Contributor Spotlight - Jennifer Chen

Hi! My name is Jennifer. I am a user/customer experience researcher, a runner, and a mom of two. It's great to be here to share my OKAPI stories!

One May afternoon, I went to Urban Ritual in downtown San Mateo with a friend. The moment I entered the cafe, my eyes were drawn to the beautiful OKAPI glass cups on the shelves. My curiosity urged me to read the sign in detail. I felt my years of frustration with the plastic boba cups were finally answered. I had been very confused about how to dispose of the plastic waste. I wasn’t sure if I should put them in the recycle bin or the trash bin. I appreciated OKAPI’s solution to reduce plastic cups. 

The mission of OKAPI not only resonated well with me, but also removed the frustration with plastic waste. I immediately signed up and got my favorite drink - Feed Me Ube! with Honey Boba at Urban Ritual.

OKAPI’s story about the disposable cup on their website made me nod my head again. The windchime in the photo below was made of a disposable cup from Starbucks. It has been outside our house, not even under the roof, since my son was in preschool, and now he’s in second grade. 3 years, the windchime is still holding strong there today.

 I was so passionate about OKAPI’s mission that I want to help them to be successful. I couldn’t think of a better and unique way to support OKAPI by sharing my user/customer-centric thinking and research expertise across digital and physical products with them. Therefore, I messaged them to introduce myself and my offerings. To my surprise, the founder of OKAPI, Emily, got back to me within a few hours.

I don’t do research just for the sake of it. I want my research to meaningfully impact business’ thinking, decisions and roadmaps. Therefore, I started with learning more about OKAPI’s challenges from Emily, and then kicked off the pro bono research that I thought would be most helpful given the limited resources. I identified different archetypes and developed a customer journey map. I really appreciate Emily’s trust and this opportunity to test my skills and thinking in a new space - sustainability! 

Moreover, this opportunity pushed me to reflect more on sustainability. I consider myself an Eco Pragmatist, one of the archetypes I identified in the research. We have grocery bags and utensils in our cars to reduce waste. I also have the habit of bringing collapsible water bottles not only on my runs, but also traveling because they are lightweight and easy to store. Although I know my family and I can do a lot more than just these, with two young kids, sometimes we just have to be realistic about our time and energy. However, why is sustainability a hustle? How might we make being sustainable not just an act of kindness to our environment, but a more cost-effective, convenient and delightful life choice?