Canon ivy LINQ —— The LINQ That Binds Us

Overview

Project Type: 0-1 Project | Integrated Innovation

Project Time: Feb 2022 - June 2022

My Responsibility: Design Lead

Results: Pitched to VP of Canon

Canon has been the pioneer of the Imaging Technology industry for decades. As the core customer base aged out, Canon USA launched the IVY brand to shift its focus and bring more products geared toward the younger generations' lifestyles and interests.

Partnering with Canon, we deep dive into the digital native Gen Z's photography and social media behaviors, discovering endless innovations that could bring newness to their content-creating experience.

Original Problem Statement

How do we come up with a new IVY product/service targeting Gen Z customers with the goal of generating meaningful revenue in the next 1-2 years?

Kick-off

To start off the research, we decided to know this generation better. As a Gen Z myself, it's interesting to research my own group of people, and it's not surprising to see how we fall into a lot of the stereotypes.

Narrow down target users

In order to understand how social media and photography play a role in Gen Z's day-to-day activities, we first interviewed 6 experts studying Gen Z across various disciplines. Then we conducted 15 in-depth interviews and an online survey with 80 responses from Gen Z users to gradually narrow down our target users.

We found that micro-generation exists and we should target Content-inclined adult Genz

Opportunities

As we try to define design opportunities from the content creation and consumption process of Gen Z content-inclined young adults, we realized that there is no stand-alone gap, and even though we identified 6 stages along the journey, it usually doesn't happen in a sequence and users tend to move back and forth between stages.

Content Sharing Scope

Why some contents are sent directly to a friend with 24h viewing limit but others are kept on the profile forever? We defined it as "Micro" and "Macro" sharing with different intentions behind.

Content vs. Memory?

Content records moments, but only small portion of it can be considered as a "memory". We detected a permanence fear among Gen Z that memory will be lost from streams of repeated digital photos.

Key Insights

After organizing the findings we learned from user research, we summarized some key insights.

Content moves between devices and platforms

Images and videos are floating around devices and applications to reach its best form. Considering smartphones' potentials, our solution should not compete with smartphone but become a complement.

Users build and strengthen relationships through creating and sharing content

Regardless of the sharing scope, Gen Z create and share content with a primary goal to create interactions and receive attention or feedback from the audience.

Memory >= easily accessed, selected content with meaningful annotation

Gen Z tends to revisit things when that is a necessity to getting a job done or easy to access from anytime & anywhere. They also consider annotation like hand-written notes give content extra values.

Design Goal

How might we make it easier for Gen Z young adults (18-24) to share and revisit memories?

Design Pinciples

Reflecting back to the key values of Gen Z content-inclined users we found during User Research, we set three design requirements before we started brainstorming the form and digital features of our product.

Introducing Canon ivy LINQ

After a rapid prototype and 2 focus group sessions, we filtered down several useful and desirable features to keep. We took inspirations from the nostalgic film camera and the connection-enabling Switch modular game console, and designed Canon IVY LINQ that helps Gen Z content-inclined users save and revisit their memories.

UX/UI Design

Home Page

The screen of the hub display photos that users took and stored with related information like time and location.

By swiping from the right border to the center of the screen, you can raise 4 widgets that we designed, representing some key features.

Intelligent Curation

With an intelligent algorithm that recognizes, categorizes, and curates the photos, all the photos are well-organized automatically when they are transferred to the hub. You easily revisit them through time, people or type.

Remote Print

You can send photos to your friend who owns an Ivy LinQ with your phone remotely and he/she can print them with the printer in the hub.

Apart from the hardware, we created some features through software to bring a desirable user experience for Gen Z to share and revisit memories more easily.

Tap and Play

By tapping the cameras to the hub, photos seamlessly transfer to the hub and the screen displays them immediately. Users can invite others to create their memories together by lending one of the detachable cameras.

Feel free to reach out for further information

Canon & Our team
Present prototype to VP of Canon
Making final presentation
Sell it.