Tanvi Sandeep Vanjara

Final Project

Soul-Full: A service for Indian men living in the UK struggling with negative self-concept

Soul-Full is a service to empower Indian men living in the UK to cultivate a positive self-concept. It does this through the medium of cooking and communal dining all while having genuine conversations with like-minded people. Soul-Full encourages open communication with the help of a trained facilitator and motivates users to adopt daily self-reflection through quick and intuitive process.

Understanding participants’ psychology

This project needed me to develop good facilitation skills. During the primary research I planned the order of the research methods to put the participants in a self-reflective zone. I facilitated the focus group to fill the gaps in the insights that I had generated. Similarly, during the ideation phase, co-design session was conducted where I used multiple methods seamlessly to encourage participants to think innovatively. This even helped me in generating my final idea. Similar to my interests, I showed good skills when it came to conducting research, generating insights and facilitating group sessions.

Experience prototyping and usability testing

Testing is an important phase that helped me in designing the service. My initial idea was about incentivising users to self-reflect, but testing made me realize that something that people have never done before, they won’t do the same thing forever even if they have an incentive.That is when I changed the core of my idea. My knowledge on usability resulted in minimal usability issues. Additionally, being able to ask the right questions gave me a clearer idea about the user needs.

Agile process

The complete research and design process was an iterative one. It required me to keep a flexible mindset and an open mind when it came to negative feedbacks and changes. I am well versed with creating initial prototypes, test it and make changes again till all the main criteria are met. In the case of soul-full the design process went through four phases before the end product and service was finalized. I adopted a mix of lean and agile framework.

Soul-Full: Eat | Connect | Grow

The video shows how Soul-Full works, its main features and how it helps one in the need of personal assistance. Soul-Full goes beyond just cooking; it’s about fostering meaningful connections, finding solace in shared struggles, and celebrating individual triumphs.