How might we enhance the ability to preserve and share the feelings we experience during the fleeting moments of travel?
IVY Mail
This is a capstone project for Canon. We were tasked on reimagining and integrating an existing product into Canon's youth-oriented IVY brand. Our solution, now a potential Canon patent application, successfully stands as a distinct product while seamlessly complementing the overall IVY product ecosystem.
Role
Designer, Researcher
Duration
4 months (January - May 2023)
Team Composition
7 people (designer, researcher, engineer, business analyst)
Project Context
Canon, a long-time leader in imaging technology, faced challenges as smartphones replace traditional camera and its customer base aged. To adapt, Canon expanded its customer base to younger audiences, by introducing the IVY brand in 2018. IVY is intended as a gateway for the young generation to the Canon brand, with products such as mini photo printer and instant camera printer.
Canon is continuously looking to generate revenue from the IVY brand by adding new and innovative products to their existing lineup, and this capstone served as one of those efforts. For this project, we were tasked to identify a product (existing, failed, or no longer in the market) targeted for Gen Z demographic, determine new and innovative changes, with the goal of generating meaningful revenue in 1-2 years.
The Snippet
Summary of the process, mapped on the Double Diamond framework:
Design Activity
Non-design Activity
Input/Output
The Story
The whole process, divided by each stage on the Double Diamond. Click to jump to each stage.
Discover Context
PESTLE Analysis
The challenge that Canon gave to us was quite broad: “How do we identify a product aimed at the Gen Z demographic, determine new and innovative changes, to create and launch a new IVY brand product or service solution with the goal of generating meaningful revenue in the next 1-2 years?”
From the prompt, there are only 2 limitations that we knew of: the industry (imaging), and its targeted customer (Gen Z). The rest was still unknown to us; not only that we knew what we didn’t know, we also didn’t know what we didn’t know.
We decided to start off with what we know. We sourced information about the imaging industry and the Gen Z consumers by using the PESTLE (Political, Economic, Sociological, Technological, Legal and Environmental) analysis method. Below are the key takeaways from our analysis.
Key takeaways from our PESTLE analysis
There were eight themes that struck out from this analysis. Compared to previous generation, Gen Z pays more attention to a Brand Image. They especially value brands that support the issue they care about, such as Sustainability and Inclusivity. Gen Z also cares about Emotional Wellbeing, more so than the previous generations. As a generation that celebrates individuality, they appreciates Authentic self expression and genuine Connection with others. Lastly, growing up with Technology and the internet robbed them of a less-digitalized life, which translated to a trend in Nostalgic, analog technology, such as cord headphone and point-and-shoot cameras.
Discover Context
Opportunity Gap Matrix
Equipped by those themes that emerged from the PESTLE analysis, we identified potential product opportunities of each themes by using the “How Might We...” (HMW) method. There are in total 20 HMW sentences that we came up with. We mapped these sentences in a 2x2 matrix that accounts for the Size of the opportunity and its Alignment with Gen Z’s value.
Key takeaways from the PESTLE analysis
From this exercise, we found 4 top opportunity gaps:
HMW make the Canon Ivy more environmentally sustainable?
HMW promote play within the product that sparks joy and exploration?
HMW incorporate Canon Ivy product lines into Gen Z photo-taking trends & habit(be authentic, create memories, build connection)?
HMW leverage the nostalgia trend to market Canon products to younger segment?
4 emerging themes
Reflection
None of the How Might We (HMW) statements generated at this stage accurately addressed the final defined problem. Furthermore, these opportunities were not derived from real user feedback. While mapping the HMW statements was useful in narrowing down the scope to just four opportunity spaces, I believe it's premature to formulate opportunity statements at this early stage of the process, particularly before engaging with users directly.
Discover Context
Survey
By this point, we knew a great deal about Gen Z as a consumer, but it was only from a third-party source, instead of the Gen Z themselves. Furthermore, we only knew what they broadly value (activism, self-expression, individuality), but not specifically what they prefer in the imaging industry.
Do they capture their life? What kind of moments do they capture? What tools they use to capture these moments? We sought to answer these questions by distributing a survey to Gen Z audience. In the end, we managed to gather 95 responses, and these are the insights we got from the survey.
Result from the survey
There are two additional themes that emerged from the survey result: Travel and Daily Moments. These two are the most documented moments according to Gen Z, which means they’re the most potential use cases for imaging products such as Canon’s.
Accounting for those two themes, now we have 6 themes that we can use as the starting point for problem definition.
6 potential themes
Discover Context
Opportunities & Insights
The next step was to present to the client about the context that we have learned thus far. But before that, we discussed each themes internally to factor in their potentials. While all themes show promise, we opted to eliminate Sustainability as a theme. Our reasoning was that sustainability is more of an ancillary theme. It can always be integrated into our final solution through practices such as using recycled materials. Moreover, we merged Authenticity and Daily Moments into a single theme as they were essentially the same. Our discussion rounded up the themes into 4:
Travel: The Importance of Travel
Play & Creativity: Rise of The Creator
Authenticity & Daily Moments: Living in The Moment
Nostalgia: Bringing Back The Past
The four themes and their corresponding insights
Define Problem
Opportunity Scorecard
The client responded positively to our presentation. However, we still had a task ahead of us: to narrow down the opportunity space(s) into more defined problem. We did these by scoring each opportunities based on the factors that are important to Canon, such as:
Potential market size
Customer’s willingness to pay
Customer’s desirability
Canon’s potential level of intervention
Required expertise from Canon
Score for each themes
Reflection
The scoring system we used is logical, but I believe that insights derived from user research would be more appropriate to narrow down the scope. However, I also acknowledge that conducting user research for all four topics would be time-consuming. As of now, I'm still uncertain about the ideal approach to condense these four topics into a single problem space.
Define Problem
Concept Mapping
As a result of Opportunity Scorecard, edging slightly above Creator space, Travel came up on top as the most potential space to pursue. It has the highest potential in market size, willingness to pay, and desirability, especially considering our survey result where users said that they use cameras most during travel.
Canon’s advantage in the travel problem space
While this has reduced the scope significantly, we still have yet to discover the specific problem statement we need to solve. What area of travel that we can work on? We didn’t even know what travel entails, or the touch points that has potential to be improved.
To understand travel better, we analyzed and dissected that problem space further by using Concept Mapping as a method. This enabled us to uncover factors and connections that we haven’t previously thought of.
Concept mapping of the travel opportunity space
Define Problem
User Interview
Afterwards, we used the information from the concept mapping as the basis to create interview guidelines, which we used to interview Gen Z users, accumulating to 16 users in total. By employing affinity mapping techniques, we were able to uncover and organize these key insights.
Insights from interview
The insights then led us to finally define the problem that we will solve for Canon:
from the initial prompt of:
How do we identify a product aimed at the Gen Z demographic, determine new and innovative changes, to create and launch a new IVY brand product or service solution with the goal of generating meaningful revenue in the next 1-2 years?
to the final defined problem:
How might we enhance GenZ’s ability to preserve and share the feelings they experience during fleeting moments of travel?
Learn more about our problem space through this video.
I’m sorry, but that’s all for now.
This project is protected under a Non-Disclosure Agreement (NDA) between the client and myself. Other information related to this project have been intentionally omitted to respect confidentiality and to retain competitive advantage. If you are interested in learning more about this project, feel free to reach out to me for more details. Thank you for understanding!
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