Ford Motor Company
In Northwestern’s Service Design Course, I worked in a team of 4 partnering with Ford Motor Company to develop a value-adding service for Ford and their customers.
Note: Images are blurred and descriptions are vague for confidentiality. Contact me for more details.
Skills
Service Design, Ethnographic Research, Service Frameworks, Storytelling, Client Communication
My Role
My responsibilities included conducting user interviews, storyboarding our concepts, creating service artifacts, and making our final presentation/pitch to Ford.
Empathize
My team's journey began with conducting analogous research, and user interviews to gain insight into who our users were and how other services successfully served their customers.
First, we did analogous research, in which we looked to other industries to find inspiration in the ways others have tackled similar challenges. As a team, we went on service excursions to experience firsthand key moments in other services.
Next, our team conducted ethnographic research using the dScout platform. This was a crucial point in our project because through these interviews we were able to deeply understand consumer habits, uncover pain points, and learn the desires related to the current solution space. These initial findings informed our team of design opportunities and guided initial prototype development.
Define
Our group debriefed the interviews at length in order to gain a deep understanding of each user and their desires related to the product space. We mapped out all the important takeaways from the interviews and then extracted key insights and behavior models (in the form of journey maps and other frameworks) from the patterns we saw in interview responses.
Prototype, Test, Repeat
Using our findings, and design research tools we created several concepts, which I depicted through storyboards. These concepts were then shared with our users and we received feedback that moved us forward to our next iteration.
We created service artifacts and low-fidelity prototypes, which we presented to users, our studio, and our Ford sponsors to gain more insights and further iterate upon them. This process was repeated several times before we finally converged on a final solution.
Final Deliverables
We had the opportunity to present our final service design to our Ford sponsors, where we told the story of our users, their current pain points, and how our service would solve these problems. The final deliverables for this course and for Ford included:
- Insights from consumer interviews and initial research
- Developing research frameworks that model consumer behavior
- Service artifact prototyping
- Prototype iterations
- Service blueprint and journey map of our service
- Midterm and final presentation
