During this first project at Ironhack my teammates and I decided to work on a food sustainability “wicked problem”.
The challenge
In the last decades, there has been a rise in consciousness on the importance of good nutrition and the responsibility that individuals have to provide themselves with good food. Organic food is not accessible to everyone, being restricted to those who can actually afford it.
Supermarket chains and other big companies benefit from the organic food market and conscious customers, but don’t actually solve the situation — they just make the gap and the impact bigger with unsustainable models.
How Might We help communities access the seasonal produce of their region, fueling fair and honest relationships between producers and customers while ensuring food safety for all?
Our Role
User research and analysis (quantitative and qualitive surveys)
Affinity Diagram
Empathy Map Canvas
Primary persona creation
Journey map
Problem and hypothesis statements
Low-fidelity wireframes
Mid-fidelity prototype
Usability testing
The Process
We started the user research and analysis phase by conducting a survey to get quantitative information. We needed to confirm that consumers are interested in buying seasonal/local/sustainable food and to discover their motivations and frustrations.
We also shared ideas in our group and started discussing about assumptions that we had. For example, we thought that people would be interested in having a shared garden where they could grow their own vegetables.
But the process tell us to start by empathizing with the users, so that’s what we did in the first place after performing a quick market research in order to know better the context.
Here are the results of our primary research :
We discovered that the 2 main reasons for buying seasonal/local/sustainable food were : their own health for 72% the health of the planet for 53% of the respondents.
The main pain point was the cost of the products. For 63%, sustainable products are too expensive.
After the analysis of the data we decided to run 5 interviews in order to know deeper our users.
As expected they said the products were expensive.
And they gave us details about their nutritional and shopping habits :
we discovered that the 2 main reasons for buying seasonal/local/sustainable food were : their own health 72% and may I say the health of the planet for 53%.
The main pain point is the cost of the products. For 63% it’s too expensive;
After the analysis of the data we decided to run 5 interviews in order to know deeper our users.
As expected they said the products were expensive.
And they gave us details about their nutritional and shopping habits :
We organized the gathered data and created groups like Cultivations, Perceptions, Packaging, Budget etc. It helped us to define the possible problem areas and to decide which problem we wanted to solve. We performed a dot voting, which was really fun to do and very useful.
Then we used empathy map canvas to develop a deep, shared understanding and empathy for other people which helped us to describe different aspects of the user’s experience, needs and pain points.
We took the decision to help users to identify sustainable products when shopping and to help them to understand all the available information in the products packaging.
At this stage we were now able to create a primary persona for the project and a journey map.
Now the goals and frustrations of our primary user are clear and we all share the same level of information in the team.
It allows us to establish our problem statement as follows :
A citizen needs to access nearby food with clear and credible information provided in their packaging because they want to be reassured that they are correctly purchasing healthy local organic and sustainable food while conserving the environment.
Our assumptions can be summarized as:
We believe that offering access to credible information provided in their packaging for citizens who want to eat and shop for more sustainable products will achieve reassurance of buying healthy and sustainable food while taking care of the environment. We will know we are right when we see increase in sales of sustainable product.
Now that we have defined the problem and have a clear idea of who our users are (their frustrations, goals, and motivations), we will generate ideas on how to design a product that will help users accomplish their goals.
Using Crazy8s each one of us we came up with 8 different ideas in 8 minutes.
We voted for the best ideas in order to start our low-fidelity prototype.
Then we developed a mid-fidelity prototype using Figma.
Finally, we did a usability testing with 5 people.
We got different types of feedbacks but overall the navigation was easy and clear for users.
We found out that:
- TO SCAN : must be a very easy action, just with the bar code. And if there is no bar code, search bar is necessary so the user can looking for a product with the product’s name.
- SCORING SYSTEM : a good choice, easy and quickly understandable but on our case it needed explanation so users can better understant what’s behind the scoring.
- COMPARISON MODE : nice to be able to compare products
- PRICE : is also an issue, it’s important for users to have some information about at least a price range.
In conclusion, we started thinking about the next steps or the other possible features that we could / should add to our app.
Our first project finished with an oral presentation where the five of us explained all the process during approximately 8 minutes.
This project helped us to get to know each other and we realized that we got along very well, each with its strengths.
Our wish was to continue the adventure together, but that’s another story…
