
Personas and Mindset Segmentation
User Journey
Service Blueprint
Vision video of Boks. Credits to Quint Bailey, Lim Ing, Yeji Kim, Ren Fairley
Content in this page:
Vision MovieResearch Process and MethodsFinal Concept, Deliverables, and ArtifactsReflection

Research Process and Methods – Process Book

Final Concept, Deliverables, and Artifacts

Reflection

Learnings

  1. Improving my skills in facilitating diary studies, improving internal and external validity from the process of recruitment to post-study follow-up
  2. Improving my product visualisation skills which helps tell the story as well as showing users the product
  3. B2B2C market in meal kit services
  4. Human factors in affecting how the concept is used, functionally and emotionally

What I would do differently

1. Evaluate the return journey of the waste and consult logistics experts

The system is designed based on the assumption that it can be profitable by collecting the waste when the delivery person delivers the product. This is an unsafe assumption and we shall investigate further into the logistics of the return journey which usually is more costly than simple shipping.

2. Pivot and fail earlier

In the middle of the process, there are a lot of speculation by the team on whether or not the smart sorting bin concept would work, and we lost sight on the market research – People can barely afford a large, clunky smart bin that only sorts trash for you. We should have discussed the limitations of the concept before further developing them with assumptions and hypotheses that it will work.