Class Project

My team was given the good fortune to explore an area of opportunity for any existing brand or organization.

Jon Gordon, Damayanti Battacharjee, Chris Eichler

Our first task was to figure out an area of opportunity that excited us. After many hours of ideation and deliberation we decided on this: People want to know where their money is going and would love to read more about the companies without going through a million websites.

We decided to partner with Public Citizen.

Public Citizen is a nonprofit organization that supports trade policies that aim to eliminate corporate and protectionist influences from the trade-pact negotiating process. It has over forty years of experience representing the interests of ordinary people and to providing a check on the power of large corporations. Public Citizen’s staff includes about fifty researchers, advocates, and attorneys. The Washington Post calls the organization a “public watchdog” and a “consumer advocacy group.”

After choosing Public Citizen as our partner the next step was to do more research, so we sent out a survey and conducted user interviews to discover how people felt about the brands they were supporting with their money.

Out of 86 respondents to our survey, 59 felt it was important to know where their money was ultimately going after a purchase, and 73 wanted to be made aware of the companies that they were buying from. This data helped us to know we were on the right track with our hypothesis.

Our user interviews further pushed us to create an app that could help users identify who they were buying their products from. Here are a couple of key quotes:

From this research we created primary and secondary user personas who each had a unique take on finding out about the companies they purchase from.

Now that we had identified our primary and secondary users, it was time to lock down a problem statement that would encapsulate the essence of our hypothesis as well as the new information we had learned and synthesized.

Conscious consumers need a quick and easy way to find out about the culture and values of the companies that they support with their business in order to make informed decisions about how to spend their money.

Starting from hand-drawn sketches, we went through 3 iterations of our app, which we decided would scan a product’s barcode to bring up information about the company.