Retale
Mama shops in Singapore are gradually declining in the market. To be able to enhance how it's being received, we need to look into innovative ways to facilitate this decline and make a receptive change towards how the public shop at local mama shops.
Phase one teammates:
Syahidah, Givson,
Foxin
Roles
Research, Design,
Prototyping
Research phase
Phase one of the project requires us to find out about how mama shops function as we are expected to apply our findings onto the future experience of our mama shop design.
What was discovered?
Without any validations, these are essentially keywords from our assumptions. We knew that they are a mere adjective to describe the overall elements that are unique to each type of stores. Thus, to be able to move forward, we need to begin conducting in-depth interviews to discover what people think.
Using a venn diagram, we mapped out the values of mama shops and the game-changing vendcafe.
Phase two quickly ventured into research planning. With the time we were granted for this brief, we sat down to sort out where and how we should proceed with the project to conduct on-site screening and interviews with the residents.
Using the above mentioned to frame our research, we came out with a framework for our project approach:
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Desk research
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Write down things to clarify
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Come out with research objectives and questions
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Site-visit #1
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Consult, rebound and revisit
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Analyse data and link details
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Be honest and understand the what is our research bias (*It's not possible to be unbiased)
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Communicate ideas and observations
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Continue to revisit the site to look at possible details
Phase three of the project comes down to the venue selection. From some desk-research, we figured that Telok Blangah was a good area to conduct our immersion and research due to it being an old estate that had been around for many years.
Phase four helps to better the understanding of the overall environment and how the existing mama shop function, it is important for us to conduct a few sets of observations to understand the tangible things behind how the store functions within the community. Using the designed environment: POEMS, it assisted us in deriving prospect findings from our observations.
What was extracted?
The initial take on POEMS was done with the correlated elements and findings. The hand-outs were in tables and seemed overly structured which inspired us to challenge the display of information into an infographic manner.
Phase five challenged us to immerse into the resident's way of life. With mere observation alone, it is difficult to understand the values behind how the user experience is conducted. Thus to be able to look into the intangible aspect of this experience, Journey Mapping is the approach we took to have a better understanding of our users and the store experience provided.
Phase six is when we are slowly getting the jist of is the experience in mama shop like. To assist us further in developing a proposal that matters, we designed 4 personas to help us prioritise the research better. The assumed profiles assisted us to stay on track and understand who are the users we are looking for when it comes to this research.
Journey mapping
After creating our four personas, we went on to further humanise our personas with an emotional journey map. This helps to establish a better emotional connection to bridge the practicality of the designed profile.
Phase seven brought the team to highlight various mama shop qualities that were brought up by the users. Using the Value Proposition Canvas, it helped us to understand what are the key expectations from the residents.
Phase seven quickly immersed into user interviews with people who resembles / shares similar qualities with our personas.
Our research objective:
To validate the assumption of our personas and their thoughts about a futuristic mama shop.
Our interview questions:
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What do you feel about having e-payment in store?
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What if you paid a certain amount of money monthly, we will do delivery to your door-step on a specific day of a week?
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How would you feel if the mama shop changes its overall concept?
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Have you shopped at any other shop besides this mama shop? If yes, why so?
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How would you feel if this mama shop doesn’t exist anymore/close-down?
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How would you feel if this entire mama shop becomes automated?
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How do you think mama shop will be like in 10 years’ time?
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How do you think mama shop will be received in 10 years’ times?
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What do you think is the key value of a mama shop?
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What are the things you can find in mama shop but not anywhere else?
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What do you think about having additional services offered at the mama shop? (Such as buy from home and self-collect in-store later?)
Synthesising the findings
Going through their interview transcript, as a team, we managed to retell their stories to find out what types of consumers they are.
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Highlighted part mentioned: "In the end, we have to see if everything is convenient or not."
To be able to validate our initial assumed personas, we ended up having to closely analyse each content, and look at what each and every data collected meant. We highlighted key defining quotes that either challenge our assumptions or supported our assumptions to make our persona more authentic for this research project.
Phase eight prompted us to revise our initial personas and authentic it by validating with the findings we got from our user research.
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Phase nine wrapped up the first part of the design brief's timeline, all the information were neatly collated onto our research journal for easy browsing.
1. Retale
Genius Loci was used as an observation method towards how people move around and compare the different habits in approaching a venue.
Application of Genius Loci:
It helps the team to generate ideas using the opportunities in the space to create moments for the people. The approach of holding people in space, allow admiration of space to happen all these things needs to be considered during the designing phase to encourage an increase in the density of people interacting with space.
4 scenes were used to look at how might we utilise the space we were given to re-design the mama shop.
Service blueprint helped us to make sense of our opportunities and whether it made sense before we start to prototype the space. The scene gets defined with what will be in the space, what can be included and what roles it played. This methodology also helps to address what happens next if something goes wrong or the number of people a space need.
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Walkthrough prepared ourselves for the scaled-up walkthrough, sketches were done to help us better visualise our proposed design.
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Co-creation made us brought the prototype and visited the site to talk to people about our proposed design. They show interest in wanting to elevate the current experience of the mama shops and gave us constructive feedback such as thinking the existing tables was a bit of a hassle to include in the given space.
Decisions made?
We decided to remove the tables in our stores as our users felt that although it's good to have community engagement touchpoints in a shopping experience at a mama shop, these engagements should not be too time-consuming, as we learnt that residents do not have the luxury of time to actually spend a definite amount of time at mama shop, and it can disrupt the spatial flow and experience of the store because of the store's spiral dimension.
Video production and the final design
Medium of communication
Designing is the easy part, but communicating it to an audience can be a demanding challenge. So, how might we visualise and communicate our design to residents and an audience who may not be grounded in the design brief of this project? As part of our video production process, we storyboarded our design's value proposition and service touchpoints in the creation of our mama shop experience.
View/download our mama shop floor plans: