Project Overview

As part of an Interaction Design course, we were assigned to choose an organization to collaborate with for the rest of the semester. Our goal was to form a mutually beneficial relationship with the organization by providing a conceptual design solution that enhances their working environment.

Our group partnered up with Rain Or Shine, a homemade ice-cream chain, to thoroughly examine their working environment (whether it be their store layout, menu design, or the interaction between workers), and come up with a well-founded solution and design prototypes that the company could potentially make use of to better their workflow.

Figma,
Adobe Illustrator,
Adobe Photoshop

UX Design,
UX Research,
Copywriting,
Graphic Design

Rain or Shine Owners at the Cambie location

Rain or Shine

Rain or Shine is a family-run ice cream chain created from a couple’s enthusiasm for conscious eating, and their love for ice cream. Providing their customers with locally-sourced, organic, and delicious ice cream with a variety of mouth-watering flavors, their mission is to make their neighbors happy by delivering the best product. Hence, their motto is ‘stronger together.’ They currently have stores in three locations: Cambie, UBC, and Kitsilano.

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Rain or Shine Ice Cream exists to make our neighborhoods happy! This is our ultimate goal and what we strive to do through all actions of our company.

rain Or Shine's Vision

Research

Ethnography

We did our first site visit to Rain or Shine to understand who they are and how they operate their business.

Method Used:

1 hour 30 minutes interview with a shift leader and a manager
1 hour observation of the store as a customer

Result:

In the interview, the staff reported that there are 3 main communication systems at Rain or Shine which include: Word of mouth, a physical communication booklet, and WhatsApp group chat. Each of these systems has its issues.

Word of mouth to spread information is unreliable as it gets overwhelming and mis-interpreted especially for those who are not full-time workers.
The physical communication booklet is not always useful as many members forget to check what new information is being passed on through the booklet.
WhatsApp group chat is ineffective as important information gets lost between the redundant conversations of personal/general chatter amongst the members.

Our Reflection

Even though many areas within the store needed improvements such as the confusing and unclear menu board design, and store layout (line up area and paying area), we wanted to focus on more critical and high-impact areas that's making the internal structure of Rain or Shine to fall.

Initial Design focus: Handing information more effectively between each shop and employee.

Design Opportunities & Direction

Based on the user journey maps, we saw value in taking a broader look at how the communication is affecting Rain or Shine’s work environment, and the productivity at large.

The 2 design directions we proposed are:

Owner-to-staff communication
Staff-to-staff communication

We omitted the staff-to-customer communication as we concluded that the most of the shortcomings of the staff-to-customer interactions stem from the poor communication within the internal staff members.

Building Realistic Personas

After analyzing interview notes, recordings, and our user journey summaries to date, we built personas of potential stakeholders to understand their standpoints, goals, struggles, and emotional states. Based on the 2 design directions proposed, the three personas we chose to define were the owner, a shift leader, a part-time staff member, and a new hire. We tried to build realistic personas that exhibited aspects of their personal lives such as their career status, hobbies, and their daily routines. This was crucial in understanding why they would behave or feel a certain way during their various interactions at Rain or Shine.

Whileboard Persona Brainstorming

Owner Casey

Casey loves her business and dreams of expanding Rain or Shine to other locations. At the same time, she understands that her busy schedule, being a housewife and a business owner has prevented her from paying close attention to each store location and has caused inconsistency in information and standards between the stores over time. She wants to be there for her employees to answer their questions and encourage conversations about what can be improved in the stores.

Scooper Quinne

Quinne is a newly hired scooper at Rain or Shine who wants to gain professional experience before she graduates from high school. The most difficult part of her job is memorizing procedures and answering customer questions. Her inconsistent scheduling and lack of experience don’t help with getting used to the routine of her tasks. She feels burdened and self-conscious about being a slow learner.

Part-timer Shane

Shane has been with Rain or Shine for the past 3 years but his recent post-grad employment has made him become a part-time worker at Rain or Shine. He truly loves working at RoS and cares about the image of the store and the owners. He is afraid that his reduced hours have made him out of touch with the latest store matters and might cause inconsistency when dealing with customers. He wants to be up to date with the policies while maintaining his current work schedule.

Nailing the Design Focus

Reframing the design focus

Through the creation of personas and analyzing the data collected, we noticed that lack of accessible information was the root cause of disparity and unawareness amongst employees which led to a weakened internal communication system within Rain or Shine.

Reframed design focus: reducing the barriers within Rain or Shine’s internal communication by addressing the lack of accessible information to employees.

Participatory Group Workshop

In the hope of understanding our target users better and validating our design focus, we conducted a participatory workshop that's made up of 3 custom-designed activities. After each activity, there was a team discussion.
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Participants: 3 shift leaders from RoS, Cambie location

Activity 1. Virtual collage

Given the prompt “Describe how the communication at Rain or Shine affects your job/ability to do your job” each member was given their own board to create a collage using provided photos, emojis, and colors.

Goal: We wanted to maximize their freedom to express themselves by allowing them to freely populate their boards with google images and a wide selection of emojis and colors.

Insight: During the debrief session, we learned how communication helps keep the workplace running smoothly, and that inefficient and incompetent communication affects employees’ motivation and care.

Activity 2. Mind Map

All participants collaborated together on one board where each member added their thoughts about the given topic, 'communication' and expanded on others' values that echoed their thoughts.
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Insight: It allowed us to see what our participants prioritized and valued in their methods of communicating with their peers.

Activity 3. Brainstorming

For 10 minutes, members brainstormed ideas/ways they would tackle the lack of communication within their workplace given what they’ve learned in the previous activities.
Insight: We saw many ideas to be integration to their existing communication systems. It also allowed us to reflect upon how adding new processes to their existing way of doing things could become counterproductive.

Workshop Reflection

Through the participatory workshop, we learned about participants' views, pain points during day-to-day communication in the store, their ideas for effective communication, and their approach to solving existing problems at RoS. After considering the employees' preferences and struggles, we generated value propositions we wanted to take into account when building the new design concepts.

Reframed design focus: reducing the barriers within Rain or Shine’s internal communication by addressing the lack of accessible information to employees.

Value Propositions

The conceptual solution must be:

Visible and accessible
Up-to-date
Quick and easy to use
Coherent

Policy Update

For our Policy Update concept, we took into consideration the merit of having a coherent platform for employees to rely on whenever they need to check the official and up-to-date policies to back them up in their decision-making process e.g. during customer service or preparing a recently added ice cream flavor.

Mad Libs Relay

Considering the struggle of shift leaders not being well-informed and not having a consistent source of knowledge, we wanted to create an easy-to-use and accessible solution to help them get started on their shift by keeping in direct touch with the previous shift leader through a platform.

Final Concept

Madlibs Relay

We chose Madlib Relay as our final concept solution because it was the most feasible method which satisfied our value propositions. Madlib relay is a support system primarily built for Shift Leaders to pass on day-to-day information in order to help others make informed decisions thus making teamwork and task division more effective. Since shift leaders are the first to arrive in the store and they have the responsibility of prioritizing tasks, Madlib Relay is a reliable way to communicate tasks and updates between not only shift leaders, but also production staff and scoopers.

Final Concept Rationale

Even though we couldn’t physically test out the board due to the Pandemic, we strongly believe the Mad Libs Board will be successfully implemented as it incorporates the value propositions derived from our research, namely: easiness of use, updatability, accessibility, and coherency.

Easiness of use

It uses pre-existing systems and materials such as the wooden dowels and chalkboard which will allow shift leaders to quickly adapt to using the board

Updatability / Flexibility within Constraints

Although the answer cards are laminated/finalized to fit the key words most used by the RoS employees, Shift leaders will have the flexibility to rewrite the prompt questions on the board as needed, as long as it makes sense within the context of the answer cards.

Ensuring Coherency

It brings all the staff members on one platform which will have an overall effect of making sure everyone deals with situations in a more unified and coherent manner.

Transparency & accessibility

It ensures shift leaders are well-informed on store matters in a transparent and visible form (as it will be displayed in the high-traffic area for all members), allowing other staff like scoopers and production to take part in the teamwork and accountability of tasks mentioned in the board.

Once all the employees are on the same page, it will create a more tight-knit working environment which in turn will help Rain or Shine more effectively achieve their core mission of making their customers and neighbors happy.

Project Reflection

Working with a real company constantly required us to practice professional communication and observation skills to collaborate effectively with industry professionals. Through this project, we learned the importance of delving into the research and using the information available at hand to find genuine problem areas before generating solutions. The more we studied our target users, the existing system, and in-store interactions, the more we had to redefine our design focus to find plausible problem space. This taught us the importance of stepping back from our own biases and perceptions, and giving priority to the needs of our target audience. We needed to own our work and research, then work iteratively and collaboratively within our team to create the most accessible solution that all of us could stand behind. In the future, we would like to physically build the Madlib Relay Board to test its real-life application in-store and its interactivity among Ros Employees.

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