How might we help businesses reduce waste? — a product design case study
This is a case study I did over four days with two other designers, Adeeba Ahmad and Jaymie Constantino. This challenge was loosely based off of a product design exercise from WeWork.
“Design an application to help people reduce unnecessary waste. This must be done with technology that is available today or would be viable within 6 months.”
After making ourselves familiar with the prompt, our team decided to have a brief discovery workshop to try and understand the different moving parts to the problem as well as to consider the potential routes we could take to develop a solution. “Waste” is a very broad concept, so we decided that we needed to narrow our problem and focus on a more specific issue surrounding unnecessary waste. After a short brainstorming session, we chose to focus on designing a solution to help businesses reduce waste. We then each went off on our own to compile some secondary research on various aspects of business waste, looking to understand how and why it happens, as well as to identify business pain points and gaps in the cycle we could fill.
Key takeaways from secondary research
From our research, we learned that businesses in multiple industries across the world are throwing away millions of unsold/returned/old-yet-still-usable items each year. These items include books, toys, clothes, supplies, blankets, and electronics. Although we were not able to pin down the main cause as to why businesses discard their items rather than donating them, we found that some of their pain points included:
- They are trying to maintain brand reputation by keeping items out of the hands of secondhand merchants (this was mostly for clothing brands, but extends out to other industries as well)
- They don’t have an efficient way to get rid of the items outside of discarding them
- They found the cost of transporting items to be too expensive
Schools as a focus for donation
We learned that public school teachers in the United States spend approximately $479 per year on average (with the highest amount spent by an individual teacher reaching up to $1000) purchasing supplies for their students due to lack of resources. These teachers are not reimbursed for their purchases. In an article by The Washington Post, a middle school teacher named Becky Cranson stated that she shells out $1000 per year on supplies for her students, and also described herself as a “scavenger”, collecting soon-to-be discarded supplies and even furniture from friends’ and family’s workplaces.
Based on this information (and the fact that all donations to non-profit schools can be included as deductible charitable contributions on taxes), we chose to make public schools the primary focus of the receiving end of our business donation platform.
Narrowing the problem
After our research and brainstorming sessions, we further narrowed the problem we were trying to solve. Our new problem statement was more like this:
Design a platform that allows businesses to connect with schools to donate their unwanted, yet still-usable items.
Our proposed solution
In order to best solve this problem, our team came up with FillSchools: a web-based platform that allows businesses to offer items for donation and then matches their donation offer with schools that need them. The platform helps businesses by taking the thinking out of trying to find places to offload their unwanted items, as well as by keeping a record of all of their donations in the form of an itemized donation receipt that they can use for tax write-offs. The businesses can make arrangements for pickups/deliveries with any of their matched schools directly using our messaging feature.
Sketches
Once we had fleshed out our idea, we jumped into sketching to better visualize the screens of our product and to work out the details of our user flow, as well as to close any gaps in our idea. We ended up spending much more time trying to properly convey the ideas as sketches than actually designing the high-fidelity screens.
Going from sketch to high-fidelity
As our team was looking to complete this project in 4 days and we were already down to our last two, we decided to develop a very basic style guide to help us maintain visual consistency and move onto developing higher-fidelity screens of our application.
User flow for businesses
After signing up, business users would navigate from their home dashboard to their My Donations page. From this page, they could view the status and create new donation offers. Once they successfully added a new offer, they would be given a list of schools that match best (based on what that school needs and their distance from the business).
User flow for schools
After signup, schools would navigate to their My Requests page and create a new request. Once their new request is created, they would be matched with businesses that are offering products that best match the school’s requests (by category, title, quantity, and proximity of business).
Messaging between businesses and schools
Once a business is matched with a school, they can then communicate via our messaging platform to work out the details of the arrangement to transfer the items. Once they are done working out the details and the item is delivered, they would be able to confirm the transfer from the details page of the individual request or offer form (for schools or businesses, respectively).
The business dashboard
We saved the business dashboard for last, looking to better understand which pieces of information would be best to display to our business users on their central page. We tried a few different arrangements of information and eventually settled on an initial prototype.
In this dashboard, we display to the business user:
- The total value of donations they have made up-to-date
- The total number of items they have donated
- The total number of pounds they have been able to keep from going into landfills
- The status of their most recent donations
- A minified version of their itemized donation receipt with an option to view a full report
Next Steps
There are many steps our team would like to take to further refine our solution. We had to make a lot of assumptions when designing this solution due to time constraints and would like to go back and uncover the truth about some of our ideas through user research and testing. In order to do so, we would need the help of businesses as well as schools. We would also like to try to address the pain point of the transport of the items in a more helpful way. Maybe we could connect the businesses and schools with delivery services in their area and help them find the best rate for what they are looking to transport.
What do you think? How would you approach this challenge? What would you change about our product or our approach? Let me know in the comments below!
If you want to contact me, you can reach me on LinkedIn or my website.
You can reach Jaymie on Behance.
You can reach Adeeba on LinkedIn or her website.
Thank you for reading!
