Here is a description of your company. Proin ex id consectetur lobortis. Aliquam, velit vel faucibus dapibus, augue justo ullamcorper turpis, nec convallis metus nunc vel turpis.
Designing an aspirational water treatment system for rural households in Vietnam
Client: Kanematsu Corporation
Team: market strategist, engineer/design researcher, industrial designer (myself)
My Deliverables:
- Desk market research
- Concept development
- Protoyping (built low-resolution research stimuli and managed manufacturing of higher-resolution prototypes)
- CAD and Render concepts
- Presentation/visual design
Challenge: How might we enable Vietnamese households to have a continuous source of potable water?
Rural Vietnamese communities presented an opportunity for our clients to enter the market with their powder technology - a solution they believed would have a positive health impact and social benefit. Our deliverables would include:
- Identify the target market and their key purchase drivers
- Product design recommendations
- Mini pilot and user feedback
- Distribution strategy
We planned two rounds of field visits to the Mekong delta region of Vietnam to:
- observe rural Vietnamese life focused on the populations’ habits related to water treatment and different water related supply-chain actors and their businesses
- interview potential stakeholders
- prototype technology concepts to test with stakeholders
We conducted a third visit to conduct a micro-trial of the product and service delivery prototypes.
Key Product Learnings
Users had very specific drinking water behaviors and habits:
- There is seasonal ‘water anxiety’ when the preferred water source, rainwater, was at lower levels. This scarcity opens households to new water sources and, therefore, new treatment options. We needed to understand how we could provide an abundant and continuous source of drinking water and transform the water into an ideal source.
- The water source determines how water is used and treated. Certain water cannot be completely cleaned and so can only serve certain functions - including drinking, cooking, etc. It was important for us to disassociate treated drinking water from bad water sources.
- Certain treatments are seen as ‘additive’ whereas others as ‘filtering/removing’ and something must visibly happen to the water to prove it is treated. Households preferred treatments that were 'filtering' and not 'additive.' In its current form, households expressed concerns that the technology resembled chemical treatments and, therefore, they could not use it to treat drinking water. We needed to give the impression that something is removed from the water, not added.
The technology in its current form did not meet user product expectations:
- Based on their experiences with other treatment products, households had very specific expectations for how to boil/sterilize and store the technology which were counterintuitive to the actual best practices. We needed to change this behavior and give them the sense the product was kept sterile continuously between uses.
- The current product size did not match a household's expectation for product to water ratio. We needed to make it easy for households to use the right amount without guessing.
- Users expected the technology to become less effective over time so we needed to provide an indicator that the treatment is working.
Impact of Research and Outcomes
For our micro-trial, we simulated a sales exchange and observed the women's reactions and comments to the product, pricing model, and positioning. These tests guided product design changes including:
- overall product shape and materials
- the filter-product interface
- and use recommendations
Following these tests, the customer used the prototype to conduct additional tests.