Bear - ELIJAH HAINES

Bear Necessities

A subscription based website paired with mainstream physical stores, aimed at alleviating the monthly hassle of purchasing household necessities. No more fights about who used the last of whatever and didn't replace it.

Approach
Primary and secondary research
Insight analysis
Opportunities analysis
Customer Journey Map
Wire-framing New Screens
User Testing
Final screens

Personal Responsibilities
Primary and secondary research, user testing, feature development, finalizing app design, print.

Group:
Elijah Haines, Rita Lei, Jessica Yang

Time Frame:
5 weeks

Brief
Create a service from the provided persona's that address their specific needs and caters to their style and sensibilities.

The Problem

Keeping essential supplies stocked for people who live together can cause conflict between them. Often running out of something and not having it replaced or having it replaced with an inferior product can increase tensions and cause conflict between people living together.

Key Features

Bill Splitting

We created the ability for everyone to pay an equal amount for the agreed upon products. With a variety of payment options to help accommodate everyone.

We wanted to address the issue of collecting funds to replace used products. For the same price toilet paper for the house, everyone gets everything they need. without the worry of ever running out or getting the wrong thing.

Friendly Reminders

Sometimes we get busy and forget. Simple reminders for conformation of payment help keep users on track.

Notifications can be overwhelming and annoying so we wanted to keep them to a minimum. Only 3 types of notifications would be given, 3 days before payment due, insufficient funds, and Admin bill split override. We are all busy and forget sometimes but not with Bear Necessities.

Easy Returns

Returning items that have been shipped to you can be a hassle. We decided to give users the ability to return products they don't like to a physical location.

We wanted to take the hassle out of returns by allowing users to return an unsatisfactory product to a nearby physical location. If you are unhappy with a product you should be able to exchange it for what you want. Hey sometimes Ocean Breeze scented toilet paper isn't the best idea and you shouldn't have to wait a week to get new stuff shipped to you.

Process

Research

primary
We were given 4 pre made personas that we had to pick through to figure out what they had in common, age, career, location, personal taste, etc.

secondary
After we parsed out the similarities from the personas, we did a competitive analysis of products or services that already exist. We wanted to determine what physical locations would apply to greatest number of our personas needs.

The Journey

We really wanted to figure out how we wanted our customers to feel as they used our product and what areas were the hardest for them to deal with. This helped to address the edge and error state solutions.

Insights

After sifting through our interviews for those ever elusive golden insights, the ones that make the difference between a mediocre product and a great product, we found three insights that we wanted to found our service on. These three problems kept coming up in one way or another through not only the personas but in real world interviews as well.

1	Essentials aren't always replaced with the same quality product, if they are replaced at all.

2	Returning items that have been shipped to you is time consuming and you have to wait to get your money back or a new product.

3

Having to remind roommates that it is their turn to buy more essentials can cause conflict and awkwardness at home.

Basic Workflows

We wanted to work out a few errors states and how we might deal with them as well as at least one of our main features. Often there is a lot of "magic" that happens in school projects and we wanted to address some of the things that might actually give users (and us) problems.