What’s Their Problem?
This project started with an observation, done by one of my teammates in the Goodwill right next to campus. He observed that the shopping experience there wasn’t all that social, and it wasn’t the most pleasant space to spend any amount of time in. We decided to make our design to attempt to solve this problem.
To kick off the project, we started with an affinity map to summarize the observations that my groupmate made. We categorized who goes to Goodwill, what gets sold at Goodwill, why people go to Goodwill, and barriers we saw that were immediately obvious.
Before we could come up with a solution, we had to empathize with the people that use the space. We first made an empathy map surrounding a specific group of people, some students that came to the store together and were trying on a jacket in the aisle.
Ideation
The next stage of the project was ideation, where we attempted to come up with as many solutions as possible to the question, “How might we create a fun experience for students to go to Goodwill that is more social and comfortable?”
We did our best to organize the ideas into four categories: the Rational, the Darling, the Longshot, and the Delightful. Once we were able to clearly see all of the ideas we had, we further discussed which idea would be the most interesting to design for.
Final Product
The idea we chose to design was to create a space in the center of the store where people could gather. We thought it would make the Goodwill shopping experience more pleasant by making it more social, and giving it a bit less of a corporate feel.
In the end, we created an advertisement for our solution: The Goodwill Social Space. We chose a color palette that was close to that of the Goodwill logo, and attempted to make the advertisement feel playful yet professional.
Cayla Kennedy 