We support our clients in design research: interviewing users, generating user contexts and scenarios, and qualitative synthesis. We believe that evidence based design is impactful design.
Research on Elderly Nutrition
User Research, Opportunity Mapping, and Design to Value (DTV) Analysis
In Singapore, malnutrition impacts approximately 50% of community- dwelling seniors aged 65 and above. Population studies show that swallowing impairment, diminished senses (taste & smell), food insecurity, poor cooking skills and low food variety are major factors leading to elderly malnutrition.
Working together with local social enterprises, we embarked on observation and survey studies to understand the attitudes and behaviors of Singaporean seniors towards ageing and nutrition. From our findings, we defined detailed personas of seniors, their family members and their caregivers.
One persona we identified was an independent pioneer, a senior who enjoys meeting his friends in his neighborhood hawker centre (local food courts) but has since gone out less after his wife passed away. Without his wife's companionship, meal times have become drastically simpler:
“ When I feel like it, I go down to my hawker centre to ‘打包 ' (take-away). Most times, even though my children help me with the marketing, I usually ask for can food that I can easily open and eat with plain porridge. Its easier this way."
During our research, we interviewed and surveyed a total of 103 elderly participants and gathered actionable insights that resonated with our client. Our client's product development team gained confidence to pursue innovation opportunities and expand their product solutions for addressing elderly nutrition.
Accelerating product development through technology bench marking
We conducted multiple design sprints with our client to spur ideation at the early stage of the innovation research. When our clients embarked on the development of an innovative appliance to automate home preparation of puree meals, we were excited to help in technology benchmarking.
Our team performed benchmarking and value analysis of existing products with desired meal preparation features. On project completion, we delivered various product architectures concepts, competitor analysis, and cost to manufacture targets, helping our clients push to the next stage of product development.