Week 12: Journey Maps
Mapping ideal customer journeys and understanding weaknesses.
📌 Introduction
This week I was assigned the task of outlining my customer’s ideal journey. I made a couple of new adjustments to my concept, but the main idea is still the same. The adjustments definitely generated some questions and weaknesses that I have to address, which I will point out later on.
Before diving into this week’s work, I wanted to acknowledge that I found a mentor! She is an excellent blend between sustainability and business, hence her Sustainability and Business Development Manager title. I’m very excited to work with her and get her perspective on creating new opportunities and business models for my project, something I should not exclude.
Last but not least, I talked to my thesis buddy, Rafa. We had a great conversation about our projects and finding mentors. He was struggling to find one, but he was having lots of mentor interviews towards the end of this week. I’m very happy for him, and I’m sure he will choose someone who can be supportive.
🗺 Journey Map
As a reminder, my platform is named Scrapsy. Through Scrapsy, my customers can choose a food waste pick-up service that exchanges food waste for produce every week. That said, my platform has 3 users: the City Dweller (Beginners), the Intermediate Recycler (Advanced Sustainability Enthusiast), and the Composter (Pick-up Service Provider).
For this journey map, I considered the main customers: the City Dweller and the Intermediate Recycler. Let’s have a closer look.
There are two ways users can learn about Scrapsy: The first one is for curious and thirsty minds, who are always on the look for something new in sustainability to try out (A). The second one is also for curious minds, but they value friend’s and other people’s opinions. I’m sure there are several ways to attract new people to the platform, but these will do for now.
Here’s where everything turns a bit messy — pun intended. Besides having the common onboarding experience, signing up with an email account, etc., users will choose a service provider based on important details, such as distance to their location and pricing.
I haven’t considered the pricing aspect in detail yet, but this is something my mentor brought up during our first meeting. She mentioned that I should include different pricing tiers people can choose from, based on what they can afford. Therefore, on the next step, you will notice a “Sign Up for Drop-Off.” This allows users to bring their own food waste to a nearby site, translating into discounts on the monthly payments or coupons. This area still needs further development, though.
Another important factor I wanted to include and emphasize was educational content. I was aware that service providers, such as Groundcycle, encountered contaminated food waste, but I did not address this issue in my early wireframes. Therefore, users will now go through a series of “courses” that educate them on storing their food waste properly and not contaminating it. I’m not quite sure how I will develop this yet, but I am considering gamifying it, if possible.
Phew! Hopefully, I didn’t lose you because now comes the fun part. As users begin to collect their food waste by using their own bins or the ones given by the service provider, they will receive an ingredients list. Each ingredient will include different recipes they can save and try out once the produce arrives!
You might be wondering when that is. Well, it depends. If customers chose to drop it off, they could exchange it for coupons, discounts, or credit. I know; it’s confusing for me, too. I need to figure out how to provide different tiers for customers who might not want to pay a high monthly fee. Again, this is currently being developed.
If the user schedules weekly pickups, the service provider will pick up the food waste, so the user dumps it in their containers. Then, the composter will give our customers that week’s produce. This would be the last step of the journey, which will repeat through time, as you can see.
🤔 Weaknesses
I think there are several weaknesses in this concept. For example, the monthly payments could turn off a lot of potential customers. However, a major obstacle revolves around feasibility. Most service providers don’t have a fully circular system where they provide produce swapping programs as Groundcyle does. I could argue that some customers might not want to exchange food waste for produce and focus on dumping it every week. But, this could lead to heavily benefitting one provider over others.
These are all the obstacles I might encounter written as “how might we” statements:
- How might I create equitable and sustainable price tiers?
- How might I attract and benefit customers who can’t afford monthly fees?
- How might I provide equal opportunities for all service providers?
- How might I educate customers without boring them down?
- How might I create an easy tool for service providers to update constantly?
- How might I continue to deliver value once the pandemic ends and food waste trucks are back?
💭 Final Thoughts
There are definitely areas to improve and discover, but I can’t wait to discuss with my mentor and see what she thinks. I also need to do more research and start analyzing future trends because, at some point, NYC’s produce trucks will come back — or not, who knows? Another random thought I’ve had is to really bring this project to fruition — I know, it’s crazy. But, I want to shake some things around and take the next steps with this project in the future. I’ll dream about it for now.
That’s it for now. As always, stay safe and healthy. See you next week.✌🏼
Thank you for taking the time to read through my post.
To connect or share your opinion, please reach out to me via email at crussoherrera@sva.edu.
