HjemmeBedst

Strategic Design, Service design, UX design, Customer Journey Mapping

Project Overview

As a part of my course on strategic design, my team and i developed a service design and strategy for the case 'Sustainable grocery shopping' presented to us by a representative from Salling Group. Our proposal was a grocery delivery subscription service that could reduce inner city emissions and congestion by batching grocery deliveries through a competitive and innovative service offering utilising an expansion of Salling Group's existing infrastructure. This opens up a new revenue stream for Salling Group, offers a convenient alternative to grocery shopping in a store and delivers a win-win-win for the customer, the company and the environment.

What did i Learn?

Design is all about 'why'. 'Why is this a problem?', 'Why is this a good solution?'. As a designer you can look for the answer to those questions in many different places and where you look is going to influence what is prioritised in your process and final product. Bringing a strategic perspective to design has taught me to dig deeper and answer 'why are these priorities the right priorities?'. On the other hand bringing a design perspective to strategy is a great way find new oppertunities and unlock overlooked potentials. Thinking and working with both these concepts togehter has made me better at connecting the small why's to the big why's and make sure that the stuff i design makes sense from the tiniest details to high level strategy.

Strategic Design

Masters course

7th semester

This project was done for my course on strategic design which explored the various ways design and strategy can be combined. Thinking and working with the various ways strategic awareness and thinking can serve a design project and the ways that design approaches can support good strategy, was a highlight of my studies and developed my strategic perspective on design. A sperspective i feel has made me a better collaborator and a better designer regardless of the specific design domain.

The course was structured around a single project based around working strategically with a case presented by a representative from Salling Group.

The Case

The case that was put to us was to create a proposal for how Salling Group could support sustainable grocery shopping. A representative from Salling group pitched the case to our class and our group latched on to two main problems: how can grocery shopping be more sustainable for single person households? and how can online grocery shopping become more sustainable?

We also used the opportunity to learn more about the organisational challenges and strategic priorities from the representative and hear more about what difficulties their current online grocery shopping services were facing.

Importantly we learned that Salling group want's to differentiate themselves on great user experience and sustainability but still adheres to profit as a very important metric: if it doesn't make money it will be very hard to implement anything.

Our process

As a preliminary problem statement we chose to ask: How can an online grocery shopping service make grocery shopping more sustainable?

A central guiding principle for our process was that whatever solution we came up with had to make sense across five 'bases':

Sustainability
Service
Profitability
Infrastructure
Branding

In other words it should improve the environmental (and social) sustainability of grocery shopping, provide an attractive service proposition to the costumers, be profitable for Salling Group, take advantage of their existing physical and digital infrastructure and compliment the various brands that make up the customer-facing identity of Salling Group.

Our group worked in two connected parallel tracks: research and concept development. Iterating on various service-design ideas and implementing feedback from classroom critiques and our professor (sadly the representative from Salling Group was not available to provide feedback until the final presentation).

Throughout the process we worked with future-scenarios and customer journey maps to define and improve our concept. And make sure that our value proposition for the customer was strong. We also maped our concept to a business model canvas to make sure it made sense from a business perspective.

Our Concept

The research track made one thing clear very quickly: Transitioning more people's grocery trips to a delivery service can significantly reduce the amount of emissions created at the "last mile" of grocery logistics (from store to costumer), which is a large part of the total emissions involved in grocery logistics. To make this both profitable for Salling Group and attractive to customers, we developed a delivery concept that removed painpoint's found in existing grocery delivery services (chiefly high minimums for purchases, no contactless delivery and per purchase delivery fees), efficiently batches deliveries and works well with Salling Groups existing delivery infrastructure.

We coupled this with a subscription pricing model that incentivises repeated usage without incentivising trivially small deliveries, and provides a predictable revenue stream for Salling Group while ideally making customers more loyal (buying less from other stores and more from Salling Group).

All of this is attached to the Salling Groups's chain, Føtex, as we argued their costumes had the disposable income to make subscription fees feel negligible while also having much to gain in terms of time and convenience from having groceries delivered. Based on this we felt that the service should be branded in a way that emphasises 'the pleasant convenience of home' and so we landed on the name Hjemmebedst from the common danish saying "ude godt, men hjemme bedst" (roughly meaning 'being away is good but home is the best).

HjemmeBedst

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