MACRO UX — IBM BRIEF 3
Feb. 18–24 | Bala, Desire, Mu, Dora, Sofia
Some of the feedback by last week’s presentation was
- What is the transaction?
- What is the mechanism for obtaining hidden benefit?
- Who is benefiting?
And truly most of the ideas we had were missing at least one of the brief’s objectives. John however, spend some time discussing the loyalty program cards and how they collect so many data from consumers and how there could potentially be something there to explore. This is when we first discussed about consumers being able to exchange their loyalty cards with others across UK in order to tamper with the data that Tesco gathers.
Starting this new week, I went to the CTL to ask some questions about a new idea that I had and through this discussion I learned about this group of teenagers that decided to use one collective instagram account, so that they could still benefit by using the app but the app was not able to collect data from them in terms of particular interests, location, device used to access the app etc.
I thought it would be very interesting to do something like that in our cohort, not only with social media accounts but also with loyalty programs’ cards. The transactions we take advantage of here are of the people of those big corporations that sell our data to other big corporations, by messing with the algorithm. Things to consider are safety issues. This has to happen between a group of individuals that trust each other. When I presented the idea to the group it was received with positive feedback and we all felt like for the first time we had something that answered the brief in its whole. However we still wanted to explore the Tesco Clubcard exchange one and so Bala proceeded with designing some low fidelity designs of how the app would look like, while I decided to do some research on mine.
Firstly, I sent this questionnaire to our cohort chat to see what people think about sharing accounts and benefits with others. Below I present some of the results.
Another interesting find in my research was that Tinder, the online dating platform, allows you to request your entire app history. Below you’ll see a screenshot of mine just to get an idea.
Then we created an Instagram account for the five of us and one thing that’s very interesting is that Instagram almost immediately blocked all actions in the app although we’re not going against its regulations. We couldn’t like, we couldn’t follow more people and many more things.
In the meantime Bala refined the low fidelity prototype we had from last week to better accommodate the new concept which was, card swapping between tesco customers. To make it fair for the people involved Bala thought that the swap should be between two people that spend similar amounts in Tesco. However, at that point, we knew this would create many complications and did not really make sense, so it was something we needed to resolve moving forward. It’s important to mention that we also thought of messing with the barcodes of the cards, or try and change the information that they hold but this was impossible since the data cannot be read without having access to the database of the company and changing the barcode randomly made it unusable in the Tesco register. We also tested if the clubcard’s barcode would work if we scanned a screenshot of it and it did.
When we presented those two ideas to John & Al, they thought there was not enough time to pursue mine and so we decided to dig deeper into the Tesco one.
