Wash & Fold Bag Redesign
The Wash & Fold Bag Redesign was one of projects I worked on during my masters project and Arizona State University. I worked on this project with Breanna Kern, Maddy Melnichak, Rikita Saunders, and Termaine Young. It was interesting collaborating with this group since we were all online students living in different time zones. We had developed plan which delegated out tasks and when and who would be submitting the information.
Original Design
Here is a picture of the original design of the Wash & Fold bag. The goal of the redesign is to improve the board inside the bag that helps fold the clothes, research materials that the bag could be made out of, and optimize the size of the bag.
Heuristic Evaluation
Before testing out the product on individuals, I had a classmate ship me one of the wash and fold bags in order to get a better understanding of the product that we were redesigning. The team member also sent us the current video of how to use the wash and fold bag. I analyzed the functionality of the product, examined the material of the bag, and tested out the piece of plastic that was used in order to fold the clothes.
Persona
To get a better understanding of who will be using the Wash & Fold bag, each member on the team developed a person based on a few different people that the bag and service would be targeting. My persona that I created was named Sandra Nielson who was part of the older generation that would be using the bag. Since she is older, she doesn’t always have the energy to do multiple loads of laundry and wants an easy way to get her laundry done.
Journey Mapping
We then developed a journey map in order to get a better understanding of how the user felt along their journey of using the bag to seek out what some of the pain points that the user was facing. For this example, we used a persona named Jessica Evans, who is a busy mom with a demanding job.
Low Fidelity
After conducting the surveys and looking back at all of our observation sheets, we all then collaborated and created a few different redesigns of the Wash & Fold Bag in order to fix the issues that the users were facing so the bag would better fit the user. Below is a picture of my low-fidelity mockup that I created when we were working on out redesign. We wanted to reconstruct the shape of the bag to allow more space for the laundry. We want to change the material of the bag to something that would not collect bacteria over time. I had also thrown the idea around of adding dividers in the bag in order to keep each individual of the family’s laundry separate from one another. This concept did not make it to the final redesign. We had also looked into creating a better folding board that was more sturdy compared to the thin plastic one in the original design.
We then came up with a final design and created 3D images in order to get a better idea of what the bag would look like based on the feedback of the users and the ideas from the team.
High Fidelity
As a group, we collaborated our ideas to create a high fidelity mockup of the new Wash & Fold Bag. Below are a few images of the newly designed bag as well as describing some of the changes that were made to the bag. We also included a high fidelity prototype of the folding board that goes inside the bag that you receive. We included the and described the changes as well.
Overall, this project gave me a better understanding on how to redesign a physical product. I am more used to redesigning an application or a website versus an actual, physical product. It was also an interesting learning experience of how to stay on topic during the project. There was some confusion at one point on what our target goal was for the project and what we needed to focus on. We did touch on some aspects of the services that the Wash & Fold Bag company offers, but we ended up focusing more on the bag itself as well as the folding board for the clothes since this was part of the bag.