DESIGN THINKING, JASON SEVERS
STUDENT PROJECT GUIDE

AN EVERYDAY EXPERIENCE CHALLENGE

Redesign your local grocery store experience. Research the experience for insights, identify opportunities
for improvement, and share two journey maps—”before” and “after”—that convey the value of your
strategic redesign.

Your challenge is to reimagine the grocery store in light of design thinking, using research, ideation, and creative
problem-solving to understand and develop solutions for improving the enjoyment, efficacy, safety, technology, and
usefulness of the grocery store to shoppers and the community at large.

Grocery stores offer countless opportunities for improvement: just imagine being a grocer, customer, food supplier, child,
advertiser, regulator, or in charge of a community nonprofit/shelter. These varied perspectives present a complex web of
needs—making design thinking the perfect holistic approach for rethinking the grocery store experience.

Specs
You will share 2 journey maps: one for the “before” shopper journey, and one for the “after” journey that incorporates your
solutions and represents an ideal experience. Each map should represent at least 5 touchpoints between the shopper and
store.

Tools & Materials

It will be useful to have a sketchbook and/or camera during research. No design skills required, although students are
welcome to use InDesign, Illustrator, or another program to create their maps.

A sample journey by frog design.

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STEPS

1. Review the project brief (first page of this PDF).

2. Identify your driving question.

Determine your goal for redesigning the grocery store shopping experience. This is the type of objective a client
might bring to a design strategy firm. Try one of the following, or craft your own:

● to create a more enjoyable shopper experience

● to create a faster, more efficient shopper experience
● to create a more community-oriented shopper experience

By the end of this step, complete the sentence, “I intend to redesign the grocery store shopper experience to…”

Use this sentence to start a project in the class project gallery, and then update your project as
you progress!

3. Identify what you do (and don’t) know about the shopper.

Gather everything you understand about the wants, needs, and objectives of the shopper. This will give you a
starting place of knowledge and questions for when you begin your research. Consider:

● What does the shopper want?

● What is the shopper optimizing for?
● What challenges does the shopper face?
● What does success look like for the shopper?

Capture your thoughts and remaining questions in a notebook. It’s okay not to have all the answers! This is about
starting what you will ask, answer, observe, and/or confirm in the next project step. Feel free to share your
brainstorm, notes, or images in the class project gallery.

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4. Research the shopping experience.

It’s time for research! You can choose to study similar situations like Italian street fairs, conduct in-person
shop-along or intercept interviews, or make observations in your local store. You might even choose a combination
of all three.

● Use the AEIOU framework: actions, environments, interactions, objects, and users.
● Pay attention to all 5 senses: sight, sound, smell, taste, and touch.
● Push yourself to ask why and how after each finding. Ask it again and again. Push your thinking.
● Take photos and write notes on your findings.

Remember Jason’s big takeaways:

Don’t be afraid for this step to take a bit of time. You want to feel like you really understand the experience. Feel free
to share notes, updates, and reflections on your research in the class project gallery.

5. Synthesize your information.

At this point, you likely have a jumble of notes, photographs, and ideas. Now it’s important to organize your
research. Try out Jason’s idea to write big ideas onto post-it notes, or use a popular mind-mapping tool to create
an affinity map. You’re trying to identify overarching themes, stages, and/or emotions. Look for patterns; these will
help inform your insights.

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6. Craft insight(s).

Once you have your big ideas and themes, craft insights using Jason’s formula:

● Observed Patterns + [“However” or “But” or “Therefore”] = Insight

Consider how your insights relate to your initial driving question. How has the question evolved? What are the
factors you’ve now discovered are crucial to consider? Consider objections, emotions, and touchpoints.

Share your list of insights with the class. Remember: a good insight will spark conversation!

7. Create your “before” journey map.

It’s time to organize your information and insights into a journey map that lays out the shopping experience. Think
of it as a designed, organized way to represent the shopping experience over time. Consider:

● What is the start-to-finish shopping experience, step-by-step?

● What are the higher-level stages of those steps? Are there phases based on time, emotion, and/or theme?
● How will you represent what happens pre- and post- shopping?
● Is there a overall shape to the process? a line? a circle?

Include at least 5 touchpoints between the shopper and the store. How you design the experience is up to you—be
creative! You might find it useful to use colors, symbols, or smiley faces to represent common patterns (as in
Jason’s example map).

Note: For now, use this “before” journey map to represent the process according to your research; hold off on
proposing solutions until you’ve explored the ideation techniques in the next steps.

Title your map something like “The Grocery Store Shopping Experience: Before.”

Share your map with the class in the project gallery.

A sample journey map by frog design.

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8. Ideate.

Now is the time to come up with ideas to improve the experience in line with your driving question! How can you
alter touchpoints, moments, and patterns to achieve what you’ve set out to improve?

● Ask: What does the store already offer?

● Ask: What can new technologies offer?
● Keep a sketchbook and post-it notes nearby so that if an idea comes to you, you can capture it right away.
● Try out a random entry exercise to kickstart your thinking.

This is design thinking. With each new solution, consider how it relates to the two key principles: form follows
function, and form follows emotion.

9. Rethink and redraw your journey map.

Now you that fully understand the current experience and have thought up many ways to improve it, create a new
journey map (either building on your first version or entirely from scratch) that represents the ideal experience.

Title your new map something like “The Grocery Store Shopping Experience: After.”

Share your map with the class in the project gallery.

10. Bonus: Tell the story of your redesigned, ideal journey.

As Jason says, “Design is about evangelizing new ways of seeing the world.” If you’d like to go one step further,
share the story of your redesigned experience. Use words, video, a diagram, or any other creative medium. Keep it
short, and consider the classic story arcs that might best resonate with your audience. By persuading us that your
new journey will make world a better place, you’ll prove the value of your redesign.

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Additional Resources

More about frog: frog is a strategic-creative consultancy that uses research, strategy, technology, and design to
improve products, services, and experiences.
● Watch a short video with founder Hartmut Esslinger. (3 min)
● Listen to a Design Matters podcast between Esslinger and Debbie Millman. (30 min)
● Explore the company’s blog, design mind, for case studies, articles, video, and more.
● Download frog’s Collective Action Toolkit, a 38-page PDF of exercises for communities eager to create change.

More on journey maps: Check out these resources on journey maps for tips, tricks, and advice:
● Using Customer Journey Maps to Improve Customer Experience via Harvard Business Review
● Customer Journey Mapping: 10 Tips for Beginners via Adobe
● The Anatomy of an Experience Map via Adaptive Path

More on story arcs: Here is a video of Kurt Vonnegut talking about the shapes of stories, which Jason mentions in the
video lessons. (5 min)

More on design research: If you’re looking for an in-depth reading list, check out this post from frog’s blog: “What You
Will Find on a Design Researcher’s Bookshelf,” a list of more than 40 classic texts on design research, methods,
interviewing, data capture, synthesis, and communication.

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