Samsung - Improving refrigerators for the Indian context

Dec 2009

Challenge

When I was a student at IIT Bombay, I was selected to be part of a student team to work along with Samsung Electronics in order to suggest possible product improvements for their refrigerator product line in India. This project was conducted over a period of 2 months and it involved user research followed by concept generation.

Process

The process followed had two main phases. The first one was aimed at understanding the users and the usage patterns across different cities in India. For this purpose, we were divided into six different groups comprising of 2 to 3 students maximum.

Due to my familiarity with the southern Indian city of Chennai and my fluency with the local language of Tamil I was selected to be part of a two member team that was sent to Chennai to conduct user research. The research process required us to conduct interviews with 6 different types of users. These users were already identified and selected by a recruiting agency and each user was categorized into a unique user type.

Before conducting the interviews we had formulated a set of questions that could potentially enable us to deep dive and understand the user’s environment. Each of the interviews conducted lasted for approximately 2 hours. These were then followed by a second set of interviews. These would also enable us to understand the information provided initially by the users and would further enable us in collecting richer data. Furthermore, the users were also provided with diaries that they could use to note down interesting points or suggestions that they felt would be important for us. All the information gathered from these interviews and diary studies were then used to perform affinity mapping.

Post the affinity mapping the broad level insights were collated and we were re-shuffled into different teams for the design workshop that facilitated the concept generation phase.

Design workshop

The entire team of students, faculty, mentors and the 'Samsung' team

My Role

I was part of a large student team that was first sub-divided into teams required to conduct user research across different cities in India. Post the user research, I was also involved in conducting the affinity mapping and participated in the design workshop.

Unfortunately I will not be able to disclose details of this project due to a non-disclosure agreement. If I you are interested in knowing more about this project please feel free to reach out to me.