dt report 2 - liyang

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Liyang Zhang 2016 Upon knowing that we are going to redesign some traditional craftsman service, our team narrow the choices down to tailors and cobblers quickly. The two are similar in the sense that they both require adept manual work from the practitioners that cannot be much helped by modern technology, and that is the motivation for us to innovate the service as design thinkers instead of counting on inventors of new machinery. We then decide on tailoring, since two of our team members are students of fashion studies and may bring more insights and connections in this field. Good start as it may be, we still barely know the business. Only one out of five people in our team, Filip, is from Stockholm, but even he thinks that tailoring is quite an ‘invisible’ and sporadic business here. So our first meeting was a field trip in the neighbourhood of Odenplan, to visit the maximum number of tailor shops we could find, to get a general impression, and to ask the favours of the shop owners to cooperate with us in the future. We reached four tailor shops in one afternoon, and found out that the so-called ‘tailor shops’ are usually a combination of tailoring and laundry or clothes renting service, although the owners are without exception trained as tailors. This implies the fact that tailoring service is quite a fading business in Stockholm nowadays that tailors are not able to break even if they keep only the tailoring service in their shops. As for the support, luckily we got one warm welcome from Roslags Skrädderi och kemtvätt. Inspired by the point of Professor Ronald Jones’ guest speech, I Like to Watch, that empathy is paramount for the understanding, appreciation and dissemination of ideas, and the fact that humans are actually good at filling in the blanks between discrete observations and conjecturing the intentions behind actions, we set out to empathise with our shareholders (customers, potential customers and tailors) and find clues of what to do next through ‘observe’ and ‘engage’. I was responsible for emphasizing with the non-user group and chose my friend, who 1 Timeline This report is designed for HRs of IT/ digital multimedia companies who are screening candidates of user experience designers or product managers.

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Liyang Zhang 2016

Upon knowing that we are going to redesign some traditional craftsman service, our team narrow the choices down to tailors and cobblers quickly. The two are similar in the sense that they both require adept manual work from the practitioners that cannot be much helped by modern technology, and that is the motivation for us to innovate the service as design thinkers instead of counting on inventors of new machinery. We then decide on tailoring, since two of our team members are students of fashion studies and may bring more insights and connections in this field.

Good start as it may be, we still barely know the business. Only one out of five people in our team, Filip, is from Stockholm, but even he thinks that tailoring is quite an ‘invisible’ and sporadic business here. So our first meeting was a field trip in the neighbourhood of Odenplan, to visit the maximum number of tailor shops we could find, to get a general impression, and to ask the favours of the shop

owners to cooperate with us in the future. We reached four tailor shops in one afternoon, and found out that the so-called ‘tailor shops’ are usually a combination of tailoring and laundry or clothes renting service, although the owners are without exception trained as tailors. This implies the fact that tailoring service is quite a fading business in Stockholm nowadays that tailors are not able to break even if they keep only the tailoring service in their shops. As for the support, luckily we got one warm welcome from Roslags Skrädderi och kemtvätt.

Inspired by the point of Professor Ronald Jones’ guest speech, I Like to Watch, that empathy is paramount for the understanding, appreciation and dissemination of ideas, and the fact that humans are actually good at filling in the blanks between discrete observations and conjecturing the intentions behind actions, we set out to empathise with our shareholders (customers, potential customers and tailors) and find clues of what to do next through ‘observe’ and ‘engage’. I was responsible for emphasizing with the non-user group and chose my friend, who

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Timeline

This report is designed for HRs of IT/ digital multimedia companies who are screening candidates of user experience

designers or product managers.

Liyang Zhang 2016

moved to Stockholm last year for master study and has never been to a tailor here, as subject. I designed a questionnaire (Figure 1) containing every aspect that I could think of relating to her habit of not going to a tailor, as well as looked into her wardrobe and accompanied her to the laundry room. The discoveries are interesting: she doesn’t consider tailoring at all not only because the price is high and she is unsure about the professionalism of the tailors, but also because she thinks it unnecessary. A lot of her clothes are from fast fashion brands and she is bound to desert them after a year or two. Her wool coats and jeans stay longer, but she thinks she can well wait till she go back China for much cheaper fixing service in case they are broken. Also, she has many walk-around solutions like preventing her fine shirts from getting creased by ‘hanging them to dry while dripping’. As a result, she well survives despite that she knows nothing about sewing and stuff.

The ‘observe’ and ‘engage’ processes also went with the user group and the tailors, and all team members sat down to share their stories after the empathy phase was over. We listed and then clustered all the k e y i n f o r m a t i o n w e collected, tried to find co n n e c t i o n s b e twe e n them, found out the most appealing problems (as the highlighted keywords in Figure 3) and generated our POVs around them.

As is shown in the map, customers’ main reason of going to a tailor is that they generally lack the

skill and knowledge to fix their clothes, and do not want to ruin some of their precious pieces of clothing. And the factor that stops them from going to the tailor is largely the high price. On the other hand, the tailor thinks that there is a dilemma between having a shop in a good location and paying high

rent. Also, the t a i l o r w e interviewed, with 39 years of rich e x p e r i e n c e i n tailoring, would r e a l l y w i s h t o d i s t i n g u i s h himself from those unqualified ones. These problems are not isolated b u t h i g h l y

correlated ones. For example, the high rent in central city is partially to blame for the high

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Figure 1. Interview questionnaire for non-user

Figure 2. Influence Graph

Liyang Zhang 2016

pricing of tailoring service, and customers’ poor knowledge about tailoring gives them the impression that the service prices more than what it is worth, as well as makes it harder to tell good and bad tailors apart.

After careful analysis of all POVs, we think it is not realistic to work on the ‘shop space & location’ problem within the limited time of this project, since it is basically a harsh reality

for all kinds of shops in Stockholm. Therefore, our final POV integrates the other three problems:

Sezgi, a 26 years old student, needs a basic theoretical knowledge about fabrics and sewing processes, so that unqualified tailors cannot take advantage of her ignorance and limited finance.

Our first idea in accordance with our final POV is a ‘Tailor’s Dictionary’, a brochure containing the details as well as prices of tailoring service for each kind of material for clothing. The aim is to acquaint the customers with the difference between fabrics and why some fixings are charged more than others. The dictionary will be distributed by the tailor to customers coming in, and there is a great chance that customers will keep it for future look-up since it is both well-designed and informative. Customers can also use it to compare the service scope, price and quality among tailor shops.

We made a coarse prototype dictionary (as in Figure 3) and tested it both hypothetically and in real tailor shops. Although both tailors and customers gave relatively positive feedbacks to this idea, we received a few doubts during our first project presentation in class. One of the most important points is questioning who are we really designing for. It seems from our POV that we are designing for customers, but does the customer really wish to be helped only after he/she has entered a tailor shop already? What about the large crowd of non-users who has no intention of going to a tailor at the moment? And after all, a paper dictionary gives no direct remark on the

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Figure 3. ‘Tailor’s Dictionary’ Prototype and Test

Liyang Zhang 2016

quality of a particular shop’s service, which doesn’t make the decision of customers much easier.

We consider this piece of doubt well worth thinking about. So instead of proceed to refine our prototype, we stepped back to analyse the real need of customers once again. A typical experience curve in a tailor service context should look like this:

Therefore, if we are to help the customers, we can start helping them as early as they are still in the clothes shop. Also, we should better be able to provide them with a place to go immediately after they realise their clothes need fixing in order for the experience curve not to drop severely. And above all, the tailor shop should satisfy good location, good price and good service quality in a row. That’s when the idea of a mobile app appeared in my mind.

The idea is an App called SewT that is designed for users and tailors respectively. If one is registered as a user, it allows the person to take a photo of the broken part of his/her clothes and post it with a visibility based on distance. On the other hand, tailors who registered can view the photos that come from users within the distance and reply them with a price offer. The user can then compare the offers and choose which tailor to go to. There is a grading system for the tailors to judge their service quality, and also a feedback to the designer of the clothes as well if the user enters the brand name, so that designers can get a feedback for improvement. The user interfaces are designed in Figure 4.

One of the principles for mobile design is that ‘If a website will work, then skip the app’ . But 1

in our case, a website is exactly something that won’t work. All tailor shops that our team has visited don’t have a computer. Tailors only use conventional tools (pen and paper) to keep records of their business. But every tailor use a smart phone, and so does almost everyone in Stockholm. We need an app to get the tailors connected and involved.

Of course, the whole functionality of the app is based on the assumption that tailors are able to tell a price simply from the photo and a short description. Is it true indeed? So two of our team members tested this by showing photos of broken clothes on mobile phones to different tailors, and gladly the answer is yes. All tailors are able to tell a price, and the prices fluctuate among tailors. The feasibility and viability of SewT is thus proved.

Beverly Rudkin Ingle, Design Thinking for Entrepreneurs and Small Businesses: Putting the Power of 1

Design to Work, 2014, p62. 4

Figure 5.

Liyang Zhang 2016

But there is still one problem waiting to be solved: how to get people use this app in the first place? In other words, as is shown on the experience curve, we wish to ‘let her know the solution in case it breaks’, and the solution is SewT. It makes no sense to put up advertisements in public places, since it only appeals to people when they need the service and not for the rest of the time. Ah-huh— maybe it is good to print a QR code of this app on the receipt of clothes shops (Figure 5). If people buy some clothes they care about, they will definitely keep or at least pay attention to the receipt for return and exchange information and so on. We let Thais to speak to the designer of the clothing store (Mes Dames) she works for about this idea, and the designer is very supportive of the idea.

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Figure 4. User Interface Sketch of SewT

Liyang Zhang 2016

Role & Contribution My main contribution to this project is the idea of the SewT app and the design of its user interfaces. Also I am responsible for designing the final presentation powerpoint and interviewing the non-user group in the empathy phase. In team work, I have always been the person better at generating ideas than working on details, but this time I went further from just creating the idea to designing it in detail via the drawing board. It is a delight for me to see this progress.

Back to An Engineer… After all this exciting adventure which greatly improves our human empathy, design skills and business acumen, I may still have to face the reality of my being an engineering student who study Wireless Multimedia and work with algorithms and data rather than directly deal with customers mostly. However, I do think the essence of Human Centred Design should be embedded in my mindset regardless of how little I am working with people. At the end of the day I am working towards creating technical products and solutions for human, and it is our human need that I should consider as my priority.

Special Thanks To:

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