Me and SD tools on a Service Design course

I probably already mentioned somewhere that I am taking a Service Design course at Aalto University. It's been a month now and we've learned a lot of SD tools. I have already used, for example, Stakeholder map, VMSV pyramid, Value proposition canvas, and Journey mapping. The last tool I tried was Personas. While I was doing the task, I, as always, got a little carried away 😅

I'm pleased with the result and I got a big pleasure from completing this and other tasks, so I want to share it with you. My case is about the «Too Good To Go» (TGTG), an online app that allows users to browse unsold food items in surrounding shops and restaurants. The unsold food items come in their so-called ‘magic bags’ with an average of one kg of food. The users can purchase them at a highly discounted price to avoid food waste. Unfortunately, this service doesn't operate in Finland, so I haven't got an opportunity to try it myself. With my group on a course, we did some research, read many reviews, spend hours exploring many different papers and articles about this service.

I'll skip a few tools I used, and jump to the VMSV Pyramid. Since it helps to review the company's vision, mission, strategies, and values, it's a good tool to start with.

VMSV Pyramid

As I already said, together with our group we studied many papers, articles, and reports related to TGTG, and were able to define a vision and a mission. During our brainstorming, we came up with 3 company values: planet, people, companies. For them, it is their win-win-win situation where they have a positive effect on the earth, people, and companies. The planet has less wasted food to deal with, people get delicious meals at a great price, and businesses reach new customers and recover sunk costs.

We had many different ideas about what actions could be taken to achieve the mission, so we decided to turn them all into two opposite strategies: community-based and business-related.

Strategy #1 – Community-based

It would be great to find a way to involve the local community more in this process. For example, create a space that allows neighbors to share surplus food. This could be community fridges in some designated areas, or an online platform to share information about which product can't be used in time so that people living nearby could pick up it and save. Also, there could be social dining, where people can cook and eat together, talk and share useful information about the cooking process, some tips. Or it could be a platform/forum as a part of the «Too Good To Go» website, where people could share their tips, observations, recipes, everything they have learned while using expiring products in their everyday life.

Strategy #2 – Business related

Stakeholders from the business must be involved here to develop an integrated approach in which the risk of throwing expiring products is minimized. This includes the timely identification of such products, convenient and friendly labeling that is easy to understand for everyone, big data analysis of food waste, the study of consumer habits, and timely set reasonable promotions for expiring products, which take into account the expiration date and the probability of purchase of the product. It is also important to pay attention to the hygienic aspect - where and how the products are stored. Here it may be appropriate to come up with special shelves with special storage conditions that could extend the life of such products.

Let's keep going. For the first course assignment, I had a Stakeholder map. It helped us identify who are our stakeholders, so we could know how to involve them in the process. Knowing the service stakeholders was very useful for completing other course assignments and using other tools.

For the next tools (Personas and Value proposition canvas) we had to know who are our individual customers. Thanks to the Stakeholder map we did it – it's household. Going a little bit deeper, we divided them into three groups: single, family, and elderly people. This could help us understand their needs better, and to know how to fulfill those needs, and after all, "Too good to go" would have the right message to attract more audience to its service.

It would be perfect to have access to real users, see who they are, talk with them, so I could create more real personas. I hope I'll have such an experience in the near future, working in a company that understands the value of these tools 🥰 But now here's what I've done.

Personas

Value proposition canvas

Thanks to this tool, our team could map out customers' needs, wishes, and values. We created one VPC for all our customers, but the lecturer said that it would be better to create 3 separate canvases since we divided our customers into 3 groups. So I decided to do this now by myself.

Some things were repeated in each canvas, some were unique. Yes, indeed, creating three separate canvases turned out to be more efficient.

By mapping out customers' needs, wishes, and values using the "Value proposition canvas" we can get a more detailed and clear picture of what customers are looking for, so we can design products and services that they want.

I'm so excited to find out what's next so I'm looking forward to our workshop on Saturday. I think this will be awesome and will help me better understand Service Design and its tools 💗