Samsung Next
Overview
The Role
Samsung Next is an innovation incubator and I supported the multiple startups under Next as a research consultant. My day-to-day consisted of running multiple mixed-method research projects and delivering insights to product stakeholders. As a point of resource, I sat in on brain trust meetings and helped guide design sprints.
The Projects
I hopped around quite a bit but I was primarily dedicated to driving the generative research for an interactive cooking concept, the evaluative research of a recipe app called Whisk, and the discovery work for Whisk Studio (a B2B suite of tools). On the side, I helped evangelize research across Next by providing more visibility into our impact.
The Impact
Because all of the projects at Samsung are highly research-driven, the synthesis of my research directly translated into product strategy. A huge part of my work was focused on humanizing these products and making sure they were inclusive in presentation and in outcomes. Working with and learning from diverse users encouraged me to continuously advocate for more thoughtful technology made for all.
Cooking Together: Market Landscape Research
With the vision of people cooking together virtually, we started by evaluating the various platforms that existed in this space. The team wanted to know: Who are our competitors?
Competitor Offerings
Through secondary research, I was able to put together a list of products and services that touched on similar ideas. To organized them, I took the priorities identified by the product team to assess how the offerings of these products and services matched up.
Competitor Stratification
I also organized these competitors in a graph to see if they were more educational or more entertainment, and if they were one-to-one experiences or one-to-many platforms.
Iterative Design Sprints
As we imagined a new interactive tool for cooking together, we invited potential users to iteratively formulate the new concept with us. I spoke to chefs, casual cooks, teachers, and learners in one-on-one interviews at the end of 3 design sprints in an effort to co-design this concept.
Design Sprint 1: Early Concept Validation
With an early-stage prototype, I interviewed 6 participants (general population) on their cooking experience, behaviors, and tools. I then had them walk through and play with the prototype to gain some general feedback, allowing the designers, product manager, and stakeholders to probe as well.
Design Sprint 2: Word Association Workshop
A recurring question was how users would feel about cooking with others virtually. For the second round of interviews with 6 new participants, I included a word association exercise as an attitudes assessment. They compared cooking with others in-person to cooking with others virtually. It was a semi-open exercise, with some words provided as ideas but with the ability to add words as well.
Design Sprint 3: Feature Prioritization Workshop
As the designs started to solidify a bit more, the question of which features to focus on surfaced. In the interviews following the third sprint, I included a workshop exercise where participants viewed (and added to) a list of features and organized them within a target board based on how important they were for an interactive cooking platform.
Empathy Mapping & Journey Mapping
From the various interviews, I captured attitudinal and behavioral data that was often replicated across users. I collated all of these notes and color coded them by users. Then, to synthesize these findings, I organized them into an empathy map so that the product team and I could start understanding how users thought and felt (attitudes) compared to how what they said and did (behaviors). Additionally, we were able to capture what they see and hear (context), their pains, and their gains.
From the 18 interviews, the participants also gave me an idea of their cooking chronology as they spoke about their process and actions. The variances were naturally separated by user types. From this data, I produced three different journey maps: chefs, serious students, and casual cooks.
Concept Evaluation & Cognitive Walkthrough
The sprints all culminated to a finalized prototype that I evaluated in a standard Concept Evaluation study. We highlighted a couple of key task flows and had participants complete a Cognitive Walkthrough of the experience. Some opportunities for improvement were identified but the conceptualized experience proved to be straightforward and enjoyable.
Final Thoughts
Working at Samsung Next was truly like working at a startup, where few players wear many hats and everyone is invested in making ideas fly. Because I’ve worked in various agile environments before, I already knew that I was adaptable enough to take on a role like this but I really hit a growth spurt here with the amount of exposure the culture provided me. The company emphasized a flat hierarchy so I was able to interact with and learn from so many different people and projects. I also got the opportunity to work on an intimate team with only two other researchers, driving research and design strategy across products and throughout the company. It taught me a lot about being action-oriented and value-driven. I’m so thankful for everything that I’ve learned as a Nexter and I hope to carry this energy with me wherever I go!
Making Whisk friendly for everyone
Whisk is an all-in-one recipe-to-shopping-list application that allows users to aggregate recipes from multiple platforms and make them shoppable and shareable within the app! Because food behavior is so diverse and personal to each individual user, ensuring the app’s value to all users requires understanding the various influences on food decisions and being conscious of the fact that “usable” looks different to different people. Artifacts of my research process can be seen below.
Other S-Next Projects
Inclusive Recruiting
Affinity Diagramming
Surfacing Meaning
Building Context
Enhancing Usability
Delivering Action