Dhobi Station

Dhobi Station was a laundry service operating in Navi Mumbai. They had a unique business model of charging per kg of clothes. They had completed 2 years and were looking to expand their business.

PROBLEM STATEMENT

Dhobis Station wanted to know their existing audience better and gain insights that would help drive their business. With a 2 member team, we were given the responsibility to lead the designs and experience of the brand.

Research

Stakeholder interview helped understanding business needs and expectation. We analysed the requirements to set up research methods :

Conducted interviews with existing store managers and customer service agents
We crawled social media for feedback from the customers
Gathered learnings about purchase behaviour by analysing sales data
Conducted user survey.
Qualitative Research.

Recruiting and data gathering

We shared a questionnaire with the existing customers to understand demographics, services they were interested in and if they would like to participate in our research study. We also connected with the uses who had shared their feedback on social media. On analysing and aligning with the business we created a screener to recruit participants.

Analysis

We collated the data and grouped them depending on common patterns observed. Following were some of the groups: Laundry, Brand, Agent, Service, Cost and Other

Key Insights

These are the top 2 problem statements form our research

Since laundry is a day to day activity, customers had built a relationship with the delivery agent. They trusted the agent on a personal level but the trust did not extend to the brand. They could not recollect the brand logo and got confused with the competitive brands. The users only point of contact was the agent and the helpline number.
Even after owning a washing machine at home people preferred outsourcing their laundry. Users believed the professional laundry service would wash their clothes better but found the task of tracking and remembering the count of clothes given tedious

Prioritization

We addressed the pain points of the users and brainstormed on solutions. Together with stakeholders, we prioritised these issues as per impact and effort. For designs, we created a problem statement:

Increase brand awareness and create a system for users to get in touch with Dhobi station.

Solution

Rebranding

We observed a similar-branded competitive app which confused the users. We had to help users differentiate us from the rest. Agents often mentioned to their customers about industrial-grade machines and customised washing systems that were used. To reinforce the technology, we suggested dhobi station to showcase their machines outside the stores. We realised the store visitors had increased after moving the machines outside.
Taking inspiration from this we decided to create a modern take on this machine as our mark.

Interactive Voice Response

The users would call dhobi station on their toll-free number to place a request for pick up. Similarly while delivering clothes the store manager had to call each customer to confirm.
We created an IVR system to solve this issue. As UX designers, our responsibility was to make this system seamless and elevate the experience.
We built task flows and journeys to achieve the following:
1.    Reduce call time
2.    Provide the user with information with fewer inputs.
3.    Make experience seamless

Dhobi Station App

We drew task flows, built paper wireframes and prototypes to conduct user testing. Using an iterative process, we refined our wireframes to building the final visual screens”

For the soft launch, we narrowed down on the following features

Account creation
Display plans
Request Pick up
Track balance ( pre-paid service)
Get notified about delivery

Aid decision making while choosing plan

Initially, the business provided 16 different laundry package options from a 4-leaf printed brochure.

Taking our learnings from the psychological principle of ‘too many options confuse the user and delay decision making’ and testing 16 packages with the existing user we came to the conclusion that we needed to simplify the packages.

With business, we broke down the decision-making process into 2 tasks.

Select service
Choose the number of kgs.

Learnings for this project

I got to work on new channels such as IVR, service design plan and design strategy thinking. I had to self-study and learn through trial and error.

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