Tork easyQ
Tork easyQ is the result of an attempt to re-brand and modernize Tork, the world leading distributor of professional hygiene solutions. The project was conducted with support from representatives of Tork as part of a Visual brand identity course at Chalmers University of Technology. During the re-branding, me and a group of seven other students introduced easyQ — a service aimed to help users plan their shopping and toilet visits during bigger events to minimize waiting and queues.
What: Re-brand / Research / UI When: September 2018 - October 2018
Current Tork
Initially, this project began by a rigorous analysis of the current Tork brand and its biggest competitors on the market. According to us, Tork currently acts as a provider rather than a collaborator, which permeates their brand promise which is to ”empower customers to get ready for business”.
We felt there was a bigger potential for the brand that expands above just providing prerequisites in terms of hygiene solutions to other companies. By shifting the focus from the customers; the restaurants, shopping malls and offices and becoming even more focused on the end users, leveraging on a more bottom-up approach, we believe Tork could become the front runner of an even bigger market than today.
New Tork
We used the brand archetype model to analyze Tork’s current, biggest competitors. The traditional dispenser brands such as Katrin are careful, expressing mainly a cautious archetype whereas Dyson with their focus on engineering, technology and power, positions themselves as dominant and experts. Google is not currently a direct competitor, if you only look at their products, but they constantly expand on new areas and they're very data-driven. In a continued development towards digitalisation, they are definitely a potential, upcoming competitor and we chose to position them as free and enjoyable.
With the new brand direction for Tork, we wanted to aim for a feeling of belonging. New Tork don’t just ”empower you to do business”, New Tork elevates you.
Digitalization
Tork has already started to explore more digitalized solutions with the introduction of EasyCube in their repertoire. EasyCube is a facility management system that supports cleaning personnel by providing realtime data from restrooms using sensors.
Inspired by a more data-driven approach and with the aim to be the front-runner of innovative hygiene solutions, we took the digitalization one step further and designed easyQ. easyQ is a queue management service tailored for venues and bigger events that makes it possible to see current as well as predicted, upcoming queueing times. The value is two-fold. For the venue owners, the possibility to guide people to evenly distribute people amongst different toilets, shops and food stalls and the opportunity to schedule cleaning based on flows, will be super valuable. For the end-users, the people visiting the venue, the main advantage will be a great decrease in time spent waiting for different amenities, something we found to be a huge pain point during our research.
easyQ design
We chose to use a web-app as a medium for the user interface to remove the need of downloading yet another app the would be used once every two months. The web-app not only makes it possible to see current queuing times but also predicted queuing times in the near future based on previous, similar events. By adding valuable venue specific information such as maps of the stadium, calendar of upcoming events and current event info, easyQ can act as the go-to hub during events.
The easyQ prototype as well as the suggested re-branding was presented to Tork stakeholders at the Essity headquarters in October, 2018. Given the feedback, Tork seemed very satisfied with what we had accomplished over the course of 8 weeks.
