Touchpoints and Candy Stores w/ Avanade

Team Members: Benjamin Frailey, Austin Johnson, Jingle Chen, Jen Nazareth, Jason Xu, Charlie Geraci, Emily Duh, Veronica Tsang

Time Frame: One Semester, Spring of 2020

Project Brief: The teams task, similar to the semester before, was to find a struggling industry and help them revitalize their product and presence through user experience design. We were specifically asked to look at Banking, Transport, Retail, and Entertainment as our possible industries, and were prompted to use IOT in the design

We worked with team Avanade under the Experience Studio from Purdue’s user experience major. We had two sponsors from Avanade, Jackson and Wais, who were great to work with and helped lead us through the project throughout the semester. We would report to them frequently, and have a meeting once every two weeks to discuss our progress and get their input. We also will be giving our final documentation to them.

Documentation:

Download it HERE

Scoping

To start scoping we look at what the team was interested to make sure we had a project every team member was engaged with and have fun with. This was something that was always important when working with Avanade, the passion that comes from having fun and how that improves your design process. From here we narrowed to down to retail, and then further to local retail stores. We then made a graph of which of these stores was most easily replaced by big box substitutes, and how well these stores were performing business. ONe that stood out was Candy Shops, and the team agreed that working with candy sounded like a great idea.

The graph used to see which of local stores had a lot of opportunity

Research

For Research we have done a lot of contextual inquiry. There were two local Candy shops just across the bridge in Lafayette, so we made multiple trips there. We also made a trip to CVS to see how the big box stores who sold candy differed from the local stores who were centered around candy. The main local store we focused on was McCords Candies, and it was a very interesting experience. Through Two visits there, one where we had an informal interview with the owners and one more where we were able to tour their candy kitchen and make our own lollipops, where were able to gather a few main Take-Aways:

The offseason is defined as March-October, where the store mostly relies on Custom Soda sales to stay afloat.
The on season (November-Febuary) is noted by increased revenue from Christmas and Valentines day, and the store will have many many kitchen tours to make candy canes during this time.
Customization of sweets and an insider view of the process was a big appeal both to the team and other customers
Unlike Big Box stores, this candy store relied a lot on tradition, community, and making each candy special.

Some Candies we made during our second visit to McCord’s

Ideation

For ideation, were first needed to further narrow down to what exact problem we wanted to help the Candy Stores face. Through many discussions and 3 rounds of group sketching we decided to focus on the stores’ off-season, and create experiences to help them sell candy during this time.

From this point one, we tried to focus on 4 main concepts that brought candy to the customer, and physically prototype all 4 of them during one sprint. However, due to Purdue’s response to the Corona Virus and the movement of classes online, we decided to cut the prototyping short (we had accomplished 2 prototypes at this time) and focus on the machine that we thought had the most potential; the Candy Vending Machine.