Oblo – Designing Connected Services for Global Markets

At Oblo, I worked on a consulting project on a home appliance product launching in 2025 for a client in the food and beverage sector. The objective was to conduct market research and devise a plan for the product UI and associated product subscription service.

Kicking off the immersion phase of the project, my team conducted desk research to understand our client’s market landscape across their four target countries in Europe. Through secondary research and digital ethnography, I collected insights on client profiles and consumer habits, competitor offerings, connected industry opportunities, and existing subscription models.

After desk research, my team and I engaged several dozen participants from our four target countries for a one-week diary study. We devised a series of questions and conversation prompts which we rolled out over the course of this diary study via WhatsApp chat, also asking participants to send photographs associated with specific moments for extra insight and to strengthen our participant profile documentation. My team compiled and analyzed our insights, extracting relevant quotes and findings. Then, based on emerging insights, identified 3 major behavioural drivers and a set of 8 challenges (or opportunities) that would be the starting point to craft the experience strategy.

From there, my team conducted an ideation workshop with our stakeholders to brainstorm service solutions. We presented the archetypes to the client team, outlined the customer journey divided into key phases, then opened the floor to the workshop group for ideas. The goal was to identify areas of opportunity at each customer journey phase considering each of the three archetypes, and to spark creative service solutions. We ensured that all stakeholders were kept up-to-date on the project, were listened to, and were actively involved in the discussion and contributed ideas for solutions.

The ideation workshop resulted in a wide array of service features idea cards, which we presented to a selection of our previous study participants for evaluation in a second round of interviews. Our objective here was to validate each service feature idea while collecting additional insights for implementation strategies. As a result, my team was able to eliminate low-interest items from the service features idea list, and reinforce high-interest items, for each client archetype at various stages of the customer journey.

Considering the feedback from stakeholders and study participants, and our initial research data, my team elaborated on our distilled list of service feature ideas to prepare an “idea catalogue”, rounding out each idea card into specific, actionable recommendations for our stakeholders. Our final delivery to our client was a roadmap with service components, complete with application suggestions, templates, and examples for implementation.