What do people care about in terms of mobility, and what do they want from a petrol station? STBY were recently contacted by a big international car brand who wanted us to help them gain a better idea of these topics to inform and inspire their service innovation process. Working with their internal innovation team, we designed a project that would help them better understand the lives and routines of a range of different people – with the ultimate aim of designing services that could support them better when they are out on the road.
As much of the research was taking place in Germany, we worked with our local partners in the Reach Network, Minds & Makers. Together we developed a methodology for the fieldwork, targeted around the kind of insights we needed. We involved a range of participants that covered a variety of social and geographical backgrounds, each of whom had different preferences and routines centred around mobility and re-fueling. A series of probes, semi-structured interviews, and location visits gave us the data we needed for an internal analysis workshop at our Amsterdam office.
The end result was a series of clustered insights that could be used to inform and inspire the client’s design teams. To make these insights as accessible as possible to these teams, we visualised them on a large-scale poster, in addition to presenting them in a more traditional report format. Presenting results in this way is something we’ve had a lot of success with in the past; after all, even the most resonant of insights will achieve little if the right people never get to see them.
In a full-day internal workshop with people from many different departments in the client organisation we presented the insight from the research, and participated in discussions around a series of new service concepts they are currently working on. The posters with observations, quotes and insights were there to refer to and to ensure that the consumer perspective did not get lost during the sometimes passionate strategic discussions.