MACRO UX — IBM BRIEF 4

Feb. 25 — Mar. 03 | Bala, Desire, Mu, Dora, Sofia

One thing worth mentioning from last week was that Al & John organized a workshop called “Dancing about Money”. First of, I was lucky enough to attend Nigel Todd’s part, who is the author of the book “The Social Life of Money”, which was part of our reading list for this briefing and it’s a truly fascinating book. Moreover, the founder of Bristol Pound was there, very similar to Brixton Pound which I mention in previous blogs posts and she was very vulnerable about the project and what went wrong which was very insightful. Then we did a workshop, in which we were divided in teams and had to think about re-materializing one of our digitised transactions. That’s when I met Tim, truly brilliant mind and we explored library entry cards and the borrowing books system. We came up with a hexagonal structure of some sort where you exchange one side of it with a book and every time you return the book you get your piece back.

Prototype — Dancing About Money Workshop

On our second meeting with IBM we had a more concrete idea to present and they actually had some very helpful feedback to give us, especially Charlie. Here are a few points from our conversation:

1. You’re limiting your user base. What if this was an app and I’m in any store (not just Tesco) where I need access to a QR code ASAP? The ambition should be that I can walk into Urban Outfitters and I can do the same thing. How can you widen the net?
2. Could I trade discounts? Maybe interact with a machine that does this? How do you build a community around it? How would you market it?
3. What if you could not just disrupt but also give a benefit? I get a QR code for food banks near you? And you could get points for that food bank for unprivileged people.
4. Do flows, personas, interviews with people about how much they care about their data being protected. Needs more granularity.
5. How do you create longevity with the app? How do you protect this idea?
6. Think about the presentation and medium for pitching it. Try and craft a narrative that people can follow.

Discussing with the team, we all loved Charlie’s input about the food banks because one of the most common criticisms on our idea was “why would people do that?” and up until now the answer was disruption and protection of data. The inclusion of charity widens our audience and ultimately helps us in our initial goal. To disrupt the data that grocery stores gather on us.

We searched for local food banks, Bala designed the grocery store cards for M&S and Tesco and we printed them out to make it look more professional and to be able to test it in stores with real people

Making of the physical Clubcard cards

Interviewing people in Tesco and M&S