Maid On Demand — A Design Thinking Case Study

It started with “how to spend some quality time in the kitchen” and ended up with “order a maid now!”

Introduction

Starting the second week of the UX mentorship program conducted by growthschool, the panel of mentors lead by Anudeep Ayyagari (UX Designer, Amazon) announced a task for us. In the first week (they call it week zero) we were asked to make a self-video intro, fill some forms, etc. that’s it. Now we need to do a long task? enna kodumai sir ithu?

We have been divided into groups and I was part of Group-22 along with Priyanka Doshi, Chaithanya Kasturi, Jayanth Kadiyam, and Ambuj Sinha. They are my teammates as well as my users! The problem I have been asked to solve was “Kitchen”! Other teammates got other rooms!

The essence of this exercise is to find the issues experienced by my Teammates related to the kitchen and make a solution using Design Thinking.

The Design Thinking

Let’s go and find out what Design Thinking is. Let’s ask our good friend Google. You will see there are hundreds of articles on Design Thinking, Some say Design Thinking is a mindset, some say it is an approach, and others say it is a methodology. Some say it has five steps, some say six. In the end, we are totally confused.

I think this is one of the easy to digest explanations of design thinking.

We are going to follow the 5 step version of design thinking.

• Empathize — Gain an empathetic understanding of the problem we are trying to solve.
• Define — Analyse the observations gained from the empathizing stage and synthesize them to define the core problems.
• Ideate — Creating ideas for innovative solutions.
• Prototype — Produce some inexpensive, scaled-down versions of the solutions we came up with.
• Test —Test the prototype with users.

It looks like Design Thinking is a linear process, however, in practice, the process is carried out in a more flexible and non-linear fashion. For example, the results from the testing phase may reveal some insights about users, which in turn may lead to another Ideate session or the development of new prototypes.

Let’s close our textbooks and do it

Preparations

Before diving into the ocean of Design Thinking, let’s do some homework. The first stage of the Design Thinking process is Empathise, which is nothing but understanding the user. Before we try to talk and understand our users (don’t forget they are our teammates) we need to find an area to focus on.

How to spend quality time in the kitchen?

Is this the correct area to focus on? Honestly, I don’t know. Anyway, let’s start by preparing some questions to ask our users, based on the area we focus on.

What kind of food do you like or prepare?

How often do you cook for yourself or for your family?

How much time do you spend in the kitchen daily?

What activity do you think is taking most of the time?

How much time do you spend in cooking?

How much time do you spend for cleaning?

Do you prepare fresh food daily or do you prepare it and keep for a long time?

What do you like the most in the kitchen?

What do you do not like in the kitchen?

Empathize

There is a famous quote about empathy; “Put yourself in their shoes”. This means nothing but you need to have a very good understanding of the user’s needs, likes/dislikes, pain points, etc. There are several methods to empathize with users. In the case of our problem “kitchen’, we can go and see how they do things in their kitchen, which will give us more understanding about our users and their actions. Unfortunately, this option is not available during this pandemic. We are going to do a zoom call with our users and talk to them and find out answers to the above questions (hopefully more than just answers)

User Interviews

This part was really fun, my teammates sorry users were really co-operative, and we had a nice conversation. Each session was about 30 min, in which, for the first 15 minutes my teammates will act as users, and for the next 15 minutes I will be the user for one of them.

Here is the summary of interviews

Define

After analysing the insight, we can conclude that people do not want to spend quality time in their kitchen, instead, they want to spend as little time as possible. but everybody needs fresh food!

So I made my Definition of the problem like this

People don’t want to spend time in the kitchen because of their busy schedule

As per the mentors, the problem definition I made is too broad to solve. When the problem is too broad, there will be a lot of dimensions to explore which will end up nowhere. They advised me to narrow down my problem statement.

I analysed the insight again and again and came up with multiple problem statements.

Supriya needs to cut the vegetables within minutes because she is new to cooking and she does not have much time to spend in the kitchen

Ambuj Sinha need a way to clean the cabins of the modular kitchen easily because those areas are difficult to reach and his maid is on vacation

Priyanka Doshi needs a specious kitchen because there is not enough room in her kitchen to fit all pieces of equipment and appliances

Jayanath Kadiam needs a nice dining area near to kitchen because he loves to chat with his mother while he is eating

Chaithanya Kasturi needs to prevent spilling the oil while she is frying because the oil makes the surroundings dirty and it is difficult to clean from hard surfaces

Supriya and Ambuj need a maid at a reasonable price. A part-time maid is also ok for them.

We cannot solve every problem of every user. We need to choose one or two. So the problem we are going to solve is

Working Professionals need a maid as and when they require at a reasonable price because of their busy work schedule.

and the other one is

People who are novice in cooking need to cut vegetables faster because it is the most time-consuming process for them.

Ideation

Ideation is nothing but finding the solutions for the problem. The method used is brainstorming. Don’t laugh, I brainstormed with myself and thought aloud. My wife and child thought something is really wrong with me.

The solutions that emerged out of the brainstorming are

· Desi Food Processor (Most food processor supports western styles of cutting)

· Full recipe ingredient kit (for example to prepare sambar; a kit which contains chopped vegetables, masalas, other condiments, and the recipe)

· Appoint a maid as and when required, from maid pool system (Uber for maids)

· Prepare food and keep for a long time

· Source food from outside

· Buy a robot which is capable of cooking and cleaning

· Use precooked / processed food

· Automated food preparation system (Like an assembly line)

- Initial Feedback

Before doing anything further let us discuss with our users the solutions we found. We had about thirty minutes of discussion about the solutions. The summary of that is

· There are food processors available in the market, even the one which is made in India will not serve the whole purpose of cutting all vegetables. Indians use a variety of vegetables and each of them needs to be cut differently.

· The full recipe ingredient kit is also available in the market, for eg. The Biriyani kit contains everything you need to cook Biriyani.

· Everybody needs fresh food; they do not really like to eat re-heated food.

· Swiggy, Zomoto, etc are very popular in various cities, they are serving the purpose of sourcing food from outside

· Buying a Robot is not practical because robots for cooking and cleaning is not available in India, also it may be very expensive

· Buy pre-cooked / processed food. In a country like India where there are no strict measures for food processing, people are concerned about its contents and quality

· Automated food processing line is also not a practical situation, the kitchen is a small place

· Everybody likes the idea of the on-demand maid booking system. We will do a prototype for this.

Prototyping

We are going to sketch this app on paper to get an idea about all the features we provide. This is a very cheap and effective way to understand and express the features of our solution.

First iteration

Second iteration

Final Wireframe

After a few iterations, the wireframe came out in good shape. because of the time limit, we created only two important pages; home and maid’s profile. The details of the final wireframe are as shown below.

Testing

Congratulations! we have made a solution that can be tested. Let’s go back to our users and find out their opinion about the solution we are planning to provide. All users were happy with the approach and they had given a rating of 5/5. The main suggestions/changes they requested are

· Ability to book the same maid

· Ability to book for many days together- like if my maid is going on leave for a few days I should be able to book the same maid for all the days in advance…

· Integration with my gate/ attendance tracking

· Background Verification of credentials and demographics (UID etc)

· Pay via UPI

· Filters (cooks veg/nonveg, cuisine North-South, etc, available timings, the charge per tasks ex dishes, cooking, floor cleaning, sweeping, washing clothes, etc/ elderly and infant care, medical care)

· Sort by rating, popularity, etc.

· Short video intro and bio

· Interview via video/conference call

· Register complaint

· Trust score: seek and give referrals for maids from Facebook friends

Summary

What is next?

The feedback users given was very valuable and interesting. But that does not fit within the scope of this task. Probably soon, we will take this project again and make all the suggestions and changes the users asked for. That time we will do more research, more iterations, more testing and we will have more fun.

Conclusion

We started with “How to spend quality time in the kitchen” and ended up with “Order a maid for now”. That is quite a transition. The Design Thinking approach helps us to really empathize with the users and find the right solution for them. This project really teaches us the importance of understanding users and gave insight that their problems are different than our hypothesis.

Along with you I really enjoyed every step of this task, even though this was an individual task within the group, the continuous collaboration with group members made it feel like an interesting collective task. I would really like to share my sincere gratitude towards my team members cum users. You guys are awesome.