Summary

GuardAqui is a service that brings ease and freedom for bathers. It keeps the user's things secure in the beach, with an urban locker's system with biometric authentication. My role as co-founder and designer was to aid the user research. Also design the business model and design both digital and physical products. I collaborated with product and industrial design, business design, UX, and interaction design to launch this project.

Discovery

In order to start our project, we choose the Public Spaces theme, to observe and interview users of that type of space. Then, we interviewed people in parks, squares, and shores in order to discover what bothers them, what brings joy, pains, and desires.

Places we went.

Parque Treze de Maio (Downtown)

Parque Urbano da Macaxeira (West Suburbs)

Sidewalk and Gardens of Boa Viagem (South Suburbs)

Parque Dona Lindu (South Suburbs)

Insights

What bothers them?

• Lack of security

• Subtilization of equipment and urban furniture in parks

What make them happy?

• Own a place outdoors for leisure and physical activities

• Own a place to take their children to have fun

• Exercise their body and connect themselves with the city.

What are their artifacts?

• Jogging track

• Public gyms

• Sport courts

• Playgrounds

• bike tracks

• WCs

• Smartphones

• Headphones

Surveys and interviews

We created online surveys using Google Forms, right after our research we visited places, to expand the range of people and collect data. We also interviewed and observed people in parks and shores of Recife to understand when, and how, they use the public space for working out.

Analysis

Pains

Security

“There was a guardhouse here, but it was recently removed. It is dangerous at night, when it rains or when there are few people.”

Motivation

“I practiced handball, futsal, volleyball, swimming, capoeira, cycling and running. Because of college fatigue, I don't practice anything anymore”.

Company

“My friends go to the gym, but I don't have the money, and jogging alone is dangerous”.

What are the biggest difficulties in practicing physical activities?

• Lack of a companion

• Messy routine

• Little mood due to day-to-day tasks

• Travel Time

• “I don't know people who like the same sport as me”

• Exhaustion

The Problem

The lack of motivation to perform physical activities, caused mainly by day-to-day fatigue, added to the lack of public safety, keep people away from exercising in public spaces.

Define

We defined our unique value proposition, after we finally understood the people's needs and defined our problem to solve. This will guide us to a real user-oriented design project. Ensure that people have a place to store their objects in a safe and practical way, while visiting parks and public beaches. We started looking for solutions on Google in order to discover what has been made for this issue around the world.

Our purpose is to ensure that people have a place to leave their belongings safely and conveniently while they go to the beach.

We defined our direct competitors, by the data found earlier, to proceed with our business model. And we created a value curve, following the blue ocean strategy, to visualize how our product can stand out from the direct competitors

Design

First sketches of our locker

I designed our first draft of the locker, using Sketckup, in order to build our first prototype

Low-fidelity prototype

I started designing a low-fidelity prototype, which we brought in beaches. Furthermore, I used shoes boxes and a smartphone as an interactive interface made in Adobe XD, in order to test usability features and business decisions with our users.

Business Plan Canvas (Lean Canvas)

We designed our business model based on lean canvas in order to think about and define others aspects of the business, such as cost structures and revenue.

Persona

I created some personas based on our user profiles, in order to visualize and understand several facets of our users

User Journey

We designed our User Journey, based on the previous interactions and reports. It was made in Google Slides, in order to visualize how the user interacts with our service, and the product.

App Prototype

I designed a high-fidelity interface screens and interactive prototypes for the mobile app and the lockers interface screen, using Adobe XD, in order to provide sufficient material for the development of the apps.

Locker Design v2

Locker’s Medium-fidelity Prototype

I designed a medium-fidelity locker prototype, modeling in Sketchup and laser-cutting in pieces, in order to demonstrate how the locker would work in real life.

Validate

We presented our project at the demo day, to validate our new business plan. We created a pitch in Google Slides and our CEO presented to around 200 people.

In the end, GuardAqui won the Best Startup Prize and the project was later incubated at the Porto Digital, in Recife.

Conclusion

This project was my UX/UI school. With the support of great professors, friends and my enjoyment to learn, I could deliver my responsibilities and build my passion for Interaction Design.

I was surprised to see the distance between how many people get interest in the product, and how many would REALLY be able to pay for the service, because that could be normal in other countries in the world, but the concept was pretty new for the Brazilians.

The project had many challenges, including to gather funds to make our physical prototypes and the possibility to make a real locker. But the most difficult piece was to motivate and deal with my buddies. All of them were developers and had no experience to talk to real people in the interviews. But at the end all of us understood that we need to do things that would not be on a computer.

While the whole project was a huge learning experience, as I said earlier, I especially loved designing the physical lockers. As an architect, in a way I was in my comfort zone, and it was nice to design and build with a laser cutter. It was a blast.