Sponsored Project by P&G Spruce
Bringing next-gen ease to weed-free lawn care
Starting my master’s journey at Northwestern, I took part in a 10-week, human-centered design studio course sponsored by Procter & Gamble. In this intensive course, I collaborated with four classmates to develop a next-generation product concept for Spruce, a new P&G brand aimed at outdoor care. While details of the project remain under NDA, I will provide an overview of my process below:
Time
Fall 2024
Skills
Design Research
Storyboard
Roadmapping
Prototyping
01
The Vision
Research shows that while 97% of consumers believe it's important to maintain the appearance of their yard, 55% are dissatisfied with their current weed control solutions. Recently launched by Procter & Gamble, Spruce offers products containing non-selective contact herbicides.
Our team has been tasked with designing the future of lawn care. Our vision is a truly hands-off solution that helps users maintain a weed-free lawn year-round with minimal effort.
02
Understand
The biggest challenge in starting this project was that lawn maintenance, especially weed control, felt distant from us as students. To bridge this gap, we divided the desktop research tasks, working together to understand the current market landscape and existing products. With this foundational knowledge, we conducted 8 in-home visits over two weeks, observing users’ lawn care practices, methods, and their pain points.
* Synthesis board after the in-home visits
03
Define
After defining our personas, creating how might we statements to tackle complex lawn care problems from different angles, we created some initial concept.
To validate and iterate on these ideas, we conducted 2 rounds of Central Site Visits using stimuli to validate our ideas and better understand users' priorities for a truly hands-off product.
* In this picture, I am guiding a user through a ranking exercise with cleaning products currently on the market. This activity helped us understand how users perceive the design, functionality, power, precision, and safety of these products.
04
Final Prototype
Final research insights & prototype are under NDA at this time, reach out for more details.
05
My Learning
Balancing Structure and Flexibility in Interviews
Over the past year, conducting high-cost qualitative research in the industry led me to create rigid interview guides packed with questions, leaving little room for follow-ups. While this approach gathered extensive data, I noticed participants became mentally exhausted halfway through, making deeper insights harder to uncover. This time, following our instructor’s advice, we used a more flexible guide, allowing space to ask, "Can you tell me more?" This made sessions feel more natural and, by digging deeper into single comments, often revealed richer insights.
Redefining Value Through Cross-Industry Insights
When we reached a deadlock in the final product stage, we realized the issue wasn’t technical complexity or cost alone—it was a value proposition mismatch. The features didn’t justify the perceived cost and technical effort required. Instead of revisiting insights and brainstorming again, the breakthrough came from researching trends in other industries. Inspired by the home electronics sector, where appliances like washing machines integrate with cleaning robots, we refined our design by removing unnecessary elements while adding features for year-round weed control to enhance both functionality and perceived value.
Appreciate the Scroll