REMANE
Time: 3 Months
Role: Design and User Research Lead
Description: Students in the first cohort of Product Prodigy were asked to create a company and launch it within the span of 2 semesters. Students were taught Design Thinking techniques and how to use human-centered design to create a more equitable service.
Programs Used: Illustrator, Photoshop, Miro
PROBLEM
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Black women going to college often lack the education and resources to take care of their own hair. This leads them to lack confidence, developing unhealthy hair care processes, and adjusting their social activities because of their hair.
EMPATHY
I helped conduct over 30 in-person interviews to understand our mission to empower women on their hair journey. We focused on asking open-ended questions that would lead us to the root of each users problem. Some of our key findings showed:
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71% of black women prefer to have a simplified fuss-free hair routine, furthermore, over 70% of black women wear their hair natural at least once a year.
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Anxiety and Insecurity were two emotions associated with many of the users fear around their hair
- Anxiety came from these girls worry about the consistency of their hairstyle and lack of knowledge of how to achieve the desired consistency.
- Insecurity seemed to largely be due to non-affirming and mixed messages in society surround the
acceptability of natural hair
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There were many behaviors that we identified during our thematic analysis such as
- Avoidance of hair because of fear of hair loss and damage
- Neglect because of a lack of knowledge
- Self-fulfilling behaviors, how many users felt about their hair correlated to their real hair results.
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We found that natural hair is a trust economy and that women who had figured out what products worked for them remained loyal to those products. We identified an opportunity when we found this loyalty was not shared with the hair tools they used.
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We also found the more women understood about their hair such as the hair's porosity or curl type, the better results they had with their hair and the more enjoyable doing their hair was.
USER PERSONAS
Name: Keisha
Year: Freshman
School: UT-Austin
Description: Keisha comes from a working-class background. She utilizes protective styles like twist outs and weaves to help grow her hair. She is nervous about starting school because her mom usually paid to get her hair done she is not very experienced with doing her own hair. Keisha just big chopped. She is excited to embrace her own hair but is frustrated by the difficulty that comes with learning about her hair.
Name: Asia
Year: Sophomore
School: Rice
Description: Asia runs track for her school, she is serious about her academics and chooses low manipulation hairstyles that fit her active lifestyle. She enjoys watching natural hair YouTubers and understands what her hair type and porosity is. She enjoys keeping up with natural hair trends and experimenting with products.
SYNTHESIS & IDEATION
After conducting interviews we went through a synthesis of the information through creating 2 different customer journies. One focuses on a holistic view of our interviews while another focused on the journey of one of the customer personas we identified
PROTOTYPE & TESTING
With opportunities identified we decided to prototype a bag to interface with the user at the most frustrating part of their hair journey, the wash day.
These are my first three prototypes along with the inspiration that I pulled to create the branding. We created the bag based on our user's desire for natural materials as well as a tie back to their roots. With this, I incorporated African iconography into the imaging and materials.
SHOWCASE
Along with presenting at our first-semester showcase we presented our project on Good Day Austin and spoke about our product and how we used human-centered design to create the bag.
