SAMANTHA BENNETT

WIPES

packaging

This internal research project’s goal was to increase wipes usage occasions by making them more accessible in new business locations and in home or on-the-go settings. We set out to learn how users are currently using wipes and to identify pain points and opportunities that are available for improvement.  We conducted preliminary research using Dscout then dove deeper with Contextual Inquiry at user’s homes and a variety of business settings.

My Role: 

I conducted and planned all aspects of this project.

My strategy manager was great to bounce ideas if needed

and to review plans and deliverables as I completed them, 

plus take amazing notes during interviews.

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Research & Activities:

Exploratory Research (Dscout) - used to get a base understanding

Contextual Inquiry - in-context field research to dive deeper

Feature Rank - to understand what attributes are highest priority to businesses

Timeline Fill-in - used to understand daily cleaning activities of businesses

Word Association - to uncover what user's feel is important in each usage occasion

Ideation Exercise - to uncover user's ideal packaging in different usage occasions

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Team: 

Design Strategy Manager

Industrial Designer

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Biggest Challenge:

With having worked on many projects

focused on wipes, we were apprehensive

about uncovering new insights. 

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Favorite Part of Project:

A grand story about "back in the ol' days" grocers needed to sweep up cigarette butts off the floor.

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THE DETAILS

application statistics

With typically applicant numbers into the hundreds when using dscout, I try to generate some quantitative data from users. Questions like what types of

wipes do they use, how frequently, and what types of packages do they prefer help get an understanding of where we should dive deeper within the mission and later in contextual inquiry.

user preferences

With Berry being a packaging company, understanding the user’s experience, how they interact with packaging, and uncovering their intuitive preferences drives opportunities for packaging improvements. Within the Dscout application users were asked what their most and least used products were and what their most and least preferred packages were. This gave us an understanding that users prefer flexible packages as they are able to be squeezed and mushed to fit in small areas, and rigid closures as they seal better retaining moisture in the package.

During this part of our mission we asked users to record any moment they interacted with wipes and their packaging. The characterized the moment as helpful or problematic, then discussed why in follow up questions. This graph shows the ratio of helpful vs problematic with each package type. Moving forward we used this to help guide out contextual inquiry to better understand why different packages provide helpful or problematic moments.

packaging moments

DISINFECTING

BABY

For our last part I always like

to gauge what people may be looking for or desire their packages to do for them. We asked users to describe their ideal packaging for each usage occasion, home,

on-the-go, and public.

ideal packaging

wipe desires

Another potential opportunity

we identified was wipes that don’t exist. We asked users to develop three ideas of wipes that they

want, but currently aren’t available. We got many ideas ranging from sunscreen or bug spray wipes to wipes in movie theaters.

personas &

journey maps

Within wipes we identified two main user groups with a focus on baby and disinfecting wipes, the clean freak and the busy mom. Personas were used primarily to develop empathy and help

stakeholder’s understand

their daily situations,

problems, and outlooks.

observations

With over fifteen interviews and hours of video, and 518 observations recorded, I affinitized and narrowed to high level observations within each identified category. These are the key takeaways and common themes heard from participants.

example video

When presenting findings to stakeholders and the design team for ideation, I find that showing them the user’s experience and putting them in their shoes goes a long way. Pretty graphs and infographics are fun to look at, but seeing first hand sticks. With the most important categories that presented themselves from research I take our video recordings and highlight impactful moments that express our insights and observations.

One thing uncovered from Dscout was the difference in usage between home, on-the-go, and public. While we dug deeper into these differences in the discussion, I wanted to understand what people associated with each usage occasion. I had people list three to five words that describe what they feel is important about wipes and their packages for each occasion. These

call out what people find important

for each occasion. Afterwards I asked users to come up with their ideal package based on the words they wrote to describe what is important.

word association

During the ideation session, we grouped insights and How Might We’s together to help direct the designers to the actual problem and design based off of it.

insights & hmw's

Gyms wipes are rapidly expanding. With many gyms using rags and sprays, struggling to keep equipment clean, wipes provide a more convenient option. Although gyms have wipes available, they typically aren’t as accessible to the consumer – they are in a select few designated areas where customers have to walk to access them. Rags and sprays on the other hand are on virtually every machine. Although wipes are more sanitary and consumers prefer them, many tend to just use a rag as its closer and doesn’t require them to walk across the room not only to get a wipe,

but to dispose of it as well.

gyms

restaurants

While some restaurants use wipes

to flip tables, it is not a widely

used practice yet. There are clear advantages with the elimination of cross-contamination, less prep work, and less errors. But unfortunately pushing restaurants to switch is a large hurdle as rags are much cheaper and many executives of chains push back on any type of change. Wipes used in restaurants are a great opportunity for more efficient table flips and cleaner atmospheres.

grocery stores

Many grocery stores offer wipes to consumers as a courtesy to clean their carts and help reduce the spread of germs. While there are multiple types of wipes offered, they each have their own problems with dispensing, moisture retention, and refilling. But the most consistent problem seen throughout is the fact that consumers fail to dispose of the wipes after cleaning their cart. They grab a wipe and clean their cart as they continue walking, thus passing up the trash can. This leaves employees needing to regularly clean up after customers as the entryway and carts become littered.

schools &

day care centers

Although day care centers were primarily focused on baby wipes, they also use disinfecting wipes throughout their facility. While disinfecting is an aspect of cleaning, they are primarily used for small messes here or there or large toys/objects that can’t be placed in a bleach bath. Overall day care centers had similar problems when using baby wipes as do parents at home. With the amount of baby wipes used in these settings there is a great opportunity to develop a system for the large scale use.

Wipes are used in a variety of ways within different businesses and different things are important for each. While visiting each business, I asked them to rank a list of features from most important to least important in order to uncover what should be prioritized in future packaging. After they completed their list of ranking, we discussed what lead them to choose certain attributes as the top three and the bottom three – what is important or not important about that aspect that lead them to place it there within the list?

feature rank

insights & hmw's

Once identifying the biggest problems plaguing each business, we developed statement starters to impose innovative solutions.