Next Steps

At this point we had turned our research into a foundation on which we could create a product.

Preparing to transition to Product Design

After we had established these 'jobs' consumers were hiring we went back and did a round of 'axial coding' on our interviews where we organized the insights from the interviews according how they matched up with the themes we'd decided on, going back to our data showed us that job #3 "I hire wine to feel special" was more accurately expressed as, "I hire wine to relax." This step helped us confirm our findings and hone them in. 

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To prepare for the product design phase, our research team broke down each job in terms of 'pushes and pulls' what's pushing the consumer towards using wine? ie: 'I can't drink beer, it makes me feel bloaty.' What's pulling the customer away from wine? ie: 'I prefer the taste of whiskey when I'm drinking.' We also took this opportunity to exam the habits consumers had, examine their anxieties associated with drinking wine, and their motivations for drinking wine.

A USER-CENTERED APPROACH TO TECHNOLOGY INNOVATION IN THE WINE INDUSTRY

Qualitative Research

For our capstone project we worked with a top technology consulting company to do some innovation research in the area of wine and technology. In order to turn such a nebulous ask, into a well define product idea, we started with a good deal of background research. Initial market research showed us that millennials are drinking up to 42% of the wine supply, more than any other generation. We decided to focus our research on millennials as they would be a great target audience of a technology product. Instead of trying to start designing off our pre-conceived biases we used qualitative research to understand why people drink wine. We focussed on what the Functional, Emotional, and Social needs users were using wine to fulfill. 

A quick outline of our qualitative research process:

1. We performed 15 semi-structured interviews. These interviews focused digging at specific memories with wine and remembering what the occasion was, who the interviewee was with, and how the felt while consuming wine.

2. A team of three including myself did a round of 'open coding' on the interview transcripts, 5 each; during this process we outlined persistent themes from the interviews that gave insight into why people consumed wine, wanted to consume wine, and how the felt while consuming wine. We ended up with 50 themes, too many loosely defined themes to define actionable design guidelines.

3. We got our research team together to use Clayton Christenson's "Jobs to be done" framework to distill these into something actionable. The main 'job' that people were hiring wine was, 'to be confident in themselves.' We further broke this down into six 'sub-jobs' that people were hiring wine for. Those are:

   1. Consumers hire wine to express class status

   2. Consumers hire wine to relax and feel special

   3. Young adults hire wine to feel mature

   4. Consumers hire wine to bring people together

   5. Consumers hire wine to have something to talk about

   6. Enthusiasts hire wine knowledge to help them learn and grow

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We synthesized these into t research deliverable for our client linked above.