Bona Fide
Introduction
It is common for unique products to loose their value due to the presence of similar counterfeits in the market with similar branding. This causes loss to both the customer who was looking for that original product, and the creator of the product. Bona Fide is a service made to solve this problem. This case study details the design thinking process behind Bona Fide.
We are a group of sophomore students at Bennett University, working together on this project for our Design Thinking and Innovation class.
Brainstorming
During our initial meeting to decide the project, we started out by simply listing random ideas which might turn into a good idea for the project. After a lot of brainstorming and refining our original ideas, we all agreed to go with the idea of Bona Fide as we all cared about the problem it could potentially solve. We all settled with the following for our project:
Target Users
Creators, manufacturers, and buyers who want to buy original products.
Our Goal
To design and develop a platform that would allow users to check authenticity of a product before buying.
User Research
To better understand the needs of our targeted users, we ran in-depth surveys with over 80 responses. We also conducted in-depth and contextual interviews with 6 people which included people from manufacturers/creators side and buyers looking to buy original products and not fall for counterfeit items to ensure we were gaining accurate and diverse insights.
Features
From the resulting data, we concluded that the following features meet the user’s needs:
- Authenticity Check
- Product Registration
- Transaction History
This implies that users want a simple platform to check authenticity of a product on the go with a simple search.
Design
Keeping all the insights from the research phase, we started brainstorming. We wanted to answer several questions through our design. How might a user want to check authenticity of a product? How might we show previous transactions of a product, if any? How might a user want to update the product status if the user sells a product in future? How might we design a registration process which is sufficient to describe the product yet simple enough for the user?
Secondary Research
We conducted some user-research interviews to check the feasibility of the interface design. We made a testing prototype of the website using Figma, which was used for user-testing. After discussing insights from the interviews, we finalised the interface design.
Planning the Production Phase
With the user requirements, interface design, and project milestones in mind we met up to determine what our production timeline would be like. We divided the development of the website into different phases, and set up hard deadlines to meet up with the milestone deadlines.
We divided different tasks among us and met twice weekly to discuss our work and set expectations for the next meeting. In last few meeting of the development phase we focused on debugging the code and improving the overall flow.
Learnings
Working remotely due to COVID-19 taught us the importance of meeting up regularly on zoom, communicating effectively, and working in a certain amount of time. We learned to hear everyone’s thought process and take in feedback, to get more valuable insights. User-research taught us realise the importance of the user in development of a product from the start. And taking user feedback at every stage, as what we might think is a problem might not actually be a problem for the user. Building this website also taught us how to take each other’s help when we get stuck.
What Might We Do in Future?
Our next step would be to secure the transaction details using blockchain technology. This would ensure that no one could modify or delete any previous transactions of any particular product. After this, our final step is to launch the website.
