role
designer
tools & skills
illustrator | visual / communication design
Companies offer products, or an exchange in value and ownership to the customers, as well as services, which are not physical, but create value and relationship for both the customer and company. A simple innovation through productization or servitization can be incredibly powerful and meaningful for transforming a product-service system.
The goal of this project is not only to understand what product-service systems are, but their value and importance through a product-service system poster.
I decided to focus on the partnership between Whole Foods and Amazon Prime.
Final Product-Service-System Poster
Process
Ideation & Exploration
I brainstormed three product-service systems that were pretty familiar to me.
First I thought of Sephora. Sephora sells makeup (product) and employees help customers find items or their shade (services). Their innovation is incorporating makeup services after customers purchase a product.
Second, I thought of Oral B, which is known for their toothbrushes (product) and support for broken products (services). Now, their toothbrushes can bluetooth connect to a phone app to give customers data and suggestions about their brushing.
The idea that I ended up moving forward with is Whole Foods Prime Delivery. Whole Foods Market previously offered a facility for groceries, where customers would drive to a Whole Foods, buy their groceries, and bring them back home. At the same time, third-party applications were also allowing customers to purchase groceries online.
Whole Foods Market has since incorporated that re-bundling within their own company to innovate and re-define what grocery shopping means, which means they can collect the revenue that previously went towards third-party apps.
Sketches
My first sketches involved laying out the main components that I wanted to include in my poster. This included the Before vs. After of the innovation. I also thought about visuals I might use, such as to convey the steps of online grocery delivery that now exists at Whole Foods. Finally, I wanted to highlight the co-creation of value between Whole Foods and the customer from this innovation.
Although my second sketch is less visually appealing, it includes better content. Compared to the previous sketch, this one creates a better visual layout of the comparison for before and after the rebundling. After meeting with Professor Zimmerman, I realized that I was losing an element in my initial sketches and ideas: that Whole Foods did not invent grocery delivery, but chose to implement it as a strategic choice for their product-service system.
Iteration 01
My original high-fidelity mockup of the poster involves two distinct sides, as shown in my sketches. On the left, I used visuals to communicate what grocery shopping at Whole Foods was like before the innovation while on the right side I included the steps of the re-bundling. Additionally, I wanted to emphasize that this innovation was a simple step of “low risk, high reward”.
