Daughter
On the map – Find and share your favourite independents
Challenge
How might we galvanise a surge in support for local independent restaurants?
Solutions
Design Sprint, Customer and stakeholder research interviews, Customer and stakeholder survey, User experience design, Prototyping, User interface design
Outcomes
We created ‘On the Map’. A web platform that allows fans of local independent businesses to share a list of the places they love with their friends.
A blank canvas
When COVID-19 first hit and everyone was forced indoors, the world was looking pretty uncertain. At Daughter we decided to turn our newly found spare time toward a side-project.
As the news unravelled we could see just how much small local independent businesses were being hit, so starting with a blank canvas, we got curious about the challenges this community of business owners was facing, but also the consumer behaviour and what drives certain people to shop local.
Design Sprint
After some initial field research, talking to people, asking businesses about their challenges we'd understood the problem space in order for us to start exploring some ideas.
Through the sprint we explored how we might create a solution to incentivise people to support local independent businesses.
Solution
Introductory offers when shared or recommended by a friend.
Prototype
HTML click-through from a shared link through to receiving an offer.
The learning
It became evident in this prototype that the idea of offering an advocate sharing introductory offer was very dependent on the the vendors creating them, but also played into the price sensitive consumer who's motivations are different from those people we discovered to be advocates and supporters of local independent businesses.
Iteration Sprint
There's something very personal about a recommendation and so with a growing understanding of this core group of people who already actively recommend and support local independent businesses, we changed tac with a new question.
How could we leverage the community of active advocates and break them out of their closed networks of individual referrals and recommendations and bring them together in one place to promote all that is known about their favourite local independent businesses?
Solution
A real-time heat map to leverage the importance of locality and personal feedback and discover new places based on what you already love.
The learning
This prototype had much more traction, although the idea of real-time heat on what's loved was not important. The personal comments (not reviews) and the focus on just independent businesses, plus the recommended places were real winners.
First release
Taking what we had learnt on board, we then transitioned into building out a simple brand and proposition for something that is both desirable and feasible with the technology to hand. With the world returning and time to invest becoming more difficult we needed to release something within reasonable time constraints and get something in the hands of customers quickly asap.
What we released was a simple map listing of businesses that you can discover, add to your list of favourites and then share that list with others. A simple proposition for us to take forward and doesn't rely on users to create an account or business to have any input.
