Making at-home water purifier ownership a delightful experience

by reducing accessibility barriers and ease of servicability

DROP

A smart water purifier for Indian market that reduces accessibility barriers and water wastage

Timeline : January 2016 – October 2016

Employer: ErgoDesign Private Limited

My Role

Lead UX Research and strategy, Lead product design and conception

Skills

Product Design, Interaction design, Storyboarding, Communication, UX

Product Type

Product-service Ecosystem, Connected Device, IOT

Project Domain

Service Design, Industrial Design, User Experience Design

Collaboration

C-suite, Product Development, Engineering, Vendor Partners

Project Background

In 2016, ELGI Ultra one of the largest Indian consumer appliances company decided to foray into the water purifier market in India. The Indian market was already flooded with numerous water purifier brands which addressed the obvious need of the consumers. The challenge which was given to me was to understand the latent needs of the Indian consumers and propose a water purifier concept that would help ELGI Ultra create a place for itself in the market by addressing overlooked consumers needs.

Initial Design Brief

How might we design a water purifier that is reflective of the Indian consumer needs?

Stakeholder research with executive leadership

Organized a 2-day vision workshop with C-suite (head of marketing, new product development, design, product manager)
Planned key activities for the session to establish executive vision and key goals for the project

Market Study & Competitive Benchmarking

More than 90% of the products in the market were providing basic functionalities with no differentiation other than aesthetics and different filteration stages which were tied to the pricing

Generative research (Qualitative)

Built screener to diversify participant recruitment
Worked closely with a recruitment agency to recruit participants
Conducted at-home contextual inquires in different parts of the country to diversify learning of across geographies

Travelled to 5 Indian cities to interact with consumers to understand their pain points and frustration with the water purifier.

Key Learnings

“I never let my son get to the purifier ever, he broke his hand while trying to get over the counter. I make sure that his bottle is filled all the time. We had a counter top one earlier, but these are just so bulky”

– Housewife (mother of two), Chennai

Synthesis

Used the data from primary and secondary research for analysis to create

Buyer journey and empathy maps
Use journey and pain points
Key decision drivers
Storyboarding and scenario mapping
Key directions.
Technical sketching with engineering and electronics team to establish product vision

What drives consumer purchase decisions?

Based of the synthesis data, I identified certain key actuators that drives consumer decisions while purchasing purifiers.

Key Directions

After identifying the key needs of the consumer segment, I created possible design directions for the ideations.

Hero Concept

Used key directions and feature prioritization matrix to

Kick-start ideation and concept creation
Assign manufacturability and engineering consideration based on data from technical sketching
Build series of testable mock-ups and prototypes to evolve design maturity
Rendered use scenarios to communicate ideas to the marketing and business development team
Created UI Screens and workflows to demonstrate product use scenario

Proof of Concept

Takeaways from the project

If prototyping the whole thing is complicated, then prototype features

This project had several technical features which were making it difficult to create a fully functional proof on concept and therefore we switched gears and started prototyping feature by feature. This not only accelerated the design process but also gave me confidence that this product could work.

Consistent and early feedback is good for project’s health

When I started this project, I had in mind that I will finish the concept and then present it to the management, however after a terrible first presentation, I decided to get critiques more consistently in between the process. This not only brought a critical 2nd and 3rd POVs on the concept but also significantly aided to my learning.