INITIAL DISCOVERY
In our initial customer discovery phase, we had learned that many Common Commuters (people who ride their bicycle to-and-fro to regularly travel between their home and other commitments) often forgot their helmet. While helmet wearing isn't the only factor influencing biker safety, our research surfaced a pain point around helmet convenience. Bulky and difficult to carry around, bringing a helmet is sometimes an afterthought or a larger nuisance for bikers, so we, as a team wanted to innovate around how we could alleviate this painful tradeoff for bikers between choosing convenience or choosing safety. To do so, we focused on how we could make helmets more portable and more comfortable, hypothesizing that a new helmet solution in itself could be the answer. However, after further exploration, we recognized that beyond the feasible challenges of developing a new helmet, many people were already satisfied and invested in the head safety gear that they already owned, and instead wanted better solutions for portability.

REROUTING OUR FOCUS

With this new reframe, we began focusing less on the helmet itself, but the behaviors of Common Commuters, particularly how they were traveling and transporting their helmets. From carrying their helmet in hand to hooking it or stuffing it in a bag, existing behaviors around helmet portability were already less than ideal due to the helmet's bulky size and weight. Many of the people that we surveyed and interviewed still saw this as a major concern. Yet, we noticed that the best case scenario for a Common Commuter was to have the affordance to keep their helmet with their bike. Today's solutions that allow for this however, are far from optimized. We noticed that many Common Commuters struggled with locking their helmet onto their bike for a variety of reasons that we've listed below.